A laid-off journalist started his own news site. Facebook AI decided he was fake – IndyStar

A laid-off journalist started his own news site. Facebook AI decided he was fake  IndyStar

This story was updated to clarify the timing of Hogan’s layoff. Jeremy Hogan was spending his Saturday afternoon covering a small protest when his wife urgently texted him. Hogan, an independent journalist based in Bloomington, met up with her at the library and learned that his outlet's Facebook page — which he relies on financially and to connect with thousands of readers — had been suspended. Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, flagged his page using artificial intelligence. It suspected his account violated its community guidelines on "inauthentic behavior" and "may misuse our platform to pretend to be a local or domestic voice." Six days later, Meta informed him that the decision was final, and he could not connect with a human agent because they couldn't change the outcome of a review.

"It says I'm impersonating a local journalist, but I'm the journalist," he said in a message to a Meta chatbot. However, on the evening of July 20, his page was reinstated without an explanation of why it went dark for nine days. Throughout the hassle, Hogan said he was never told why his page was flagged. A screenshot of his banned page displayed no specific flagged violations. Amid shrinking local news coverage, Hogan's online outlet, The Bloomingtonian, has grown into a critical news source