It's not me Facebook, it's you

Before Andy and I started dating, I had a cheesy website called Never Enough Pets. I started the website in 1999 and it was part of an assignment for a required introductory computer science class that I had to take to complete my undergraduate degree at Boston University. At the time, I had one horse and three parrots. There was very little information about myself on the website, save for one or two boring pictures. People at the time used America Online for groups and to meet people they would not otherwise encounter in the real world. Back then, if you did something stupid on AOL, you got TOSsed, or a Terms of Service violation. There was a cost to use AOL, which required a land line. It was also extremely slow, and sometimes took several minutes or more to see a message, much less respond to one. I began using AOL in 1995, when I was 15 years old. There were so few people "online" that chat rooms had scheduled times that they were open for people to communicate about shared interests. It was not exactly real time or instantaneous, like social media platforms today. So, people were careful and the community was well regulated. Spam was uncommon and quickly reported. There was not even a dating website in existence when I started using AOL. My username was Macaw Princess. When I got TOSsed, I knew exactly why because AOL told me what I did to violate their rules. I was a hotheaded teenager so I frequently got breaks from AOL, which was fine. When I started college in 1998, I maintained a spot on the Dean's List for all but one of my semesters as an undergraduate, took far more classes than I needed to graduate, worked 20+ hours a week to pay for horse board, and went to the barn 4-5 days a week to ride my horse and other people's horses. I started talking to Andy on AOL in January 2002, during my final semester of college. I had just been accepted into the University of Iowa College of Law and was trying to learn more about the area. I decided to enroll in March 2002, after I was rejected from my first choice law school, Cornell. It was a long shot and my LSAT scores were below the average that they accepted, so the rejection was not a surprise. I rejected a full scholarship to Brooklyn Law School, which infuriated my mother, who had hopes that I would move back to New York City, where I grew up.

Twice in the past month, I received notices from Facebook that I violated their community standards (which are multiple pages long, with dozens of embedded links) on their message platform, Messenger. I have a hunch what happened the first time, in May, because the warning came two days after I blocked a woman who I considered a stalker from my personal Facebook page. The second warning came this morning, this time with an obscure message from Facebook that I will not be able to respond to messages for 24 hours. This is a head scratcher for me, as I cannot recall anything I have written in the past few months that would violate any of Facebook's long and unevenly applied standards. I can still use Facebook itself, start new posts, respond to others, comment, etc. I am just locked out of Messenger. I joined Facebook in December 2006, and used the platform for over 14 years without any issues. I have an idea of what is going on, and suspect it's all related to the can of worms I opened in March 2021, when I called the Sauk Rapids Police Department in Minnesota. I reported a woman that lives in their city limits for hoarding dogs. There was a precursory investigation, the woman would not allow the investigating officer into the house, there was a short police report, and the case was closed. The incident report number is 21002874 and is a freely available public record.

This is what social media has come to. People can't find ways in real life, off artificial reality, to find fault with people that they consider their enemies, so they create fiefdoms on social media platforms. Their hope is to accumulate enough followers that a few of those followers will find ways to inflict misery on their perceived adversaries. Social media personalities create entire lives for themselves, identities that are gross departures from their actual existence. You can't actually visit that person in real life, because that would shatter the images they carefully curated online. Their house looks nothing like they described it. It's barely habitable. Their dogs don't live the premium lives they describe repeatedly online and use old, highly cropped pictures to justify as proof. The person is not actually married. There is no significant other. They have a minimum wage job, a vehicle that barely gets them to that job, and that is how they will live for the indefinite future. In the highly unlikely event that you see that person at a dog show, you wouldn't recognize them. They probably won't talk to you and will pretend they never corresponded with you. They will go out of their way to avoid you, because they spend so much time curating their online identity that there are no hours left in the day for actual real life improvement. Their yard is overgrown, strewn with garbage and their neighbors know little or nothing about them.

I hate to sound dated, but back in the days of AOL, people went out of their way to meet in real life and continue the conversations they started online. I am still part of an Iowa Gardeners group formed in 2007 that met regularly for dinner to catch up. We used to have to reserve multiple tables at restaurants and had so much fun that nearby customers often complained about how loud our group was. We visited each others' gardens, traded plants, and had potlucks several times a year. That was before covid-19 started, and the pandemic drove more people to create artificial online worlds for themselves.

History is starting to repeat itself. People like me use social media far less than they used to when the platforms were newer and better regulated. I started this website a few months ago so that I could have an independent creative outlet and blog. I pay a yearly fee for the privilege and I am glad to do so. There are no advertisements on my website. There is no click bait and I can't be blocked or banned. Everything I post on my website can be accounted for. I have a real farm, a real husband, real dogs, real geese, real flowers in my real gardens. Everything I post about is based on real life experiences outside of the internet, not vice versa. I am glad to see that younger generations don't use social media like my generation does. College aged people these days might have a profile but it's invariably to keep in touch with their parents and people in the 35+ year category who remember when Facebook was new.