Why I'm staying on Facebook

(Author's note: I originally shared this on Facebook. This is an expanded version for LinkedIn. You can find the Facebook version here: https://www.facebook.com/musicjunkieg/posts/pfbid02uAWJYzbv2k5LjLNaKnnJfDU3RmFkU1HDaZtiBJfASKG2hQS7WMkbDtFFzPtXEdEel)

TL;DR: I'm staying. If you're not, DM me and we can connect. I am staying because I have made a home on Facebook and no white supremacist bigot whiny boy is going to run me off.

I'm not leaving Meta properties. I want to explain why, given my very public stances on systemic oppression, and those who enable it.

First off, there is no doubt in my mind that the changes made by Meta to moderation, especially around gender, race, sexual orientation, and gender identity, will make large-scale, public discussions on the platform much worse. More people will post more terrible things in comments and on their own profiles, and those of us who are primary targets of systemic oppression, especially in the United States, will have more verbal attacks and abuse thrown our way, whether directly or indirectly.

This is the point of the changes. They are designed to drive those of us who care about justice and equity and diversity and inclusion, those of us who want to see reparations and reconciliation happen, off the platform. Zuck wants us gone, so we stop making his life hard. So, he attempts to make us hate Facebook so we leave.

As a fat Black person in America, there has never been a single moment in my life where I have not existed in opposition to the status quo of this country. In the language and systems of the western world, my flesh and its color brand me as unwanted, unworthy, and inhuman. I exist as lesser than, a caste below.

At least to the oligarchs and those who believe they can become them. To those who need to preserve whiteness as the dominant language of the land so they never have to risk their control of society. They fear us. they fear that we will do to them what they have done to us. Even moreso, they fear having to face that we would NEVER do to them what they did to us, which would leave them having to face the moral inferiority their fears created.

So many of you in my circles stand actively against the systems of oppression in this country and in the world, and Facebook is now a new battleground. They want to run us out of the communities we have built. They want to deprive us of the connections we nurture. They want to isolate and atomize and disperse us.

They wish to create a digital diaspora. They wish to keep us from where we have a right to be, where we have a right to a voice.

Mark Zuckerberg once said he wanted the whole world on Facebook so people could communicate with each other from all over the world and make friends and build relationships they never would have otherwise. The platform he built, for all its flaws, enables that in a much better way, with its groups and its two-step consent signals for connection and its incredibly granular privacy features, than any other platform out there today. NOW he says if we leave, we are "virtue signaling." He turns the thing he built against us because we ask him to be accountable for its harms as well as celebrated for its good. Typical white man.

Social media is not fake. it is real. It is a place we have come to and found community and organized. It is where friendships and relationships have been built. It is where love ahs blossomed and organizations have been founded. It is where power and momentum have been built and translated into real action. They want to take all of this from us, because they fear us.

So I stay because my ancestors were taken from their homes. I stay because my ancestors were driven from the land they had lived on from time immemorial. I stay because my history is littered with those who fought to keep the home they so richly deserved when it was turned against them by those who "changed their minds" without care for the ones they would hurt. I stay because time and time and time again the bigots and the white supremacists believe they have a right to hold public spaces as their own and drive us off, but they do not, and they will not.

I stay because I will not be moved.

(Special thanks to L C De Shay , whose own post helped me put this into words. Additional and eternal thanks to the brilliant work of Da'Shaun Harrison, Mikey Mercedes, Caleb Luna, Jordan Underwood, Sabrina Strings, Sami Schalk, Tigress Osborne, Hortense Spillers, and more. I will add resources in the comments.)