Are your facebook friends really the arrogant bastards you think they are or is there something else going on?
Have you noticed that, over the last year or so, your posts have become less and less popular with friends? You probably noticed a drop in 'likes' about a year ago, but even before that you'd have been puzzled that something had changed.
In the beginning you'll have dismissed it. You'll have put it down to the time of day; that you were not on form, or even that your friends secretly didn't like you anymore. You'll have probably become irritated by it all. After all, you'll say to yourself, i'm still the same witty, interesting Facebooker I've always been. What gives? Why do 50% of my posts not even get a single like these days? And you'll have no-doubt thought 'why are my facebook friends such arrogant bastards?' 'THEIR facebook posts aren't all-that!.
Facebook are more than happy for you to blame your friends, or even yourself, for your sudden lack of likes. In the online help page Facebook claim that it is merely because you don't post often enough as being the reason. yeah, right.
You're spending even more of your time on their app so they're not dependent on likes any more. You're hooked on videos that you endlessly scroll through. And when you do actually post something, the little red alert that follows will trick you into thinking you've got a reply, only to find its an alert to yet another video. It won't be because one of your friends has 'liked' your post because they haven't seen it. and they won't. You posted it, but it remains invisible to everyone else but you. The alert is a lie, they want to drawer you back to mindless scrolling. You won't get any likes for that witty thing you said because Facebook aren't showing it to anyone. Because if you have ever said anything even slightly critical of 'the current thing' you were shadowbanned.
You're now talking to yourself. You've been shadowbanned, permanently.
You may have the illusion that your posts are being shown to all the people in your friends list but they are not. These days Facebook don't routinely show your posts to everyone, and if you're remotely right-wing they won't show them to anyone. An average post now only gets shown to around 10% of the poster's friends, and none at all if you've ever said any of their banned words or phrases.
Millions of uses were secretly, and permanently, shadowbanned in 2021 and if you've ever been irritated by a sudden lack of likes you were probably one of those targeted.
What researchers have learned since 2020 is that the internet always punishes difference and always rewards conformity. This is the core principle of shadow-banning. Through what are known as 'deamplification' protocols these automated surveillance programmes look for phrases like 'open minded' or "i like to do my own research" or "I'm generally A-political" and deplatform the author. They don't score the people saying those things as 'tolerant' or creative free-thinkers, instead the algorithms detects that this is a person harbouring a 'dangerous' willingness to embrace unorthodox ideas, and so that person is downgraded with others seeing less and less of their speech until, eventually, they are delisted entirely.