Facebook fired me/set me free
The photo has nothing to do with Facebook, except it represents the new calm I feel having been exiled from all Facebook-owned platforms.
I joined Facebook in those halcyon years when we scrolled gladly through posts featuring friend’s dinners and ski houses.
Then, because of the algorithm changes in Facebook that we’ve all read about, of my 1,145 “friends” 14 could see my pictures of coq au vin and Folly Cove. And I could only see Jason Grow’s children and Leslie Heffron’s images of fishing boats. But I was ok with that, because I like Jason’s kids and Leslie’s pictures.
I had basically dismissed Facebook as useless except sometimes it was helpful to message a person or group for whom I didn’t have an email. I more or less participated until December 11, 2021, when the real darkness of this relationship exposed itself, and not just the child pornographers who hacked my account.
When I routinely clicked on Facebook Saturday morning, December 11, 2021, I saw a scary message telling me that child pornography was a crime and I could go to jail. Along with that Facebook page message, an email said this:
(If anyone knows more about this IP address send an email!)
The scary Facebook message also said that I could ask to have my case reviewed, but that link didn’t work, as I was no longer on Facebook.
I started writing to Facebook on Twitter, posting things like, “isn’t it funny I have to go to Twitter to talk to Facebook?” Then I received this from Facebook:
That last bit sounded as if Mark Zuckerberg himself were speaking to me: “You can’t post or comment for 72 hours.”
Everything about this situation is wrong: that the Facebook platform is so vulnerable to the most heinous crime. That sending declarative threats to innocent users seems to be enough for Facebook to feel like they are doing their job. (I have no idea if they are pursuing the hackers, but I wrote to the FBI.) That Facebook thought they could silence my “posts and comments.”
If you are reading this, you have probably found me on LinkedIn or Twitter, both seemingly absent the craven atmosphere inside Instagram and Facebook, but I already feel liberated from those whirring anxiety engineers. (I’m also blocked from What’s App, owned by Facebook.)
I’ll be posting more on my website, and may soon be growing that in new ways. In the meantime, feel free to share this post on Facebook. Maybe some of my old friends will see it and find me on Twitter.
