The original plan this morning was to post about returning to eating and exercising properly after my three-month, end-of-year attempt at simply maintaining my weight in an effort to enjoy the holiday season and a few other important occasions scattered throughout. I will simply state for now that it was essentially an abject failure and that I will return to this subject when my next regular weigh-in date arrives. However, the partially composed, original post for today got trashed when I was thrown into Facebook jail for 24 hours.

Aside from the utterly ridiculous reasons for this happening (more on that in a bit,) it’s probably for the better as this day is a particularly good one to be staying as far away from Facebook as possible. I was already riled up earlier in the morning after looking through my Facebook memories from a year ago today, and I’m certain that doom scrolling, as I far too frequently do, would have only served to further intensify those feelings. Thankfully (?), that very behavior — which Facebook utterly encourages due to its design — provided the impetus to getting thrown into Facebook Jail

See, what brought this 24-hour sentence upon me was a simple response to a troll whose comment was highlighted in a response to Washington Post article in my feed. My comment: “Bitch, please. 😂” Apparently, by responding to a troll (which I never should have done in the first place — I really do know better) I “didn’t follow [their] Community Standards on harassment and bullying.” This was a second strike against my account, thus the ban. My first? A comment I made early last year — “Speaking as one, straight white males are the worst” — for that, Facebook’s impeccably context-sensitive, thoughtfully programmed bots and AIs decided that I had engaged in hate speech.

🙄

After quickly getting over my initial reaction of disbelief (and more than just a little bit of  anger,) I started taking some actions that I have actually considering for a number of months now. See, I am fully aware of just how fucking evil Facebook Meta is, and I have already spent lots of time thinking about what to do about that given that the overwhelming majority of my social interaction takes place online, and Facebook is the primary facilitator of it. So, as much as I really wish I could simply delete my account there and never return, I don’t believe it’s 100% feasible, at least not at this time. The fact is that there are a number of friends and family who only/predominantly use Facebook, and don’t really one of the other social platforms. Hell, I barely use any of the others.

Well, that’s changing now.

I’m not giving up the Facebook account, but I’ve started taking steps to transition away from it as much as possible. I’ve decided to make Twitter my new primary site for the kind of short posts that they and Facebook encourage, and anything longer than that is absolutely going over on this blog from now on. I’ll then link to anything I post here to those sites. Once Facebook allows me to make changes to the account again, it’ll be time to aggressively trim my Facebook friends list down to the people that I really wish to follow and then unfollow The Washington Post, New York Times, et al. I already have subscriptions to the news sites that overwhelmingly appear in my feed, and I can manage my own news consumption without Meta’s help. As for the doom scrolling… Well, I’m sure that the Twitter feed will likely provide enough angst on that front. Finally, I’ve already removed the Facebook app from my digital devices and will only visit the site through a web browser. This way, I can more easily control what information Facebook gathers about it.

Frankly, this was a step I should’ve taken a long time ago. I joke frequently about the fact I work for Satan, but holy shit… If I’m working for Satan, Meta is Cthulu. I know my change in usage will in no way effect their bottom line — especially since I’m not actually leaving and they will still monetize me in anyway they can. However, I can rest a little better in knowing that I’m not continuing to play the game the way they would prefer. Maybe a little further down the road, I will take the final step: download all my content and then close the account. However, the desire to socialize as easily as possible those I care about is a hard one to overcome, and I’m certain that even the changes I’m now implementing will take some getting used to.