Ruminations on book burnings, censorship and Facebook content moderators

Aweh, My Dearly Beloved Fellow Ruminants & Groupies

Two weeks ago, the Zuckerberg Machine struck me down—again. My blog got the axe, slaughtered by the soulless algorithms of Facebook’s automated content moderators. My crime? Apparently, I was “trying to get likes, follows, shares, or video views in a misleading way.” Perhaps I did mislead you. You’re all just gullible enough to fall for it.

So, I appealed, thinking maybe—just maybe—a human would read it. They promised a response in four to five days. Guess how that turned out? They ghosted me. Will I follow up? Hell no. I’ve got better things to do, like crafting this tirade you’re now reading.

Look, if there’s one thing, we humans love more than bickering, it’s deciding what other people aren’t allowed to say. This is best done by the small-minded curtain twitchers who live for the thrill of peeking through the window to gasp about the world’s imperfections sitting atop their ethical pedestals doling out self-righteous judgments as the guardians of public decency.  In the grand tradition of squashing opinions, we’ve got it all: book burnings, censorship, and—because we’re so evolved and are ever so sophisticated these days—automated Facebook curtain twitchers called content moderators. Let the machines decide what we can’t say. It’s as if we can’t stop ourselves from playing Thought Police, but with less Orwellian cool and more PTA-level handwringing.

Who doesn’t love the smell of charred paper and extinguished ideas in the morning? Book burnings are history’s favourite pastime for insecure regimes and moral crusaders alike. And the justification is always the same: “We’re doing this for your own good, to protect society from dangerous ideas” What’s a little literary bonfire action if it means the kids won’t stumble across anything too spicy, like, say, To Kill a Mockingbird or—gasp— The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Do you know the N-word appears over two hundred times in this seditious book? This shameful book was a school set work when I was at high school in the seventies. Even after many years of costly therapy this childhood trauma has blighted my life and is responsible for my many deficiencies.

We’re constantly being sold on the idea that censorship is for our safety, for the children, and for the public good. And every single time, it’s the same flippen skelm move. First, it’s the obvious stuff: “Hate speech! Fake news!” Let’s silence the unhinged neo-Nazi running the open mic night. But it never stops there, does it? Once the censorship machine gets warmed up, it’s like Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors. It starts off small but grows into a massive, talking, carnivorous, and increasingly menacing bloodthirsty creature. “Feed me Seymour, Feed me”.

Which brings me to our modern overlords: social media platforms. Mark Zuckerberg, defender of your free expression… so long as it doesn’t offend the delicate sensibilities of advertisers, shareholders, or a particularly vocal mob of keyboard warriors. Facebook’s content moderation system is basically censorship in yoga pants—soft, flexible, and pretending to be good for you.

Algorithmic moderation? That’s censorship with the human removed entirely—your thoughts, memes, and occasional dick or fart jokes tossed into the “good” or “bad” pile by a bot trained by some intern who probably reckons Paddington 2 is a befok masterpiece. Forget thoughtful debate or legal precedence—your voice is now at the mercy of lines of code because heaven forbid, we engage in actual conversation. When will you find yourself on the wrong side of the moderation fence?

Let’s not pretend that censorship is some kind of scalpel that’s used with precision to remove the worst offenders while leaving everything else intact. Censorship is more like a wrecking ball swinging wildly through the public square, knocking over anything that seems even vaguely controversial. The slope we’re sliding down? It’s greased with fear—fear of offending, fear of discomfort, fear of ideas that challenge the status quo.

Free speech isn’t about protecting what’s popular. It’s about giving voice to the unpopular, the uncomfortable, and, yes, sometimes the downright offensive. Because once we start making exceptions—“Oh, well, that speech isn’t okay”—we’re no longer defending free speech. We’re defending the right to only say things that make us feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Here’s the truth: Free speech isn’t about protecting what everyone agrees with. It’s about protecting what makes people squirm. It’s about defending the right to say things that make your skin crawl. And if you can’t handle someone’s awful opinion? Tough luck. Grow up. You don’t silence them; you fight back. You mock them. You debate them. You write a blog about them. Or you let them hang themselves with their own idiocy. That’s how progress happens.

Censorship, whether by fire or by Facebook, is a losing game. Because when you start silencing people, you eventually silence yourself. So, stop trying to micromanage the collective consciousness. Let people speak. Let them burn their own intellectual bridges. Let them build new ones. Just don’t act like censorship is anything more than a coward’s retreat from the necessary chaos of free speech.

And if you don’t like it? There’s the door.

Thank you for all the recommendations, comments, and love I feel in cyberspace.

Regards

Bruce