“I pledge allegiance to the Lords of Facebook, and to the platform which exists with Section 230 protections but still exercises its entitlement to restrict or ban the content of my opinions; one ideology, uncontested, raking in billions in revenues with an audience of self esteem-challenged “like” seeking grovelers, with dopamine hits and obedience for all.”
I don’t know – does that sound too “chip on your shoulder”-ish?
Sometimes the frustration of the modern media landscape forces a mild-mannered, humble newspaper man like me to reach far, far back into the annals of free speech to a time when people actually got buzz about your right to say something, even if they didn’t agree with it.
You remember. It was a time when you picked up your mail every day hoping for that magazine subscription or checked your front step for the newspaper, knowing those pages would carry gems that you could argue about at the barbershop or at your Rotary Club meeting or sitting on the sultry southern Missouri front porch with your dad and grandpa on a summer evening listening to the St. Louis Cardinals game crackle across an AM radio.
And when that wistful, informed vision of yesteryear is shattered by the hypocritical modern BS of social media, all you can do is dig up an iconic 1973 cover of National Lampoon and hope you get your point across. Who could resist, really, an edition with article prompts like “Playdead Magazine,” “Last Aid Kit” and “Suicide Letters To Santa.” Now, that was WRITING.
Yes, I stole it. So sue me.
Because according to Facebook, the Kansas Informer – this amazing little digital information gem invented by myself and two other co-conspirator newspapermen aimed at providing a different perspective to statewide news than the leftist bilge so often pumped out by corporate-owned and Soros-funded media in Kansas – needs to be cataloged and registered and documented and location checked because….wait for it… sometimes we say things viewed as politically “edgy.”
That’s my term – not theirs. Zuckerberg’s minions delivered the message with much more melba toast legalese a few months ago when the Informer began placing – or at least attempted to place – ads on Facebook to promote our content to Zuck’s gazillion users. Not so fast, the FB palace guards of content restriction said: We’ve deemed you “political content,” so before we will allow you to spend money with us, we want your name…and your address… and your phone number….and the state where your corporate documents are filed… and your inseam measurement…and your date of birth… and the approximate date you expect to die…
It started to feel like the roadside drunk test the cop gives Steve Martin in “The Man With Two Brains.”
Eventually Zuck wanted to mail us a secret code- snail mail, mind you– to have the post office confirm we were actually where we said we were, in case Zuck ever had to sick the UN black helicopter squad on us for some reason. I had to wonder if conservative-hating “Media Matters” and all the Soros media submarines in “States Newsrooms” have to go through the same red tape?
Social Media makes practice of censoring conservatives
Needless to say, by the time the letter finally arrived from Facebook with the secret identification code scrawled in dried lemon juice, we weren’t really much in the mood to spend our money with these man bun-sporting, lip-pierced, multi-pronoun fops anyway. Instead we sunk our marketing budget into these nifty gold-fleck keychains which we’re going to airdrop across Kansas from a rented surplus B-52.
Actually, we can tell the difference between our Facebook page traffic and the emails we get and analytics from our website that for some odd reason, Facebook seems to be significantly underperforming for us in its purely “organic” form. It’s hardly a surprise, considering Facebook banned a sitting U.S. president because it didn’t like what he was saying and censored all kinds of Covid information later confirmed as true, all the while shrouding itself in the same protections the phone company and the newsprint manufacturer have against being charged for crimes people might commit using their products. Facebook doesn’t want to be held liable for the damage its platform does, like kids eating Tide Pods and bullying each other into jumping off highway overpasses, but it insists it should be indulged with the right to manipulate the content it carries if its minions determine it “violates Facebook’s community standards.”
Facebook runs different censor filters depending on where offenders live
Get it? Imagine your cell phone carrier or your electric utility turning off your service for three days because you texted some trans dude that his new tattoo looks like crap.
Regardless, we’re tickled pink at the reception we’ve gotten from our readers in our first six months of operation and the level of engagement and tips we’re receiving from everyone. We are trying hard to respond to all of our emails, but if you don’t hear back from us, know that we read everything we’re sent and your input and attention helps us accomplish the mission we started.
And just for kicks, we’re posting this story on Facebook. Let’s see how long it lasts.
Dane Hicks is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and the United States Marine Corps Officer Candidate School at Quantico, VA. He is the author of novels "The Skinning Tree" and "A Whisper For Help." As publisher of the Anderson County Review in Garnett, KS., he is a recipient of the Kansas Press Association's Boyd Community Service Award as well as more than 60 awards for excellence in news, editorial and photography.
