Fuck You, Facebook: I’m Leaving

Mark Zuckerberg was the first to create a program we now refer to as a social media network, and was thereby successful in establishing Facebook (more properly known now as Fascistbook) as the “industry standard.” When I first joined a decade ago, FB was relatively unfettered.  You could write and post freely, with little chance of being banned or censored.

All of that, in more recent times, has changed dramatically.  FB now routinely suppresses speech, manipulates algorithms, shadowbans, “fact-checks” posts according to their own ideological biases, and perpetually expands the boundaries of what lies outside of their specious and entirely arbitrary “community standards.”

People do an awful lot of complaining about FB — and then do little or nothing to rectify things. They continue to remain on such a censorious and authoritarian network because “that’s where all the people are”…or, just out of sheer laziness. All while alternatives like MeWe, Gab, and Minds exist — also free of charge for basic services — and where full freedom of speech and expression reign supreme.

As an author, it might seem counterintuitive on some level to choke off my own access to a more populous marketplace.  But when not doing so comes at the expense of freedom, I’ll take the big fish in a small pond route rather than the converse.  I’m not going to be subjected to Fascistbook’s implicit blackmail: “Sure, you can leave anytime, if you like…but you’ll lose access to aaaaallll those people.”

Fuck you, Facebook.  I’m leaving.

And I’m not even going to look back over my shoulder.

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Alex R. Knight III is originally from Groveland, Massachusetts, where he grew up listening to rock and roll, reading J.R.R. Tolkien, and the comic books of the 1970s.  He today lives in rural southern Vermont where he welds, plays guitar, paints abstracts, reads avidly, and writes.  He is the author of the short fiction collection, Tales From Dark 7in addition to the novels The Morris Roomand Empty World.  And, he is a Voluntaryist. Visit his MeWe group here.