Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, has changed their moderation policy to permit users to post statements that allege “mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality.” It’s open season on LGBTQIA+ people.

When I was a teenager, people routinely used slurs to refer to LGBTQIA+ people. I was terrified of being labeled as queer because I saw what happened to people who were. I was horrified to see people making social and environmental decisions based on purely on dogma and prejudice. This was why I dedicated my career to science education. I hoped that people might learn how to use the best available information and multiple perspectives in order to make better decisions. To see the country moving back toward ignorance and superstition is profoundly discouraging.

I began using Facebook pretty early because one of my students invited me to join. I joined on Jul 23, 2007. I honestly never really liked Facebook all that much: most people didn’t post interesting stuff they created. It was always mostly “copypasta” garbage. Now, of course, it’s mostly ads and “suggested content” that Facebook tries to jam in front of your eyeballs to conceal the copypasta your “friends” share. And they’re experimenting with bots that will pretend to be people posting copypasta.

As it became more and more enshittified, I had basically quit using it. Then my publisher encouraged me to set up an author page as part of my book promotion efforts in 2021. Since then, I’ve posted snippets of my writing and even spent some money to experiment with advertising (i.e. the only way to get Facebook to not hide most of your posts.)

Before then, I had never even set up an Instagram account. When they created Threads, you needed an Instagram account to try it. So I set one up to experiment with. Instagram doesn’t allow you to disable autoplay, which results in frequent unrequested motion on pages. The same is true of Threads, which uses the Instagram codebase. Due to a mild vestibular disorder, it’s very uncomfortable for me to visit pages with unrequested motion. And I found Threads to be uninteresting anyway: it uses an algorithm that surfaces really uninteresting posts to show you. It kept showing me random short posts from people I didn’t know about inane topics. Vomit emoji.

But this new change in Meta’s moderation policy is probably a bright line for me. Meta is clearly pandering to the incoming fascist administration. I expect it’s defensible to them since, as a corporation, their only guiding star is to make as much money as possible. And the fascists have shown they’ll crush anyone that doesn’t fall into line. But I can’t be a party to it.

So, I’m going to post a message to my Meta accounts linking to this post and inviting my friends to come here if they want to find out what I’m doing. At least, until the fascists come after me.