F*** You Facebook

This morning, for the third and final time, Facebook has banned me for ridiculous reasons.

The first time was after I posted, “I wish Sarah Palin would disappear.” That punishment lasted until I agreed to a policy prohibiting threats. Really, a threat? A threat would have been, “I wish I had a canon, so I could blow up Sarah Palin’s house, and she could no longer see Russia from her bedroom while riding her idiot husband’s tiny penis in attempt to make more babies and name them after mathematical theorems.” Now, that is a threat. And, the world doesn’t need another Pythagoras Palin. Can you imagine him on Dancing with the Stars? And what makes Boom Boom Bristol Palin a star? I wish someone would knock me up, so I could get on a reality competition show.

The second time was because I either sent a friend request to someone I did not know outside of Facebook or someone I didn’t know outside of Facebook sent me a request and I accepted it. That punishment lasted until I agree to a policy only to friend people I knew outside of Facebook. Seriously? So you are telling me that all these other people with 2,000 and 3,000 and even 5,000 friends know all those people outside of Facebook? My favorites are the suggested friends on the right-hand column. I would send a friend request and get a note telling me they have too many friends, yet some had 1,500 friends. Who makes these determinations?

Isn’t the purpose of Facebook so you can connect with people all over the world and make new friends? Apparently not. If I see someone in France with shared interests, I need to book a flight, visit him, fly home, and send him a friend request, hoping he doesn’t forget who I was and report me for requesting a friendship with a stranger. I guess that meeting better be memorable with a happy ending.

I signed the agreement, but then I was not allowed to send requests for fourteen days or message anyone. What was more frustrating was they went through my friend list and unfriended about twenty percent of my friends, so then I received messages accusing me of unfriending people. Who decided which friends I was allowed to keep?

Today was the icing on the cake. I work for a publisher of gay erotica, so we arrange for and have a lot of images that are not for everyone’s eyes; however, some are harmless enough not to offend, or so I thought. We had a picture of a naked mechanic working on a car. All you saw was full backal. The caption was, “My new mechanic.” The comments and likes were many and positive, but then, someone from Facebook removed the picture.

My Facebook friends, whom I know personally and have touched in many ways, were appalled. One even sent me a dozen photos he found on Facebook, which depicted sex acts by any number of combinations of genders and species – all of them posted on people’s pages. There is a page called “Gay Porn.” Literally! You should check it out. I can’t.

In order to log back on to Facebook and reactivate my profile, I was asked to sign an agreement not to post any pictures that I did not own the rights to and that all my pictures were of people I know and contained a date and time stamp.

My reply to Facebook?

FUCK YOU!

They claimed I did not have the rights and permissions to post that picture. What a bunch of dicks. I was at the photo shoot. I know the model. I know the photographer. I drew up their contracts. I received permission to use the image.

By the way, I love my job. It doesn’t pay much, but for some reason, I don’t care.

So was it banned because they thought I didn’t own it? Or was it offensive? Or ….

Does someone on Zuckerberg’s team have something against me? Did I piss off someone years ago, and that person works for him and has nothing better to do than watch my profile? Is Cynarra, my stalker from college, the vice president of morality and standards at Facebook? Do they have morality and standards at Facebook? 

I have the most honest profile – or at least I did until this morning . My pictures include my face. I use my real name. I post pictures I took with my own camera and phone or ones I witnessed being taken. Do they know how many of those Craig’s List headless profiles are fake?

I had a guy contact me last week with the last name Stern. He had a headless shot for a profile picture. It turns out after telling me we were related that Stern wasn’t even his name. I had already figured that out, but I wanted to see how far he would go. And have mercy, did he go far. You can’t catfish me!

This isn’t the first time they have removed images from my page. You know those Blunt Cards that people post constantly? I apparently am not allowed to post them. Every time I did, they removed it. Literally. A friend made one his cover photo. I told him what happened to me, and he said they never questioned him.

Our publishing company has run into the same problem on Amazon. For the last four years, Amazon Kindle has randomly banned books for questionable content, and the reasons never make sense. We have a book called Muscle Worshipers, which was published so many years ago that it was the first Gay erotic book ever on Amazon Kindle. It is also the tamest erotic book ever. It is nothing but stories about guys admiring each other’s bodies. There are no anal sex scenes in it, and everyone is of age. This book is so tame that it was panned by hard core fans and reviewers of erotica for being too vanilla and boring. Two weeks ago, we got a notice that it was banned. We were stunned. There are books on Kindle that are downright disgusting but still available.

We are convinced that the Church Lady is one of their reviewers, and every once in a while, she picks up one of our books and decides to ban it. We would fight it, but then we risk having all of our books banned. The books are all in the erotica category, and one must be eighteen to order them. All the characters in the books are eighteen. Who determines what is questionable or not? And if erotica is not allowable, why is it one of the categories? This makes no sense.

Funny, we never had these problems when a Republican was in the White House. Go figure.

As I learned during my decision to go on weekend Facebook hiatus, this social media site does little for book sales and only drives about five percent of the traffic to this blog.

I can live without it on Saturdays and Sundays, so how hard will it be to live without seeing pictures of cats and knowing someone woke up with a headache on any given Tuesday or drove in traffic on a Thursday evening?

So long Facebook and your fascist, nonsensical policies. As far as I am concerned. You are so last year.  

If you find me offensive and don’t know me outside this blog, join me, get on my email list, or buy my books at www.miltonstern.com.