Every month, the good folks at Facebook send me 10 bucks for no good reason

Right from the start of today's post, it's important to mention two things, at least one of which you already know:

(1) This blog is an exceedingly small part of the Internet and is read by only a handful of exceedingly smart individuals (that's the part you already knew).

(2) I am fully aware of this fact and harbor no illusions of the blog's reach and influence.

Having established that, I will also tell you that every month, without fail, the Facebook people send me $10 or so for being a "digital creator." And since 90% of my Facebook posts are blog links, they're basically paying me for driving traffic here to 5kids1wife.com

This is funny to me for several reasons, not the least of which is that I would be doing the same thing even if they didn't pay me. It's also funny because I'm sure there are powerful cyber-influencer types to whom Facebook (actually its parent company Meta) pays hundreds and probably thousands of dollars.

What I get is chump change, and deservedly so.

Still, the fact is I get it, which means the engagement I create on Facebook must be worth something to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

I don't know why Mark finds my traffic to be of value, but he is, if nothing else, pretty savvy when it comes to making money.

The actual amount I receive depends on how many Facebook likes, comments, clicks, etc. I generate in a certain month. It varies from as low as $8 to $12 or more. I just say $10 because it's an even number and it sounds good.

Until I started receiving these payments from Meta, I didn't know this is how the Internet works. The more traffic the better for these giant digital platforms for whom more eyeballs on advertisements means more revenue.

You will be glad to know I invest these monthly stipends back into the blog to make it better, which is to say I usually buy coffee with them. Coffee motivates me to write, which keeps all of you graciously coming back, which keeps 5kids1wife.com going.

So every time you click on one of my blog links, or like or comment on one of my Facebook posts, you are stimulating the economy, which feels like a very patriotic and admirable thing to do.

In the end, your engagement doesn't really benefit me so much as it benefits you and our whole economic infrastructure.

So keep being a virtuous person and click/like/comment to your heart's content. You are an upstanding and high-minded citizen.

Yeah...that's it. 

The dilemma of the unjust Facebook ban

A screen shot from my apparently illegal Olympic field hockey video

Last month while in Paris, I took a short video clip of an Olympic women's field hockey match and posted it on Facebook. It was less than a minute long and showed the Netherlands team on the attack against Great Britain.

The idea was to share this unique experience with family and friends. Watching an Olympic event live, particularly a sport with which I was only passingly familiar, was thrilling.

I wanted others to be able to enjoy it, too, if only vicariously.

No big deal. People post video from live sporting events all the time.

Yet within a day or two, I received a notice from Facebook that my clip "violated community standards" and was an infringement of copyright owned by the International Olympic Committee. I filed a formal appeal and requested an explanation as to why my short personal clip, shot on my iPhone, was in any way violating the IOC's copyright.

I never received a response.

I tagged Meta (Facebook's parent company), Facebook itself, and the IOC on Twitter to see if they could explain the situation to me there.

Again, no response.

Being banned from Facebook for four days isn't the end of the world, I realize. I rely on FB to drive most of my blog traffic, but it's not like I'm making a living from this blog anyway.

It was more the principle of the thing.

Nowhere on our tickets or in our official Olympic emails did I find a ban on videography or photography. The ban notice from Facebook even admitted it was discovered "using our technology" (i.e., a bot) and that no human had actually reviewed the video.

The whole thing seemed patently unfair.

Yet I might argue it was also necessary.

As both a content creator and a content consumer, as well as a corporate communicator and former newspaper journalist, believe me when I say I get the need for tight enforcement of copyright law. People who write, photograph, shoot video and otherwise provide the stuff that makes the Internet interesting need to have their content protected if we expect them to continue doing what they do.

It's impossible to police copyright over the entire vast universe of the Internet manually, so bots are needed. There aren't enough people available to do it the old-fashioned way.

I'm guessing the vast majority of what the bots find really is copyright violation, which is good.

But as my own experience suggests, they also get it wrong sometimes. Or at least, they got it wrong in my situation as far as I know. I may simply not have seen a sign prohibiting the taking of video when we entered Stade Yves-du-Manoir for the field hockey match.

This might just be a case of having to break some eggs if you're going to make an omelet. Some people will be unjustly banned, and that may be unavoidable. On balance, automated copyright enforcement is probably effective the vast majority of the time.

So I'm torn.

In the end, I don't believe I did anything wrong. And a four-day ban from being allowed to post, comment or even "like" someone's Facebook content is absolutely no big deal.

There's no foolproof way to protect copyright online, or even to stop the spread of blatantly untrue political and social content. So if a relatively small percentage of us get the shaft, that's probably a fair tradeoff.

That doesn't mean I'm not still annoyed by the whole thing, though.