Thoughts on my four-year history of being censored by Facebook

Sometime in the last few months, Facebook decided that the Brazilian Portuguese word for "queer" is forbidden. So I was censored for using it in jest, referring to myself, as other Brazilian gay men do.* While English speaking gays were able to capture the words "queer" and "gay" and wash the slur out of them, the large LGBT community in Brazil has to go through the foreign cultural gatekeeper owned by Zuckerberg if it intends to do the same with our slurs. Brazilians are enthusiastic social media users, so it's no exaggeration to say Facebook has become a cultural gatekeeper, since it doesn't shy away from meddling with what is appropriate to say and what words we can legitimately use to describe ourselves.

Finding the censorship amusing, I asked a friend to post a screenshot of Facebook's ludicrous accusation that I had attacked "people based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender or disability". Many people commented on the post, some amused, some shaking their heads at Facebook's pathetic attempts at having their cake and eat it too when it comes to free speech (because it still claims to uphold free speech). What followed was that my friend and all commenters who used the forbidden word were also put under censorship to varying degrees. I got 30 days with no right to submit messages or posts, so did my friend. The other people got varying degrees of censorship or a slap in the wrist.

I'm no longer shocked at Facebook's behaviour. I'm a seasoned censoree. Back in 2013 I created a Tumblr blog to tell the tale of when I had posts inexplicably and repeatedly deleted for criticising homophobes and sexist men who cheat on their wives. Back then, Facebook didn't even try to explain why I was being censored (the accusation/explanation is a very new thing, in fact). I've amassed a follower base after I used my expertise as a geneticist, that same year, to reply on YouTube to a homophobic preacher who said on a popular Brazilian TV show that being gay had nothing to do with genetics. The video went viral and so I used my instant popularity to advance some ideas. But not all of them, not on Facebook's watch.

Some may be thinking by now I'm a typical progressive and this story is a politically one-sided tale of Facebook censorship. Actually, it's a bit more complicated. I've been more often censored on Facebook for criticising the left than the right. With friends I run one of the most popular anti-"social justice warrior" pages in Brazilian Portuguese - we were pioneers back in 2015, and before that I used to criticise what I perceived to be activism gone wrong through identity politics, this divisive political cancer of our times.

I was once censored because I wrote a long think piece, with no image attached, about racial-quota activists who broke into a classroom at the University of São Paulo to point the finger at the alumni and attack them for their skin colour. It's not only racist to do so, I said, but also fallacious for blaming individuals for supposed moral failures of the groups they belong to. That, too, was censored. And it was censored for "nudity". Maybe because my lack of respect for authoritarian identitarians was too naked, too bare to handle?

Having a text piece censored for containing "nudity" maybe tells us that Facebook's censorship problem is more about incompetence or sheer volume of content to sift through than about authoritarian values with a predominant left-wing bias. But I'm not sure of that. As John Stuart Mill knew, the masses have an authoritarian streak, and so whomever has the power to fulfil their wishes for censorship should counter-balance their streak by not doing so. Facebook seems only too happy to condone the flagging guerilla. Since its methods are a black box, censorees can only speculate on how it's done: although the network denies it, it seems that the sheer number of people flagging a post does make a difference on the likelihood of its being censored (making virtual witch hunts common).

Whole pages with millions of likes have been deleted, making masses of users unhappy. One would think that mistreating users or potential customers (since anyone can pay to boost a post) is a bad idea. But, of course, we're not being really served as customers on Facebook. We're the product. We're kept in because if we delete our profiles (or rather deactivate, deleting is not a straightforward option), people will wonder why we've blocked them (as happened repeatedly to me). We're kept in because of clever exploitations on our brain reward system, and because of sheer lies like the number of likes on our pages and the number of followers on our profiles: you have no guarantee "followers" will really get your updates on their "news feed", so the number is a lie to make you proud that you got that many people to click a button once.

Over the years, after I lost count of how many times I've inadvertently run afoul of rules designed to be vague, I've developed a mix of feelings for Facebook, with an overall negative hue. I think many years of work made it quite an effective website for many things. I'm not even insulted by the bland white-and-blue template. But I quietly cheer for Facebook's demise. I wish it will just die out soon. Sometimes I come back to use my pages and try and get some traffic and ad revenue to my blogs. With a dirty feeling afterward. I don't think Zuckerberg and his team will appreciate any time soon the value of free speech, since they have been flirting with Angela Merkel's twisted view of what free speech is. For the sake of freedom everywhere in the world, I hope Facebook is butchered by better alternatives.

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* The word is viado. It's a mutated form of veado, which means deer. It probably started either as an observation of a supposed common delicateness between the animal and gay people or as a shortened form of desviado (deviant).