Faceban

I got restricted on Facebook.  I haven't been allowed to post anything, comment on anything, contact anyone through Facebook Messenger, or even click "Like" on anything since Thursday.

Because, apparently, this picture of a little boy urinating on a Trump lawn sign is . . .

. . . frowned upon by the Facebook police!

Because, I am told, this is child sexual exploitation, though I don't know how showing a little boy's bare bottom while he's relieving himself on a Trump lawn sign is exploitative when you can't see anything worse than, well, a bare bottom.  

I got this from a friend's Instagram feed.  Guess who owns Instagram.

Meta!

Since the same people who use Instagram also use Facebook and vice versa, what the hell is Meta doing by penalizing me for posting this to Facebook?

Aah, computer bots are policing Facebook and Instagram now, not real humans.  What's really galling is that I clicked on a button for a form with which to fill out on Facebook to challenge the removal of the photo and the resulting suspension, but I got a message saying the feature doesn't work and that someone is working to get it fixed.

Yeah, right. 

The real reason  for this photo being taken down, I suspect, is because the real crime is demonizing Trump, whose hateful rhetoric has been very good business for Meta.  Meta has just lifted its ban on content promoting the fallacy that President Biden stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump, and so has YouTube.  That is why I made this video. 

I plan to post this video to my Facebook timeline as soon as my restrictions have been lifted, which should be either tomorrow or Monday.

In the meantime, I would encourage Trump's opponents to take advantage of the right to free speech and speak out against him as much as possible.  After January 19, 2025, we may never get the chance again.

X Marks the Spot

It is now officially over.  I am no longer connected to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. 

I deactivated my account on "X" in early September after being harassed for committing the unspeakable crime of criticizing a black woman's cornrowed hair, but it accidentally got reactivated briefly in mid-September when my mother signed into it thinking it was her account - after logging into my settings on our desktop thinking she was logging into her settings.  Once I deactivated it a second time, I waited patiently for every tweet I ever posted, every reply I ever tweeted to someone, and every nasty tweet I got in reply to the tweet that ended my time on the platform to be completely annihilated from the ether.  Now I'm totally free.

I just saw a PBS documentary on X owner Elon Musk, who renamed Twitter after X because it's his "favorite letter"  (does he think Silicon Valley is on Sesame Street?).  The documentary noted that, once Musk let all forms of speech to proliferate on X as part of his plan to allow anyone to say anything (so long as it doesn't affect him or his bottom line), racist and sexist tweets shot up dramatically.  I continued to use the platform to post links to this blog and also to write or reply to tweets and occasionally post pictures, thinking that my posts other than my blog links were too innocuous for anyone to bother with or care about and had nothing to so with racism and sexism.

How ironic, therefore, that it was my own idea of what constituted a racially or genderly appropriate tweet that ended up getting me into trouble.  Though I was never banned for telling a black woman that she looked better without cornrows, the relentless abuse and scorn I got as a result was enough to make me defect from X with my tail between my legs.