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Zuckerberg's META goes full MAGA

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When Elon Musk bought Twitter a couple years ago, he reinstated NAZIS, throttled anyone to the left of Attila the Hun, and his algorithm filled our timelines with a rogues gallery of alt right types, incels, Q-Anon cultists, and paid Russian dupes.

I had more than 6,000 followers before Musk remade Twitter. Afterward, my posts were seen by no more than a dozen or so.

The performative X-odus

Corporations pulled their ads, and hundreds of thousands of Tweeters fled to Threads to escape the cesspool. I opened an account, mysef. And why not? It was easy, because if we were on Instagram - which Zuckerberg had already gobbled up years earlier - we could activate a Threads account with one click.

This “X-odus” was foolish, and it was obvious at the time. One power-mad billionaire isn’t going to provide much of a refuge from another power-mad billionaire. Facebook fielded blame for much of America’s political polarization four years ago in the wake of Donald Trump’s insurrection. Zuckerberg responded by reducing political content.

In 2022, Zuckerberg’s Facebook removed some of the editorial cartoons from my Facebook page, which had more than 11,000 subscribers. The cartoons had attacked the Proud Boys, Tucker Carlson, and other right wing extremists.

Facebook claimed they violated community standards. Even though their community standards page specifically exempted political satire aimed at lampooning bigotry.

“These platforms that were pretending to be town halls were actually silos where billionaires would gather all of our opinions, and use their algorithms to pick and choose which ones would be amplified and shared.” -Darrin Bell

I reposted the cartoons, along with an article asking exactly which community was Facebook protecting? Facebook deleted that. That same week, the “likes” on my cartoons plummeted from the hundreds or thousands, down to no more than twelve (who I’m assuming were people who had bookmarked my page and would go there directly, because my page stopped appearing in people’s feeds). The views never recovered. Zuckerberg’s moderators had clearly shadow banned my page.

The epiphany

That’s when I stopped seeing social media as anything other than a billionaire’s sandbox. Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel… it made no difference. These platforms that were pretending to be town halls were actually silos where billionaires would gather all of our opinions, and use their algorithms to pick and choose which ones would be amplified and shared.

I decided to stop giving billionaires free artwork.

I started this Substack. Here, every single person who subscribes is notified every time I post a new cartoon. There is no algorithm to stop me from sharing what I want to share, or to stop you from seeing what you want to see.

Zuckermedia’s pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago

After Convict Trump resoundingly won a massive 1.5% popular vote victory, Zuckerberg joined Joe and Mika, Tim Apple, Justout Trudeau, and a parade of other fellow travelers on a pilgrimage to Mustafar Z’ha’dum Mar-a-Lago for the first annual holy boot-licking.

No word on whether they all creepily touched a glowing Saudi Arabian orb.

Let’s all just hope Mark-Elon Muskerberg doesn’t decide to buy Substack.

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Don’t forget to scroll down and view the time-lapse video of the creation of today’s editorial cartoon!