984 Hours Off Facebook

I returned to Facebook on May 3rd. I wish I could say that this was an Eat, Pray, Love­-like effort to get in touch with myself or an act of protest of Facebook’s allowing an organization access to, like, so much of our personal information. If only I were that self-caring or that passionate about sticking it to the man. My vacation from Facebook is a forced one, like Napoleon from France or Ann Coulter from Fox News. I have been kicked off Facebook for hate speech (please stay with me. This is not a Nazi-humanizing article, I swear).

I have never been the kind of person to break the rules. I am always on time, nay, early. I don’t cross the street when the sign says “Don’t Walk.” I still remember the specific instances when I got a strike from my fifth grade teacher. The shame, the embarrassment! Can you imagine? I am an aggressive, compulsive rule follower.

Except when it comes to Facebook’s community standards. It all started about one-hundred years ago in November of 2017. We were right in the middle of the #MeToo reckoning. The ground was shaking and shifting, and it felt like things were going to change, that men were going to be held responsible. It seemed like every day there was a new article, and we went through all seven stages of grief every morning when the news app on our phone informed us of a new man who had abused his power in egregious and heart-breaking ways.

“Garrison Keillor,” we would gasp and fall onto the nearest fainting couch. “Who’s next?” we would cry softly as we thought of our favorite male politicians, actors, directors, writers, news anchors. And then another one would come down the pike, and we would cry and faint all over again.

I was admittedly guilty of this cycle of surprise and outrage, but I started to realize it was never going to get beyond that. We were just waiting for a new name to break, so we could take to Twitter and chastise Kevin Spacey before the whole world. I wanted to get over my surprise and outrage; I wanted to actually see stuff change. So, I took to Facebook, where your short thoughts and jokes can be put over a delightful backdrop with leaves falling behind your words or hands clapping below them and I said, “Stop being surprised that men are garbage, and start taking out the trash.” It was, in my humblest of opinions, very clever. I then got to sit and watch the praise come in. There is a unique joy for writers and joke tellers to watching people pressing the like button (or better still, the haha button) on something you have written. The joy of sweet, sweet validation as the number in your notifications ticks up and up and up. Thirty-five, forty, forty-five, fifty reactions to your post.

So, I went to bed that night quite pleased with myself. ’Twas a good day to be Meghan on Facebook. I set my phone aside and fell into a deep, deep slumber. The following morning I awoke and immediately went to check my phone . My Facebook app informed me that my session had expired, and I needed to log back in.

“Huh,” I thought to myself as I typed in my password that could probably use a few more special characters. Once I was all logged in and had forgotten my pledge to myself to change my password, Facebook informed me:

“We Removed Something You Posted

It looks like something you posted doesn’t follow our Community Standards. We remove posts that attack people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender or disability.”

I was reeling. “So ridiculous!” I laughed to myself as I stupidly took a screenshot the notification and then posted the screenshot to Facebook. What followed was 12 hours of a near stranger telling me I had been sexist and family members encouraging me to remember that I have a father and brothers.

And then that post was taken down. I was banned for twenty-four hours.

And then another that read “m*n are g*rbage.” Three days.

And then one where I tried to put my argument in context, because, after a careful and thorough perusal of Facebook’s community standards, I understood that my posts needed to be contextualized, needed to open up conversation. So, I wrote a fifteen minute podcast to explain what I mean when I say “men are garbage.” Facebook’s Community Standards claim that they encourage posts that “promote debate and greater understanding.” That’s what I was trying to do. Seven days.

Then I shut up for a while. I decided to be very careful about what I posted on Facebook. I reserved most mentions of the G-word for Twitter.

And then, come April 2nd, I decided to wade back into the garbage waters. I tentatively and hesitantly put a post linking to a twitter thread that a man had written about how men are the ones who teach women that men are garbage in the first place before turning around and getting upset when we realize that it’s true. “This is what I’m talking about,” I yelled in the void. “This is what we mean when we say, well, m — are g — — — !” I didn’t say the words. And then when I woke up early the following day to go to a physical therapy appointment to help me with all the tension I hold in my neck from my fear that the world is falling apart, I got the message:

“We Removed Something You Posted

It looks like something you posted doesn’t follow our Community Standards. We remove posts that attack people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender or disability.”

And they slapped me with my sentence: thirty days. I’m honestly sometimes grateful for the time off Facebook. I can’t spend so much time looking up people who hurt me in high school to see if I’m doing better than they are. I’m not comparing myself with her and her and him and her. But getting your Facebook account suspended includes a unique kind of torture, specific to the world we live in now. I can still wake up in the morning and scroll through Facebook, roll my eyes at the memes, wish that maybe some of my distant relatives would stop posting quite so much, and then I’ll see it. Oh, Amanda set a new profile picture, I’ll think to myself. Oh, she looks so cute. I press the like button only to be reminded “This feature is temporarily blocked.” I shake my fists at the skies. How could I be so foolish!

The Facebook world carries on without me, as I look through the one way mirror of my computer screen. I can see them, but they can’t see me. Or worse still, someone posts about my indiscretion: “Posted in solidarity with Meghan McGuire.” And then the conversation continues without me. The council of elders gathers to decide: Did Meghan go too far? Should she write personal apology letters to every man she’s met? Or just half of them? She should be ashamed. She should be proud. She should set her computer on fire and move back to Alaska where no one will find her. I watch as people pass judgment on me, on my silly joke, on my attempts to actually engage in a discussion about it. But, here’s the thing, I can’t engage in the discussion. I can post my pop culture references to garbage on Instagram (there are so many more than you would expect). I can bang my head against the wall. But I can’t engage.

And perhaps that is the most frustrating part. My original post was in support of a silence-breaking movement, where women, people in general, were finally given a voice to tell their stories. Women’s voices are so often silenced, and I don’t just mean in hush money. We’re silenced when we’re told to calm down. We’re silenced when we’re told that our voices are shrill. We’re silenced when people yell “hey baby!” to you from across the street, because you can’t respond for fear of retribution or violence. Women can watch a million Ted Talks about how to speak up for and advocate for themselves, but that doesn’t even begin to address the messaging we receive every day of our lives to sit down, shut up, and smile. And every time Facebook took down my posts, it felt like they were telling me the same thing.

It’s important that Facebook have Community Standards. It shouldn’t be an internet anarchy where people roam free, but those community standards need to be evenly enforced or they don’t mean anything at all. The posts I’ve seen on this website that call people the n-word or the c-word need to be taken down. The post my mom reported that threatened to hit protestors at the Women’s March in Augusta, Maine with cars should be taken down. Pages that advocate for white as the superior race need to be taken down. But again and again, they aren’t. For a platform that claims to represent a diversity of over two million voices, they seem to be really working to protect a select few of those voices, those voices that aren’t already struggling to have their voices heard, while the rest of us are scratching and clawing to have someone, ANYONE listen to what we have to say, and maybe hit the “like” button while they’re at it.

When I returned to Facebook on May 3rd, I had been in Facebook penitentiary for 984 hours in total. “Facebook is garbage,” I muttered to myself as I resumed posting about my dog and my next improv show and my friends’ birthdays, biding my time until I get kicked off again, maybe for good. Because Facebook is like my frenemy from middle school. Oh, I hate her so much. I doodle a picture of her with devil horns and make snide remarks when she turns her back. But I still check up on her twenty times a day, and I hope and pray that she likes me. But usually she leaves me feeling like garbage and like my voice doesn’t matter. And one of these days, I may actually believe that she’s right.