Those of you who follow me on, and communicate with me using, Facebook will notice that I’ve been very quiet on the platform for the past three weeks or so. Well, I was suspended for simply re-sharing a joke that had already been shared by someone else on FB. I have no idea if the other sharer was also suspended because, well, I’m suspended.
It was a screenshot featuring someone making a joke response to the story about the Colombian sex island resort where guests are offered sex and drugs — the person basically said, “where is that island so I can go and tell them how terrible they are in person” or something like that. Classic joke redirection. Anyway the brain donors at FB — who recently spent EIGHTY BILLION DOLLARS on remaking Second Life but worse and way less popular — decided that I was encouraging drug use by resharing that image.
So I clicked the “Appeal” button on my suspension notice. It’s been over 2 weeks now and I’ve received no update whatsoever on that. It really doesn’t take very long for a human being to review posts, so I have to assume that the FB space cadets shadow-banned me, because that’s the kind of limbo I’m in, indefinitely.
And that’s fine, because frankly as a platform FB is generally a waste of time. I do miss the dog pictures and the Snapmaker U1 support forums on FB where I was a frequent contributor, but I do have better things to do these days than to prop up a dying social media platform so I’m officially giving up on Meta and its various virtual properties now. I also frequently bought stuff from Marketplace but obviously that also stopped.
There’s still the issue of people who used to communicate with me using Messenger. Well, I’ve been on Signal for a while, but now I’ll make it my primary means of communications. It’s a privacy-first messaging platform used widely by journalists to communicate with confidential sources, so it’s much better than Messenger — I mean how many times have you communicated to someone on FB about a particular subject and then saw that the ads you were served after that reflected the contents of that conversation? Signal isn’t a social network, so no risk of that there.
My username at signal is eltopo71.40, or you can use my current phone number in the signal app to reach me.