Stopped Asking

I was drinking red wine and half-watching old Bored to Death episodes when the message came from Facebook. Another picture flagged. Violation of community standards. One more incident and they’d delete the whole account. As always, no explanation of which image or what specifically was wrong, just the threat.

This had been happening for months. Every few weeks something would disappear. Facebook didn’t offer reasons, just enforced arbitrary rules to keep you uncertain and manageable. It’s an efficient system when your goal is compliance.

So I stopped asking permission. I pulled together everything we’d wanted to post but couldn’t, everything that got flagged, the crude unfiltered stuff, and put it somewhere beyond their reach. No moderation. No American sensitivity standards. Just what we actually wanted to make.

The thing that surprised me wasn’t the content itself—most of it wasn’t even that transgressive. What mattered was that we weren’t waiting anymore, weren’t softening things, weren’t calculating what might trigger the algorithm. We’d taken back the decision.