Facebook throttles local League of Women Voters with an election coming up. Kansans, stay vigilant.

Kansas Reflector's Facebook page was shut down by Meta in April. The social media giant has now targeted the League of Women Voters of Lawrence-Douglas County. (Illustration by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)

After Facebook shut down Kansas Reflector’s page in April, we quickly received apologies from Meta’s spokesman and assurances that our content was not being targeted by the social media giant. It was all a mistake, he said.

Nearly six months later, that sounds like a fib. A whopper. A taradiddle .

Not because of how Meta has treated Kansas Reflector: Since our plight made national news, we have been able to post without issue. However, scarcely a week goes by without us receiving a message from a reader unable to share one of our stories or an advocate whose online presence has been somehow targeted. The latest, and perhaps most outrageous, example was the suspension of the League of Women Voters of Lawrence-Douglas County ‘s page on Facebook.

Sonja Czarnecki, president of the league chapter, contacted me and other local news media outlets earlier this month after Facebook axed the page for “violating community standards” and highlighting “impersonation.” Czarnecki had no idea what was going on or why. The nonprofit, nonpartisan group encourages civic participation and voting. One could scarcely imagine a more benign bunch.

The Lawrence Journal-World published a story about the suspension Sept. 17. Miraculously, the page was restored by the next day .

“This experience has been unnerving,” Czarnecki told me late last week. “It was a stark reminder that Meta is a private company, not a democracy where folks are entitled to due process and knowledge of the charges when accused. I never found out any more information about why our pages had been suspended, or why they were put back. I don’t know which of the three strategies I tried simultaneously was effective (contacting the press, leaving daily voicemail messages with a guy at Meta, getting LVW-US national staff involved).”

An Ohio chapter of the group faced a similar takedown in April, but we don’t know anything else about the Lawrence case. Social media plays a large role in our lives, yet it can be difficult to track exactly how platforms such as Facebook interact with individual users. We only know if the company issues a statement (vanishingly rare) or someone reaches out to us. We just can’t tell otherwise.

Czarnecki added: “Mainly I’m worried that it will happen again.”

In reporting after Kansas Reflector’s takedown, editor Sherman Smith discovered the cause was likely unrefined artificial intelligence deployed by the company. The company’s AI is designed to remove inappropriate or spammy content, based on extensive programming. But as anyone who has worked with Chat GPT knows, such programs routinely hallucinate . Those working at Meta likely can’t explain their AI’s choices. They simply clean up the aftermath.

More worryingly, the platform’s indifference or outright hostility to content from civic groups and the news media seems to stem from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s disenchantment with politics. The AI may actually represent a desire to shut down political discussion.

“His preference, according to more than a dozen friends, advisers and executives familiar with his thinking, has been to wash his hands of it all,” the New York Times reported last week.

Zuckerberg apparently feels burned by the reaction of those on the right to his previous activism and has been expressing more libertarian ideas.

“That includes a hostility to regulation that restricts business, an embrace of free markets and globalism and an openness to social-justice reforms — but only if it stops short of what he considers far-left progressivism,” wrote the Times’ Theodore Schleifer and Mike Isaac .

Listen, I’m sorry Zuckerberg had his precious feelings hurt.

People can be mean. Life can be challenging in ways that we don’t expect. The rest of us, however, don’t have $196 billion to fall back on when the going gets rough.

We also don’t have a bevy of communications professionals at hand to spread our message. What we have, for better or worse, is an array of social media platforms, many of them owned and directed by the Meta CEO. We can look for other options and make other connections, but that will take time and energy and effort to redirect our audiences. In the meantime, Zuckerberg faces no consequences for harming civil debate through such takedowns.

As Tim Murphy of Mother Jones pointed out, in a trenchant response to the Times piece, Zuckerberg hasn’t actually rejected politics. Someone with his reach and power can’t possibly do so.

“Zuckerberg’s efforts to discourage political activism among Meta employees (per the piece) mirror his own efforts to discourage political content on the platforms he controls, such as Facebook and Instagram. Attempting to mute or disincentivize political speech is, of course, a political act, and it betrays an ominous worldview,” Murphy writes. “In that sense, at least, he and (fellow tech tycoon Elon) Musk aren’t so different; they’re collectively building a ‘digital public square’ where you can find everything but reported, factual news . Zuckerberg has made it clear that he is frustrated with specific kinds of political speech — including criticism of him.”

In other words, he’s become a conservative comfortable with authoritarianism.

So what do we do?

Here at Kansas Reflector, we have taken a number of proactive measures in the past five months. We have repeatedly encouraged readers to subscribe to our daily newsletter. We have stepped up our town halls , during which we meet readers face to face and answer their questions. We also now post regularly at Bluesky , the decentralized Twitter alternative. At the same time, we have largely stopped posting to Instagram and Threads, two Meta-controlled platforms. Don’t worry — we’re still on Facebook, for the foreseeable future.

Czarnecki likewise points Women Voters of Lawrence-Douglas County supporters to alternative platforms.

“We have our website , and our monthly newsletter to members, and we try to accept every invitation we can to do tabling events locally,” she said. “But like all organizations these days, we still rely on social media to get information out to the public about voting and educational events like our Civic Engagement 101 series (next one Oct. 3) and candidate forums (next one is Oct. 6).”

Both the league and Kansas Reflector understand we can’t rely on a private business to prioritize the public good. But concerned citizens need to know that as well. Unless they take their eyes elsewhere, Meta won’t feel the pressure to change.

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here .