When I opened the Facebook app this morning, I was greeted by a message from Facebook telling me one of my photos from January 29, 2019, had been flagged as a possible violation of community standards for showing violent or graphic content. The message didn’t actually show me the photo, of course – that would be too easy.

I clicked the button and saw this image:

Facebook offered to delete the image or I could “disagree” with the decision and leave the image up. I chose to leave it up and went on with my day (well, to be honest, I looked to see if I’d gotten any comments or likes on yesterday’s blog post).

This afternoon, I wanted to find the post that Facebook had flagged and look at it in context. I couldn’t find it on my timeline. I couldn’t find the message from Facebook, either. I looked in the Photos app on my phone and found the image – it was one of a dozen or so that Sokun, our guide in Cambodia, had sent me to distribute to our tour group. I looked in the tour group’s Facebook group, and saw that I’d uploaded all of Sokun’s images there so everyone else could download them at their leisure – and, a mere 26 months later, Facebook’s scanners had found this one and flagged it.

I eventually found the message from Facebook – it was in the “Support Inbox” in the Help and Support section of the settings dropdown – not exactly an obvious location.

I think I’ll leave the image where it is and see if it gets flagged again.

Edited to add: I’d forgotten that the group had been made public after the trip so we could let family and friends see photos, so I’m a bit less surprised that Facebook scanned it. I also decided that anyone on the tour had had ample time to download the guide’s photos by now, so I deleted the post with those photos, including the one Facebook didn’t like.

There are times I think the universe is out to help me. I’ve stumbled across answers to problems I hadn’t yet encountered twice in the last two days.

I happened to read a conversation a couple of days ago on Twitter between two people I worked with at IBM that mentioned a “zero-width non-joiner” – an invisible character that you could add to a word to keep it from being recognized as, say, a link or a special word on Facebook. Yesterday, a friend commented on my trip to India Cash and Carry, saying she really liked garlic ginger paste, which she abbreviated to “GG”, which Facebook turned bright pink. If you clicked the “GG”, you saw an animation. I was going to reply, but I didn’t want my GG to turn pink, so I cut-and-pasted in a zero-width non-joiner, and Facebook left my typing alone. Solution, meet problem!

And today, the Los Gatos Weekly Times had an article about David Kinch’s new cookbook, in which they mentioned a few of his cooking tips, notably “how not to toast pine nuts” (bake them in the oven, don’t toast them in a pan). I was planning to make a Pasta with Mint, Basil, and Fresh Mozzarella for lunch; the recipe calls for toasting pine nuts in a pan, and I hadn’t been happy with the way they turned out. Today, I followed Kinch’s advice and the pine nuts toasted much more evenly and browned without burning. Solution, meet problem!

We saw the first ice cream truck of the year during this afternoon’s walk – he was prowling the neighborhood, but I think to no avail.

Shabbat Shalom!