The #Pornocalypse comes for us all — even mild-mannered gardeners!

No lesser source than the Associated Press reported out this sad tale of a New York state gardening group that was put at risk of deletion by too many automatic robot-moderation flags for the word “hoe”, which Facebook apparently thinks means the same thing as “ho”.

Moderating a Facebook gardening group in western New York is not without challenges. There are complaints of wooly bugs, inclement weather and the novice members who insist on using dish detergent on their plants.

And then there’s the word “hoe.”

Facebook’s algorithms sometimes flag this particular word as “violating community standards,” apparently referring to a different word, one without an “e” at the end that is nonetheless often misspelled as the garden tool.

Normally, Facebook’s automated systems will flag posts with offending material and delete them. But if a group’s members — or worse, administrators — violate the rules too many times, the entire group can get shut down.

Elizabeth Licata, one of the group’s moderators, was worried about this.

…

When a group member commented “Push pull hoe!” on a post asking for “your most loved & indispensable weeding tool,” Facebook sent a notification that said “We reviewed this comment and found it goes against our standards for harassment and bullying.”

…

“And so I contacted Facebook, which was useless. How do you do that?” she said. “You know, I said this is a gardening group, a hoe is gardening tool.”

Licata said she never heard from a person and Facebook, and found navigating the social network’s system of surveys and ways to try to set the record straight was futile.

Contacted by The Associated Press, a Facebook representative said in an email this week that the company found the group and corrected the mistaken enforcements. It also put an extra check in place, meaning that someone — an actual person — will check offending posts before the group is considered for deletion.

“We have plans to build out better customer support for our products and to provide the public with even more information about our policies and how we enforce them,” Facebook said in a statement in response to Licata’s complaints.

Note, however, that Facebook did not promise a better way to get in touch than to have an Associated Press reporter make phone calls.

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