Someone Else’s House
Jürgen Domian posted something on Facebook about Pope Francis. Nothing incendiary—just speculation about whether this new pope might surprise us, might be worth giving a chance to. Generic optimistic hedging. But enough people reported it as blasphemy that Facebook’s algorithm deleted it. Post gone. Conversation ended.
Domian, understandably irritated at being censored by a machine, posted again—this time directly calling out Facebook. Who exactly gave them the right to decide what counts as acceptable speech? Twenty thousand people clicked like. Facebook apologized. And then nothing.
What caught my attention was watching people realize, slowly, that they didn’t actually own anything on these platforms. You could build years of content, connections, photographs—all of it—and some algorithmic combination of reports and moderation could vaporize it whenever. Post an image someone objected to, criticize the wrong thing, link to a competitor—deleted. Your choice didn’t matter.
The platforms had always been clear about this. Their space, their rules. But most people just accepted it because the alternative was irrelevance. Everyone was there. The algorithm fed you things. It felt like the natural order of the internet.
Except I’d lived long enough to remember when it wasn’t this way. When the internet actually meant building your own thing on your own terms, with your own rules. Somewhere in the last decade I’d let that slip—I was posting to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram not because I wanted to, but because they’d become mandatory distribution channels. The places where an audience existed. So I fed the machine.
Which meant accepting that these companies could delete my work whenever some policy shifted. That everything I posted existed at their pleasure, subject to their algorithms and whatever they decided violated their terms. I hated it and I used it anyway.
The option still exists to rent cheap server space, install an open-source CMS, own your own platform completely. No middleman. No algorithm. No one who can delete you on a whim. And I keep thinking about it every time a platform does something stupid—censors something fine, bans someone without cause, tweaks the algorithm in some absurd direction. It was always possible to just leave.
But the inertia is too strong now. Everyone’s on these platforms. The audience is there. The convenience is too ingrained. Domian’s apology came through. His post was restored. And nothing about how the internet actually works changed at all.