Fear and Loathing In Coronaville Volume 3: Forced Social Media Distancing

It has recently become abundantly clear that Facebook hates my fucking guts. I’ve suspected as much for a while now but this week it became pretty much undeniable. After posting my praise for the latest victories of the fabulous Houthi rebels, those faceless censors at America’s biggest social media juggernaut regretfully informed me that I had violated their pristine standards by supporting “dangerous individuals and organizations”, and since this was my third offense, they’re blocking me from posting on all their platforms for thirty days. They tossed another 7 days of forced isolation from instant messaging on the fire when I attempted to finish a comment on a friend’s post that I was in the middle of when they spanked me. Apparently, I’ve been a bad bad girl. Pappa Zuckerburg needs to send me to bed without supper thirty times in a row, all at the height of social distancing season with my clinical depression already in full bloom. I can’t even message my epileptic bestie back in plague-ravaged England to make sure she’s not ice cold on the kitchen floor of her girlfriends flat. And for what exactly? What the fuck even is a dangerous individual or organization?

According to Facebook, there are several markers that identify such undesirables. But none of them really fit.

1.) Terrorist activity. The Houthis are in no way shape or form a terrorist organization. They are a civilian militia fighting off an American backed genocide. Even MBS’ ginger gimp in the White House has decided not to designate them as such. The Saudi Arabian government, on the other hand, has been a devoted supporter of Wahhabi terrorism for decades and, last time I checked, none of the western rags who kissed their ass before they went Scarface on Jamal Khashoggi have been banned.

2.) Organized hate or violence. OK, sure, maybe the second one, but doesn’t the US Army have a Facebook page? Who’s got the higher body count, the wolf or the wheat thresher? As for the first, I won’t deny for a second that the Houthis treatment of Yemen’s Baha’i minority is deplorable, but this hardly makes them a hate group, especially in the sectarian minefield of the Middle East. The Houthis’ declared mission is to liberate their land from foreign influence, pretty much everything that follows is another specter birthed in the fogs of a war they didn’t start.

3.) Mass or serial murder. Only if defending their people from these very crimes counts. Yeah, I call horseshit.

4.) Human Trafficking. Nope. No smoke their either. Once again, I’m pretty sure that sweatshop archipelagos like the Gap and Old Navy have unmolested Facebook pages.

5.) Criminal or harmful behavior. Harmful behavior? What, like anorexia, drug abuse, crippling debt, cancer, climate change and obesity? By those blatantly vague standards you could hang the entire Fortune 500 with the flick of a single lever. I can think of worse ways to get a boner before lunch.

But you’re not gonna see that show trial in this lifetime or the next. That’s because Facebook is like the rest of the colossal institutions of this terminally sick fucking country. Not only do the rules not apply to the rich and powerful, they were designed by the rich and the powerful to be arbitrarily enforced against the rest of us riffraff. Over the last several years, social media has been on a rampage, censoring the shit out of anyone with an unpopular opinion and this fire hasn’t just burned the Alt-Right. My friend and agitprop sensei, Keith Preston, who runs my site, Attack the System, was banned from Facebook for life this year.

Is Keith some goosestepping Proud Boy? No, he’s a fellow eccentric left-libertarian who earned a place on the status quo’s shitlist for two primary reasons. First off, He’s an analyst for Iran’s English language channel, Press TV, who are trying to pervert our blessed democracy with the inconvenient fact that we’ve been raping Persia stupid since the Shah wore short pants.The other reason is perhaps even more telling than the first. Keith’s message boards were the last bastion of untethered free speech on Facebook. Anybody could say anything and it was fucking fantastic, like some strange cyber CBGB’s. You could catch neo-Maoist tankies sparring with crypto-fascist trolls, pone both of them for being wankers and then trade “…Three radicals walked into a bar…” jokes. Somewhere between Altamont and Lollapalooza, this brand of open cross-ideological sparring wen’t from weird to dangerous on the scales of the powerful.

I’m an open borders loving, kitten petting, transgender, social justice warrior. Facebook is supposed to be my safe space. But I don’t know my lane. I also support gun rights, cryptocurrency and un-hip anti-imperialist freedom fighters like the Houthis and Hezbollah. The fact that I’m a minority just makes this even worse because I smash their assimilationist tokenism to fucking bits and lay ruin to the lie that liberal democracy is the only thing that can save a wretch like me. My first two strikes before Facebook’s latest were violations of their rules against hate speech because I proudly self-identify as a fucking tranny rather than mind my place, seen but not heard, in the mild-mannered alphabet soup of LGBTQ. The straight cis lord giveth. The straight cis lord taketh away.

I’ve essentially been locked in the Facebook penalty box for being a bad minority and having too many weird friends in weird places. Well, fuck them. I have only 230 followers, making the Zuckbots’ hissy fit doubly absurd. But these friends include anarchists and communists and nationalists and paleoconservatives and libertarians. We don’t agree on much, but they never made me feel like a faggot. It took the supposedly woke liberal babysitters that run Facebook to achieve that. The one thing my weird friends and I can agree on is that this brand of corporate censorship is fucking evil. And that is precisely the kind of solidarity Mark Zuckerberg and his faceless flunkies want to see mopped up, because they know, deep down in their throbbing little chicken hearts, that the freaks have their mansions surrounded and the moment we stop flaming each other is the moment we burn them to the fucking ground.

Until then, or at least for the next 30 days, you can find my clinically depressed faggot ass on Minds. But I’ll keep coming back to Facebook until they give me the same death sentence they gave my sensei. I’m not done with them yet. Those cunts pissed on the wrong electric fence.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.