LAST DAY ON FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM! GOOD RIDDANCE!

I’ve been warning for a while that I would eventually get off Facebook and Instagram, and made it official last month that it would happen in thirty days. Well it’s been thirty days, plenty enough notice for my every reader to subscribe via another platform. In case you haven’t gotten the memo, you can follow me on these alternate media:

• Bluesky
• Mastodon
• Reddit
• Telegram
• Threads (Meta also, I know)
• Youtube

You can also subscribe to receive new posts via email. If you’re reading this on a desktop computer, just scroll down to the bottom of the page and enter your email address in the text box. On mobile you may instead need to subscribe via my wordpress.com profile.

The Victoria Liberation Front now operates on a Discord server. Feel free to request an invite via email at martin.girard@victorialiberationfront.org if you want to get involved.

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I can think of at least fifty different reasons to dump Meta. The worst category of course pertains to censorship, with all the account suspensions, shadow banning, and comment moderation targeting causes like Palestine. Human Rights Watch had already delivered an extensive report one year ago. Meta should be on every reasonable activist’s BDS list, and yet most simply cannot wean off it. Even Mark Zuckenberg admits it’s gone too far under political pressure, dammit.

By the way, the main reason I joined Instagram last year was the constant Palestine protest alerts, and these just don’t happen anymore, at least in Victoria. You don’t need me to remind you there’s a parade every Saturday at the Legislature, so what’s the point.

Beyond censorship, there’s the utterly rabid moderation system, which is manifestly driven by a broken AI removing posts at random, under the weirdest of justifications (such as flagging them as ‘spam’), without any reasonable appeal system.

Likewise, its profanity filters are such that I can’t even call Joe Biden a “demented fossil” without the system leaving my comment hanging with a nondescript error; I don’t see the point of commenting on a platform that won’t let me criticise the President of the United States when it’s plain for everyone to see there’s something wrong with his brain.

Then of course there’s the Canadian news block. Of course it’s possible to circumvent it, but it’s a huge hassle, and ultimately a losing game of cat and mouse as Meta keeps blocking whatever new workaround users come up with. My platform exists to share news about activism, and if it’s too much trouble then I don’t see the point. You may have observed that I have yet to dump Threads, even though it’s also a Meta platform; that’s mainly because news aren’t blocked over there.

There’s way more to my decision than these issues. For example, several crucial features, such as posting Instagram stories, are missing from the desktop interfaces and require the phone app. I hate having to switch to my phone for every little thing, it’s utterly tedious. And there’s a plethora of infuriating glitches I don’t even want to get into, they drive me absolutely nuts, like the broken notification system on Facebook and all the clickbait suggestions.

And then there’s platform decay, to put it delicately. Just like Twitter, Facebook in particular has become so toxic that I just can’t stand it. And I’m not just talking about the debate, mind you, but the trash post quality competing for clicks, down to reels of pigs’ butts while urinating and defecating—which makes it all but a literal shithole. And if I try to block the trash, I get even more of it, because apparently the algorithm counts this as positive interaction.

Let’s be frank: Meta is beyond salvaging. Facebook and Instagram were never friendly platforms to activists to begin with, and they’ve grown so hostile over the years that it’s time to leave them for greener pastures; Bluesky in particular has gained over twenty million disillusioned users fleeing mainstream social media platforms, just this year. If three fourths of my followers won’t follow, I’m leaving them behind, farewell.