I’m Super Suspicious Because Facebook Has Identified My Profile In Some Way

I’m incredibly active on my Facebook account. I post a considerable amount of political and social commentary. I only have about 700 friends and maybe 50 followers, so it’s not a huge page, but I’m doing my part to educate and inform.

Because of the content I post, which is decidedly conservative and generally contrary to the official mainstream narrative, my page and posts are routinely subject to strange algorithms that mess with my viewership and visibility. I routinely don’t get notifications when my content is shared. There are good friends who report that my content frequently “disappears” from their newsfeed and they have to go directly to my page to find anything from me, where they then discover that I have made numerous posts that never showed up in their newsfeed, even though they have specifically made my content a priority on their page. Sometimes, when I click to publish a post, I’ll get a notification that they’re “reviewing” my content before they publish it, and “this might take a minute.” Sometimes their review takes so long that it never actually publishes and I have to close out, log back in, and redo the entire post. In fact, I learned to back up anything I draft because Facebook will often just delete the entire thing when I click to post it, and then give me an error message saying that it failed to post.

But now, I’ve apparently triggered some other algorithm, and I’m super suspicious.

Recently, I started getting these prompts to set up “two factor authentication” for my log in. I just ignored it, like I do most official prompts from Facebook. But now, they are requiring me to jump through all these security hoops to protect and access my account. I had to set up a super strict two factor authentication with a phone number that isn’t mine and can’t ever be used to reset my password, they sent me 8 unique numeric passcodes that I will be required to use if I ever sign in from an unfamiliar device, and they are requiring me to turn on this “Facebook Protect” thing that essentially scans your page for vulnerability.

They specifically state that I will be locked out of my account if I do not set up these things “protection measures” before March 17th.

What I’m gathering is that more “influential” accounts are required to have greater security because if they get hacked, they can do more damage than some no-name tiny account. And that makes sense. And I’m flattered.

They even say that they “require stronger security for [my] account because it has the potential to reach a large audience.”

But how did they determine that? How did they conclude that my profile qualifies for this extra security because of it’s potential for extra reach? I have like 700 friends and 50 followers or something. I get about 5 likes on anything I ever post, except for the occasional family post, because people these days are too afraid to publicly support my content for fear of social or occupational reprisal. And Facebook makes sure I don’t usually get more than 10 shares on anything at all, ever, by suppressing my content and sometimes even hiding the “share” feature. It just doesn’t seem like my page is all that influential, all this considered.

So I’m just shocked they think I qualify for this extra security, UNLESS it’s more about my type of content… How have they possibly determined that I “have the potential to reach a larger audience?” They literally control and manipulate who can see everything I post. They control how far my profile reaches. That is abundantly clear in the notices I get (and the notifications I DON’T get), and the rules my profile is subject to that other profiles aren’t.

So, did I trigger some metric they use to enforce extra scrutiny? Or is my page actually more influential than Facebook wants me to realize?

Either way, I’m suspicious.