CARDINAL NEWS is celebrating free speech and a freedom trend that moves our company slightly away from the Facebook platform.
Here’s the explanation …
Facebook (Meta Platforms, Inc.) sent CARDINAL NEWS a false alert last week that forces a decision change regarding how CARDINAL NEWS articles will be delivered on Facebook pages managed by CARDINAL NEWS. In other words, the actions of Facebook (Meta Platforms, Inc.) has caused CARDINAL NEWS to reconsider how articles will be shared or fed to Facebook pages from CARDINAL NEWS.
Readers may have noticed the change that is already underway: CARDINAL NEWS Facebook pages no longer post referrals directly to the link of the CARDINAL NEWS article. Instead, each Facebook post refers to the CARDINAL NEWS website timeline link. We are making this change because Facebook made a general false accusation that one of our articles was considered spam, against their “Community Standards.”
Facebook also warned us that continued violations of their Community Standards may result in our account being suspended or terminated.
CARDINAL NEWS wants you to be alert to upcoming changes, and wants to make the following recommendations to make it easier for you to continue reading CARDINAL NEWS articles.
First of all, the new method of referral to the simple timeline will take you in close proximity to the actual article, which should be easy to find unless you are reading the shared post on Facebook a significant amount of time after it was posted.
ADVANTAGES TO YOU
Posts shared on Facebook will be concise with no photos, which produces a simplified list on our Facebook timelines that will be easy to browse to find what you want.If you want more in-depth information, you can proceed to CARDINAL NEWS and view full content, photos and video carefully designed by CARDINAL NEWS with readers in mind without the risk of modification or censorship by Facebook.
You will still be able to share our Facebook content with others — both from Facebook and directly from the CARDINAL NEWS article.
You can still comment on our content on Facebook.
DISADVANTAGE TO YOU
You will no longer be able to see our photos on Facebook, and you will see shorter excerpted article content on each shared Facebook post.ADVANTAGE TO CARDINAL NEWS
We reduce our risk of having our content controlled or censored, and of having our account suspended by Facebook.
SUGGESTION …
Please consider placing certain CARDINAL NEWS resources on your Home Screen on your mobile device (eg., Apple iPhone, iPad or Android mobile device).
Also, consider creating bookmarks on your browser on your desktop computer or notebook computer.
Here are some recommended resources to save to your home screen or bookmarks …
FRONT PAGE
Our magazine style front page.
Arlingtoncardinal.com
RECENT NEWS
A simpler display that lists all articles, always starting with the most recent article at the top.
Arlingtoncardinal.com/posts/
24/7 Crime Alerts!
Includes all Chicagoland crime articles from CARDINAL NEWS (there are sub-categories for more specific areas of Chicagoland).
Arlingtoncardinal.com/category/crime-alerts/
24/7 Fire Rescue!
Includes all Chicagoland fire, rescue EMS articles from CARDINAL NEWS (there are sub-categories for more specific areas of Chicagoland).
Arlingtoncardinal.com/category/news-flash/
FireMapChicago.net
Chicagoland fire, rescue, major EMS calls in a succinct format.
ChicagoCrimeMap.net
COMING SOON: Chicagoland crime, investigations, police activity calls in a succinct format.
RADAR
Weather radar page (not category) for northern Illinois.
Arlingtoncardinal.com/radar
You can explore: There are many other categories that are available that you can save to your home screen or bookmarks. For example, there is a sub-category to 24/7 Crime Alerts that provides a list of Arlington Heights crime only (CRIME BLOG A) …
Arlingtoncardinal.com/category/crime-alerts/crime-blog/
CARDINAL NEWS is making these recommendations about Home Screen placement because we want to encourage you to check the website on your own instead of depending on a Facebook feed. There is really more value to the website, than just receiving a feed from Facebook.
SAVE TO HOME SCREEN MOBILE
How to Save a Website or Web Page to Your Home Screen (Official from Apple)
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/bookmark-favorite-webpages-iph42ab2f3a7/iosHow to add a website to an Android or iPhone (Android Authority)
https://www.androidauthority.com/add-website-android-iphone-home-screen-3181682/
Looking forward, CARDINAL NEWS plans to provide additional information to help you organize our CARDINAL NEWS resources, reduce your dependence on Facebook, and possibly select other methods to receive real time alerts for CARDINAL NEWS. We plan to make updated recommendations periodically.
CARDINAL NEWS regrets having to make these changes to our Facebook feeds, but these changes may be necessary to keep Facebook (Meta Platforms, Inc.) from suspending our Facebook accounts completely.
The new procedure may initially hurt our statistics, with less effective notifications because Facebook referrals will be missing direct links to specific CARDINAL NEWS articles. This may initially inconvenience some people that depend on Facebook for their news feed. However, the new Facebook feed procedures by CARDINAL NEWS (if implemented) may also help everyone because detailed content and photos will be consistently available on Arlingtoncardinal.com and NOT available on Facebook, which is often disorganized and slow. That means that more people will visit Arlingtoncardinal.com, and less people will be on Facebook with the associated distractions, spam, censorhip and filtering that occurs on Facebook.
As an example of other annoyances, one of our readers reported that Facebook warned him that he was scrolling too fast on Facebook, and was suspected of being a bot. No kidding.
If readers go directly to Arlingtoncardinal.com/posts (RECENT NEWS list), they will conveniently see the list with the most recent articles posted at the top.
WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?
The simple answer is that we want to stop “bending a knee” to lord Facebook, and reduce the waste of time that is miserably involved in attempting to safely, efficiently and effectively use Facebook.
Also, on a technical topic, the Facebook platform can be painfully slow and unreliable — wasting time.
Also, if Facebook (Meta Platform, Inc.) would suspend CARDINAL NEWS, it would cut off part of the communications that we are accustomed to using for our readers. If Facebook does eventually terminate our Facebook accounts, we will be prepared to move on, and hopefully you will be prepared to move on with us in whatever method we find most successful for feeds.
Also, the fear of being capriciously cut off unjustifiably by Facebook (Meta Platform, Inc.) lowers our quality of life in the digital news world. It just doesn’t feel good; and life is too short to be continuously annoyed by Facebook, when all we want to do is simply provide news reports. These aggravations have gone on for years with Facebook, and we thought we had solved our Facebook suspension threat problems.
Also, CARDINAL NEWS would never want to be involved the way some other type of emergency category Facebook pages are managed that involve members insulting other members, wrongly criticizing innocent victims and their families, and posting other disgraceful type of comments that appear on these Facebook pages. Bottom line? The Facebook overhead is hurting our effort of providing effective, organized news with free speech; and we want to stop or reduce experiencing these issues with Facebook.
Also, we want to gradually reduce our involvement with Facebook because the Meta Platform, Inc. has experienced bipartisan admonishment by the Senate Judiciary Committee About Online Child Safety. The meta platform, including Facebook and Instagram has been accused of harming teen lives, and even causing the deaths of teens who have been bullied or extorted on their platforms. Facebook and Instagram have even been accused of techniques that encourage teen girls to be obsessed with their body image to the extent of causing suicide. The less CARDINAL NEWS is associated with Facebook, the better.
Instagram studied the effect of the platform on teenagers, and found that “Instagram is harmful for a sizeable percentage of teenagers — most notably teenage girls.”
“We make body images worse for one in three teen girls” (– Instagram)
“Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”
— Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo quoting a Wall Street Journal article
Hawley Press Releases
January 2024 and February 2024
Hawley Forces Zuckerberg to Apologize to Families of Child Exploitation Victims in Big Tech Hearing
Facebook co-founder, chairman and CEO of Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, Inc.) denied the allegations by Sen. Josh Hawley.
Hawley continued at the Senate Judiciary Committee About Online Child Safety …
According to a Facebook senior executive whistleblower who studied the Meta platform Instagram, he testified under oath saying that in the study he found that …
Thirty-seven percent of girls between the ages of 13 and 15 had been exposed to unwanted nudity on the Instagram platform in the last seven days at the time of the study.
Twenty-four percent had experienced unwanted sexual advances and were propositioned in the last seven days at the time of the study.
Seventeen percent said that they had encountered self-harm content pushed at them in the last seven days at the time of the study.
A video of the interaction between Sen. Josh Hawley and Mark Zuckerberg is directly below …
Mark Zuckerberg and other leading social media executives faced tough questions at the Senate Judiciary Committee About Online Child Safety in January 2024 from U.S. lawmakers concerned about child exploitation and safety of their social media platform services. U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., pressed Zuckerberg on social media’s effects on families and children (especially teen girls with body images issues), forcing him to apologize to families and asking him if he will compensate victims harmed by Facebook and Instagram (Forbes Breaking News). YouTube Tips ⓘ
The Meta platform allegedly lets all this happen to teen girls, but deletes a true post about a fatal crash in Elk Grove Village shared by CARDINAL NEWS on Facebook. The Facebook post deletion was accompanied by a warning accusation of some type of vague spam violation with inadequate explanation (see directly below) …
LAST WEEK’S MESSAGE FROM FACEBOOK
Last week CARDINAL NEWS received the following alerts from Facebook (Meta Platforms, Inc.), and there was no method to challenge Facebook’s accusation or to request closer review by Facebook. Also, the alert disappeared, so it couldn’t be reviewed.
First, we received an alert from Facebook (Meta Platforms, Inc.) that a post that CARDINAL NEWS shared on Facebook was removed for violating spam-related standards. The post was “Fatal Elk Grove Crash: Why Were Teens Traveling in Black Lexus Without Rear License Plate?” published on Wednesday, May 29, 2024. The post was an article about the fatal crash in Elk Grove Village at Meacham Road and Biesterfield Road that killed a Des Plaines woman. CARDINAL NEWS was there all night at the scene of the fatal crash, and provided detailed coverage with video and photographic evidence being gathered at the scene by investigators. CARDINAL NEWS also provided some additional truthful information, that no other media sources mentioned.
Facebook removed this shared post, claiming it violated some type of Spam category community standard.
Secondly, Facebook (Meta Platforms, Inc.) provided a vague second alert that “defined” the category that we allegedly violated (there was no specific information detailing what CARDINAL NEWS allegedly did wrong) …
See rule Community Standards
Spam
We don’t allow people to share or send anything that contains misleading links or content.
Examples of things we don’t allow
x – Taking people to a website that is significantly different to what was shown or sent to them
x – Taking people to a landing page that impersonates another website
x – Disguising where a link is taking someone using repeated redirects of cloaking.
Your freedom of expression
We want you to share freely with others. We only remove things, or restrict people to keep the community respectful and safe.
Ironically, Facebook also trivially encouraged CARDINAL NEWS to post a comment or actually “spam” on the “rising post” of another unrelated, and unaffiliated Facebook page … “so more people discover” CARDINAL NEWS.
Below we display screen shots of …
the comment encouragement message from Facebook,
the title of the irrelevant article where a comment was recommended (“Woman Allegedly Injects Man with Mystery Substance Inside Walmart”), and
the ABOUT PAGE that shows that the referred page claims to be a Police Station (but apparently is not a police station) because it displays an Anaheim, California physical address and a telephone number with a Mexico country code (+52) … yet Facebook recommends it.
Keep in mind that CARDINAL NEWS is constantly fighting actual spam that is posted in Facebook comment sections by bad actors that usually contain false links claiming to provide extra video regarding the article we just posted. This kind of spam appears on all pages across Facebook, including official police department pages. CARDINAL NEWS routinely reports and hides or deletes these spam links with little promise that Facebook is willing to improve the conditions (extra work for us). We have even been “threatened” by readers of our articles on Facebook claiming that they will stop reading CARDINAL NEWS if we don’t do a better job of removing these spammy links in the comments section. Let’s just say the work to manage Facebook is becoming an overhead liability that affects our ability to do the work that we like to do best … provide news.
CARDINAL NEWS is changing our feed operations with Facebook primarily because we don’t want to be improperly suspended by Facebook. NOTE: The changes we have announced around the Independence Day holiday period might only be temporary as we suspect Facebook (Meta Platform, Inc.) is adjusting their algorithms for detecting violations of community standards with the upcoming presidential elections in November 2024. But we are not holding our breath while waiting for good to come from Facebook.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) refers to a June 2023 Wall Street Journal article, and tells Mark Zuckerberg that Instagram’s own algorithm was promoting the discoverability of victims for pedophiles seeking child abuse material by promoting graphic hashtags to potential buyers (Forbes Breaking News). YouTube Tips ⓘ