Somebody Pressed Report
Jürgen Domian is a German radio host who spent years doing late-night call-in radio—a show where people rang in with problems so extreme and so specific that the recordings circulated on the internet long after they aired, the kind of show where human misery and human absurdity become briefly indistinguishable. He is not, by any reasonable standard, a provocateur. Which makes what happened to his Facebook post in March 2013 all the more instructive.
Domian wrote something about the newly elected Pope Francis. The full statement: Some people grow into their office. So perhaps Francis will yet surprise us. Let’s hope so. Let’s give him a chance. In six months, a year at most, we’ll know more.
Cautious optimism. A mild, almost charitable take. By any measure, not blasphemy.
It didn’t matter. Enough of his followers—the devout, the offended, the people who treat a report button as a weapon—flagged the post until Facebook’s algorithm deleted it without review. A fifty-five-year-old man’s careful, measured opinion about a religious figure, gone because a mob clicked a small button and a machine decided that was sufficient evidence of harm. Domian responded with a second post addressed directly to Zuckerberg, which got close to twenty thousand likes. Facebook apologized. Quietly. Without explaining anything.
The incident itself is minor. What matters is the structure it reveals. These platforms extend a welcome and then enforce a set of house rules you didn’t fully read and can’t appeal. Opinions, nudity, competing products—anything that conflicts with the platform’s preferred aesthetic or that accumulates enough complaints from organized bad-faith reporters gets deleted, hidden, or banned. Your years of posts, your connections, your archive: held hostage to someone else’s terms of service and someone else’s algorithm. Post your lunch, play the games, and you’ll be fine. Try anything else at your own risk.
I use Facebook and Twitter as repeaters for this journal. That’s the whole relationship. I push posts through them because that’s where some readers are, and yes, because it generates traffic that eventually generates money. But I would never build anything on those platforms. I would never make them the primary home for anything I care about, because I have no idea what they’ll do with what I put there, or when the rules will shift, or what I’ll violate without knowing it. Presenting nipples, defacing swastikas, and mocking other bloggers is not permitted here, Mr. Winatschek. This is a Disney establishment.
The solution is boring and old and nobody wants to hear it: rent a server, install an open-source CMS, and run your own site. Not Blogger, not WordPress.com—your own installation, on your own hosting, where you control what stays up. It costs a few euros a month and an afternoon to set up. It means that when you write something about the Pope, or post a pair of tits, or say something a coordinated group of strangers finds offensive, no algorithm can erase it because nobody pressed a button.
What I’ve been waiting for since I got my first internet connection is a version of "social media" that doesn’t mean logging into a handful of monopolistic platforms and performing within their parameters—but actually owning your own corner of the network. Real decentralization. The internet was supposed to be that already. We just let a few companies convince us their way was easier. It is easier. It’s also someone else’s house, and they can change the locks whenever they like. The internet could be so much more than Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of it. We just have to want that badly enough to do the work.