The Thinking Police

I wanted to send my girlfriend something filthy on Facebook and apparently that’s not allowed anymore. Facebook’s decided they’re going full puritanical with new community standards that ban any form of sexual solicitation or contact on the platform. Doesn’t matter if it’s public or hidden in groups or messages. Get caught and you’re warned. Do it again and you’re deleted.

The list of what’s forbidden is genuinely absurd. Vague sexual innuendo, sexualized slang, anything referencing positions or kinks or fetishes, pictures of people in suggestive poses. Even offering a massage reads as inappropriate if it hints at anything erotic. Facebook laid out the rules with examples in their guidelines, which means they’re essentially publishing a list of things you can’t write.

The reasoning is that their moderators can’t reliably distinguish between consensual adult content and exploitation, so they’re just banning all of it. It’s a blunt approach. Like closing a restaurant because of a food-poisoning complaint instead of fixing the kitchen.

Everyone thought of the same workaround immediately: code words. Potato salad is sex now. Highway bridge is a blowjob. There’s one specific phrase in Facebook’s own guidelines—multiracial gangbang with a bukkake finale—and now that’s just hello. Everything’s hello. And that’s the platform Facebook wanted to build: one where nobody’s thinking about wanting anybody, which is probably also one where nobody goes anymore.