Proudly censored by Facebook

Facebook rightly gets a lot of grief, but for years, it was working for me and for my partner Ani. Like many FB users, I had thousands of posts and photographs that chronicled my life and my real-life friends’ images — images that provided a comforting scrapbook of the living and the dead. Over the course of more than a decade, I had created a “friends” list of well over a thousand followers. I had developed a habit of writing creative pieces to express my opinions and to draw “likes” and comments.

The comments were the best; they amounted to immediate feedback and gratification for my narrative-descriptive pieces. I had watched others build a writing career with that sort of creative flow. FB pieces even helped me deal with anti-transgender oppression, and with a job that was terrifying when it was not depressing (driving a municipal bus). I wrote pieces that tied down the details of my experience and made them more comprehensible, not just for the readers, but for myself.

So when I left my thirty-years-long stint as a community radio commentator (no, I did not retire), I saw Facebook livestreaming as a good venue to build up a new audience. Ani and I set up her computer and a couple of microphones, and began to write scripts and improvise dialogue with the aim of creating relevant commentary. We assumed we were as free to express our political opinions as we had been on FM people’s radio.

We woke up a couple of weeks ago to find that we had been mistaken. Facebook had deleted our personal accounts; when we tried to communicate with the corporation, we found that there was to be no negotiation, and that our crimes had led to a complete and permanent banishment. (Apparently, we were banished for opposing Israeli aggression versus Gaza, along with sixty thousand others at that time — but that’s just a guess.)

Americans are trained to say that, since a private corporation was mediating our communications, we had no right to complain. I would argue that a long, successful and mutually beneficial business relationship deserves more than a unilateral ghosting. But Congress has so far refused to see that the biggest communications corporation in the world is a utility for millions of its citizens. Facebook is scarcely regulated at all.

I will admit I’m a bit embarrassed, much in the same way one feels when a bicycle with an inadequate lock is stolen in the night. Is there any doubt, given his actions and inactions and excuses, that Zuckerberg is a White supremacist? I had a moral obligation to end that relationship sooner. And I should have bolted the pack, rather than wait for the anti-justice of his corporation’s jackass algorithms.

So here I am on Medium, paying to post my thoughts in a different way. It is a more explicit arrangement, so here’s hoping it will work out better. This week (I hope), on Friday at 9AM Pacific as per usual, Ani and I will return to podcasting on YouTube, and we will retain the name “This is now: Bridge to a better world.”(Here’s the link! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY-6kn4NFgw — and here’s the audio-only version https://soundcloud.com/user-707059354/this-is-now-bridge-to-a-better-world-052821-youtube

See you soon!