The Hilarious Reason Why This Online Gardening Group Keeps Getting Flagged by Facebook

The debate over Facebook and censorship has been raging on for months more than ever. Ever had a post of yours that just seemed to mysteriously disappear? Ever had your account temporarily suspended and been thrown in Facebook jail? Some have said they didn't even violate Facebook's community standards but still got axed anyway. Now, one of the most benign online groups you could imagine has been fighting this ongoing battle, and it's all over one word. Hoe.

Western New York Gardeners is Facebook a group with over 7,500 members, according to Fox 5. But it appears that whatever A.I. bots are monitoring the group seem to be very confused over the word hoe. Of course, a hoe is a long-handled gardening tool. But drop the "E" off the end of the word and then it becomes something a whole lot different. The algorithms don't seem to be picking up on this though, according to Fox. They're continuously confusing hoe and ho.

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

The group's founder has been fighting this fight for a while. But as you may know yourself from experience, contacting Facebook doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get a response back. Perhaps never. Fox says that the Associated Press was able to finally get a hold of a Facebook representative, who promised to put an actual human in charge to monitor pages like this one, to avoid further confusion. It is uncertain how the gardeners' group page or the comments on the page will be managed in the future, but repeated reports of violations can get pages like this shut down for good.

And to think, all these people want to do is talk about gardening with each other. But it seems quite apparent that Facebook ain't got no love for hoes. Ever had a page of yours shut down by Facebook? If so, how did the website handle it?