Social media travails and important update

UPDATE post-publication: Someone from Facebook reached out to me by email and offered to correct the issue with my page, which had been incorrectly suspended by their algorithm/AI. The problem has been sorted out now. I appreciate Facebook reaching out to me. I do hope, though, that their algorithm is improved so issues like this can be prevented from happening in the first place.

A few days ago I left Twitter, despite having 20K followers there. This was not an abrupt decision, but one I have been seriously considering for well over a year. After Twitter was acquired and turned into a private company, I noticed significant changes over the months and years that followed. Any post with even a very slight political take would attract hordes of crass, obnoxious replies from accounts that didn't follow me. Many were likely bots, but not all. In my experience, the broader community there has turned rather vulgar, so eventually it became impractical to moderate my presence to keep it minimally civil. And then, recent changes made it possible for blocked users to again see my posts, rendering moderation even harder. That was the final straw for me; I kept my account going until the US election, to reach people until that crucial moment, but no longer. I regret leaving my 20K followers, but you have alternatives to keep following my work.

As if by synchronicity, only a couple of days after my leaving Twitter, Facebook suspended my 'Bernardo Kastrup' page without any explanation as to why. On the announcement of the suspension, there was a link called 'More details.' Clicking on it, however, briefly opened an empty window that closed automatically in less than a second. I tried it in multiple computers, with multiple browsers and operating systems, but with no change. There was an option to protest Facebook's decision, but every time I tried to submit my protest, I'd get the message: "We cannot process your request at this time." This went on for over 24h until I gave up. Eventually, I found out how to check my page status elsewhere, getting the screen below:

Contradictorily, the screen says that my page was suspended due to violations of community standards, but also gives me the "good news" that my page has no violations of community standards! Clicking on either link from the "Your page has been suspended" lines does not clarify the problem. At some point a pop-up window highlights specifically that impersonating someone else is a violation of community standards. This suggests that Facebook thinks that I am impersonating Bernardo Kastrup (!), but even that isn't quite clear. Thinking of it, I had indeed updated my profile photo just before the suspension, using (with authorisation) professional photos originally made for an article in a French magazine. Perhaps Facebook's AI thought I was impersonating the famous Bernardo Kastrup from the French magazine! Be that as it may, there is no way to contact a person to clarify the issue. If Facebook's AI thinks you violated something, they suspend your account without an explanation and there's nothing you can do about it, other than fill out a 'feedback' form that will most-likely just add to some statistics, but not be read by a human. There's just no reasonable recourse, for the process is entirely opaque and rather arbitrary.

I had had some weird issues with Facebook in the previous weeks. Twice Facebook cancelled my sharing of posts by Essentia Foundation because apparently I had shared pornography (!). I laughed it off and didn't make an issue of it. But now I realise that those events were harbingers of things to come.

So I have been effectively forced to leave Facebook, and thus decided to leave all other Meta platforms as well, including my newly-created accounts on Instagram and Threads. This is not because of any political or activist position against Meta, or even as a protest against what happened (I can't get mad at mere AI), but because I simply do not trust those platforms and do not want to spend the significant effort required to (re-)build a following there just to see my accounts arbitrarily suspended in a couple of years. It makes no sense for me to build up an initial presence on Threads or Instagram, or to start a new Facebook page.

I left Twitter because it has become a wild-west due to lack of moderation and enforcement of community standards; it became a downright rude, obnoxious, unsafe space. So I support community standards enforcement, as Facebook tries to do. But then, the enforcement should be minimally logical and transparent, not ridiculously arbitrary and opaque as it turns out to be. Twitter and Facebook are now at opposite extremes of a spectrum, neither of which makes it minimally attractive for me to build or maintain a presence there. Neither seems to be reliable, or even viable, anymore as a platform for a (small) public figure to engage their audience.

I am still active on my relatively large YouTube community, BlueSky, Mastodon and LinkedIn. The latter one I use only for posts related to my technology and business activities, not philosophy. I am considering re-starting a discussion forum/community to replace my Twitter/Facebook presence. Such a forum/community would (will?) be owned by me and run on private servers not subject to third-party control. If (when?) I go ahead with this, you will hear it here and in my remaining social media platforms. I also plan to become much more active on my YouTube channel, cultivating a larger community there in the coming months. I'll be doing live community events, such as Ask-Me-Anythings (AMAs), starting from next year. I will also make more use of this blog for community related messages, such as this one. Notice that you can always check this page to see updates to my social media presence, including new platforms, as they come online. 2025 will be refreshing and exciting, a vigorous new start to my online presence, more focused on community building and more direct interactions between me and my audience.

I sense a synchronistic ethos behind my misadventures with social media. Just as my new book comes out, events push me away from the superficiality and brevity of social media, to more thoughtful, in-depth, content-rich spaces such as this blog, YouTube (the latter of which I plan, again, to make much more extensive use of starting next year), and a potential forum/community. I accept that this is what life is pushing me towards, and will happily act accordingly.