A week ago, it was announced that former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg would be leaving his role at Meta, to be replaced by Republican Joel Kaplan. Clegg was responsible for the creation of Meta’s Oversight Board, and subsequent announcements have indicated decisive shifts in content moderation policies. In addition to ending its fact-checking programme, Meta has dropped its DEI programmes and changed its rules to permit hate speech on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation, in response to what it calls “political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality”. Although Zuckerberg has positioned this as a move towards greater freedom of speech, this apparent commitment to free expression does not extend to pride-related colour themes in Messenger, which have been removed.
I’m trans, and it’s distressing to see a platform that is so woven into the social fabric become another spawn point for transphobic ghouls. But this post isn’t about that.
I first joined Facebook as an undergrad - I think it must have been 2007 or 2008 - when it became the primary way that other students organised and promoted social get-togethers and events. I remember being reluctant at the time, because I shouldn’t have to go to a specific website to get access to information that could easily be distributed by email. But I ended up in charge of two student societies that both organised regular events, so Facebook was a highly valuable tool. To fit it into my existing internet use patterns, I subscribed to my Facebook timeline as an RSS feed, which I would check multiple times a day on Google Reader. I also subscribed to a Google Calendar feed of events that I had indicated an interest in on Facebook, and Facebook messenger was one of multiple messaging services that I was able to use all within the same program on my MacBook. At this point in Facebook’s history, it was important for it to establish itself as a vital tool that functioned as an integral part of everything else that we were doing with personal computers - interoperability was part of that.
Enshittification required the intentional destruction of every aspect of this service, as well as many of the other services with which it used to be interoperable. Google Reader was shelved, Facebook’s RSS feature was shut down, it stopped using the messaging protocol that allowed you to chat through third-party apps, and eventually, it got rid of the Google Calendar events feed as well. Now you had to be on Facebook’s website or app to access this information. Meanwhile, the news feed showed less and less of the content that I had previously been accessing through third-party services: updates on my friends' lives, and information on local events. By the 2020s, it was essential to post any community event on Facebook - where else would people find out about it? - but also insufficient, since the algorithm had deprioritised events in favour of ads, sponsored posts, and content that was better at extending the length of a user session.
In 2021, I started a non-profit to run a secondhand bookshop and arts space in my struggling hometown, called Typeset. We had a Shopify site for selling books online - chosen precisely because Shopify seems to work so well with Instagram and Facebook - and a relatively cheap physical space in the town centre. In theory, we would attract people to our bookshop through specific social gatherings, with measures in place to limit infection risk (being a dry venue helps a lot with that!). It was incredibly difficult for Typeset to reach people. There were multiple factors making these conditions challenging, including the health issues impacting me and my co-directors. It’s not all Zuck’s fault. But Meta erected a lot of extra barriers in our way. Actually getting our posts seen by the people we wanted to reach was very difficult, but paying to have our content promoted on Facebook meant that it was forced onto the feeds of people who were not interested in it, leading to frustrated comments.
**They forced us to use their proprietary apps, and then made those apps unfit for purpose. They forced us to pay to get our posts boosted, and then still didn’t show our posts to the people who wanted to see them. **
You might imagine that Facebook is primarily designed for e-commerce businesses, since this is a major source of revenue for them. But businesses are treated poorly as well. Shopify would automatically add our new products to our Facebook shop. Our small social enterprise ended up accruing multiple violations for contraband goods such as a book about aromatherapy (banned for its proximity to health) and Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries novels (banned because murder is bad, actually). Eventually our business was banned altogether, making it impossible to connect with our community through the only website or app that most people use to connect with community online. When I asked customer service to explain which rule we had broken, I was told that it is against Facebook’s policies to disclose which policy has been violated, lest bad actors learn how to cheat the system.
It’s nice to imagine that perhaps a Facebook that is dedicated to free speech will stop being censorious toward innocent booksellers. But I don’t think Facebook’s commitment to free speech will extend to restoring the utility of its services for local communities. It will not mean that we are once again able to use Facebook to organise gatherings in community spaces. It won’t mean that we are free to access Facebook using third-party software that is interoperable with competing services.
Collectively becoming dependent on Meta was never going to end well. The only way to ensure that we are able to reach each other is to use services that are community owned and operated. There’s a part of me that is excited about this, excited to focus my energies on the bits of the internet that actually give me joy. I don’t mourn the loss of a website that I never wanted to use to begin with. But I do mourn the loss of a platform that managed to be a comfortable experience for users who aren’t interested in nerdy shit. The independent web is a great place for me to connect with the kind of people I used to hang out with on a regular basis when I lived in the Bay Area, but it’s not the first port of call for the kind of people who could have supported a small community bookshop in South Yorkshire.
I still don’t know how to fill the gap that was left behind when Facebook quietly deprioritised events. Whether online or off, people need to hear about events that could keep them connected to community. Loneliness is such a profound issue for so many right now. What are we doing to help each other to organise online?
