In January 2020, I voluntarily ended my 12-year relationship with Facebook. I had joined in 2008 during one of the early MySpace migrations to this new platform, and during the love/hate decade with THE social network, I watched as it evolved from what started as a way to “reconnect” with various people from my past (and some of my present) to a monster that wielded direct power over the direction of our culture. By the beginning of last year, I was exhausted with it and various issues the platform was directly causing in my personal life. Thus, I pulled the plug - rather, I downloaded all of my shit and deleted my account.
As time progressed, the direct absence of Facebook was extremely relieving. It is true that by the end I wasn’t as engaged with the network as I had been in the past. I was checking my notifications maybe twice a day at most, and I had everything associated with The BetaFiles set to automatically post on its page, so the actual activity was at a minimum. But the relief of not having that damn push notification popping up, or the devilish red number in the top right of the app icon teasing me, was substantial.
Then, a year later, I attempted a reconnection with the network for the sole purpose of creating a new page for The BetaFiles as I began plotting the launch of a Substack newsletter for the brand. The idea was simple: create a personal page that would be minimalist in structure, crank the privacy settings to 11, and create the BetaFiles page. The page itself would serve as yet another avenue to help funnel people to the new Substack that was in its early stages of development. It would also help in providing more traffic to YouTube, Instagram, and to the podcast. It would be a win-win. Facebook would be able to start tracking me against my will again, and I would be able to exploit their platform for my personal gain. What could possibly go wrong?
The entire endeavor lasted less than 30 mins before the Facebook overlords shut it down. Yes, shut it down. Took it away. Deleted it. Made me a ghost – this time involuntarily. The reason for the Zucker-bomb on a page that existed for the time span of a decent sitcom?
Ezra Pound.
Back in 2008 when I launched the first of several iterations of The BetaFiles, Dr. J and I discussed, in our first episode, a specific photo of Pound. Afterwards, I changed the banner on the Facebook page to that picture of Pound. That banner remained in place, without incident, until January 2020 when I took the page down. So, being me, when I opened the new account and started building the new page for The BetaFiles, I naturally plugged the classic photo into the banner as I had done before. It took less than a minute to complete that task, one of a dozen I was deep into as I continued to set up the new page.
If you have never set up a new page on Facebook (mind you, we’re not talking about an account, we are talking about a page that is linked to your personal account) let me explain how this typically works based on my own experience. When you first create the page, Facebook leads you through a set of pre-programmed check lists to help you build exactly what you want to build (and give them fodder to track – remember kids, it’s all about tracking…). As you complete the processes, in the background Facebook is already watching your actions. They are checking and re-checking to make sure that you “adhere to their community standards.” That’s cool and I think it works well to keep those eyes on any potential nefarious actors like murderous Saudi princes or third world dictators from creating Facebook accounts of any kind. I’m so glad THAT hasn’t happened…
I had all but completed the sets of check list applications for the page when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I was directed to a page that stated, “Your account has been disabled” and instructions on how to resolve the matter. The way to resolve it? Upload your phone number and a picture. My hopes were that the crack team of Facebook watch dogs would see that I am neither a murderous Saudi prince nor a third world dictator – again, so glad those guys aren’t on Facebook – and restore the page.
Alas, it has not been re-instated. And I am not about to go back in and try it again.
What happened (and it seriously happened in less than a half-hour) is what I have been complaining about recently with Facebook and Twitter. The net of social policing is getting tighter, so tight that a picture of Ezra Pound is flagged for violating community standards. Yes, I will concede to Facebook that the bastard was a convicted traitor and fascist. He was also exiled at the end of his life to Italy after a group of American writers persuaded the American Government to let him go so he could leave the country.
He is also one of the most important players in the Modernist movement, specifically during the high-modern period of the 1920s. He was responsible for “The Waste Land” and shaping it into the poem we have today. He worked diligently with W.B. Yeats and the result of that relationship led to the best poetry of Yeats’ life. He helped foster the careers of untold numbers of artists in Paris, London, and New York, and was lifelong friends of Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, HD, and so many others that have rocked the literary world to its core. His influence on the art is undeniable, and it is his pre-Italy days that I find fascinating.
But for Facebook, it’s a no-go even though the photo was up for two years originally without incident, warning, etc…but Saudi princes…
Context, however, does not compute in an algorithm.
The point of all of this is that the cultural policing of these social media companies is reaching peak police state tactics. I don’t want to sound conspiratorial, but let’s face it - that picture hung on The BetaFiles Facebook page for two years before. A picture of a dead dude from his early career before he joined Italy’s campaign in World War II. A picture that Dr. J and I openly mocked and laughed at – hence the original joke of using it for a banner.
Now, in the new woke world, that picture is considered as violating community standards. And Facebook is “always looking out for the security of people on Facebook” (direct quote from the disabled page). But are they? Or are they in the throes of exerting their power over the culture in ways that we were warned about in all those history classes of our youth?
In the process of getting ready for the Substack launch, I consulted someone who knows how to create traffic in our modern online world. One of their suggestions was to find groups on various platforms and begin posting different things that could generate traffic to any one of the other platforms The BetaFiles is using. We set out to explore LinkedIn and their groups to see what we could find. As the search results for groups populated and re-populated, I began to realize that the target audience I am aiming for has no place to openly and freely exist on any of the major platforms outside of YouTube. The target audience?
College educated Gen-X men. Specifically, professors in their mid-life.
It’s not that we do not exist, because we do. I see them and interact with them professionally every day. So where are these groups? I think they have been taken down for fear of being targeted as a space for white males to congregate and spew anti-diversity messages. Although Reddit, 8Chan, and 4Chan are notorious for just such uneducated groups, the fact that LinkedIn, where tons and tons of professors are, doesn’t have a single group dedicated to mid-life intellectuals, and the stories that could be shared, is at first shocking - then not so much. It makes sense…which is the saddest part.
I end my tale of the great Facebook battle of 2021 where I fired shots at the giant without knowing I had and was subsequently wiped off the face of the platform to be buried in what one can assume to be a mountain of deleted pages. In all honesty, the whole incident simply confirmed why I left it in the first place, and the universe gladly gave me that reminder.
What I find fascinating about all of this, however, is that for two years they didn’t give a shit that a dead poet turned fascist turned traitor turned exile was on their platform. I am even willing to bet that the young unpaid intern who made the decision to take him down probably read one thing on Wikipedia about Italy and…click. I would go further to place a bet that most of the kids working at Facebook right now don’t even know his name.
But Saudi princes…
***UPDATE***
In the time since I originally wrote this post, Facebook has re-instated my personal and “business” pages. I did have to replace the picture of Pound (that happened) which made the corporate machine happy. Until…
After running two ads for articles on our Substack, Facebook struck again - this time blocking me from running ads. The official explanation was that I had once again violated community standards without any further explanation. As a result, the average number of hits on the Substack page has dropped dramatically. The page was seeing between 70 and 100 hits a day (not a lot, but not bad for an upstart of this size) to between 7 and 15 hits per day. Now, I know that is not ALL due to Facebook, but the drop came the day after the Facebook ad ban. Chew on that for a second..
In the appeals process for re-instating the ability to run ads or “boost” a post on Facebook, the overlords of Silicon Valley wokeness have requested a copy of my ID (drivers license). I have not and will not submit it. They have also hidden behind their “community standards” bullshit without explaining exactly HOW I violated these standards and with what action I did so with.
And so the battle continues. I know I will lose because between myself and the Zuckerberg, he has much better lawyers and much better ways of controlling WHO gets to be successful on his platform. The Facebook I originally signed onto back in the late aughts exists no longer in every conceivable fashion.
But Saudi fucking princes…