Zuckerberg changes his tune, but the band's stopped playing.

I remember how frustrated I was when Facebook started cracking down on freethinkers. I'd been building Safe Seattle's membership for years and suddenly we were getting throttled for sharing a parody post or showing a blurred-out photo of a drug addict. One time I got a "community standards" violation for jokingly telling a reader to shut up. Another time I got dinged for calling someone a troll. Appeals were almost never granted.

Private posts weren't immune, either. And there was no statute of limitations. Many of my fellow Facebook refugees will remember getting warnings for images that they'd posted on their personal wall years earlier. I once got a warning for a five-year-old cartoon of a tire hanging from a rope on a tree branch with a rope with the caption "Good-bye cruel world."  (It was a tire swing.) "You're encouraging self-harm!" scolded the nanny bot. 

Am I going to get a permanent ban for this, I wondered? They'd already warned me about that a couple times.

And then there were the "fact checkers," who Mark Zuckerberg now admits weren't checking our facts at all; they were checking our politics. Fuckers.

When Facebook was the only game in town, we had no choice but to endure the censorship, leave, or wait till we were kicked off. Then Elon Musk bought Twitter and fired their censors. Suddenly moderates and conservatives had an alternative, so many of us came over here. True, some of the speech on X is ugly, but that's the price one pays for freedom of speech, no? The good news is that I don't have to let every asshole shoot off his mouth on my page. That's what the "block" function is for.

After losing millions of moderate and conservative users to X, Zuckerberg now admits he made a terrible mistake. That's nice, but I won't be bringing Safe Seattle back to Facebook, not after the hassle of moving it to X and painstakingly building membership back up for two years. I might clone a post onto the old Facebook page now and again, just to remind readers that we're still around, but it'll never be like it was. 

I feel bad for anyone who followed Safe Seattle on Facebook but refuses to get on X because they don't like Elon Musk, but I have to go with the platform that lets us speak.

–David