Goodbye Meta!

So a week and a half ago I was kicked out of my Facebook account and all of other associated pages as well as all my accounts on Instagram and Thread as they were one way or another linked to the main Facebook account. All the 7 accounts across different platforms were all disabled. Without warning, without explanation, without specification. And I didn’t even have the chance to appeal. All this happened on one Friday morning and I only found it out in the afternoon when trying to go through some artists’ pages I was following that I couldn’t log on any more. I gazed at the automated, generic emails from Meta announcing triumphantly that they had found my account violated some regulations without telling me exactly what it was, that they had reviewed the case and now I no longer had the right to demand another review on the decision.

It was an act of violence that stunned me a little. It still stings to this day. Because not only did I lose a 20-year-old account that had connected me with all my main circles of family and friends but also to everyone that I admire and was following as well as people that have been supporting my life as a human being and as an artist. All my data, writings, photos, videos, and documentation through almost 2 decades. All the efforts to build my business and personal interests for the last 5 years have also gone in a blink of an eye. It is not so uncommon, though. Here and there I’ve heard similar stories about people losing their accounts but I thought it must only happen to big stars and not small accounts like mine. Boy how wrong I was! But what put me in rage was how cold and humanless the whole affair was because surely it has been processed by the machine and not a real human being, for the fact that I didn’t start the review process that I had 240 days to do as they had announced in their first email yet it was somehow carried out automatically by Meta itself.

At the same time, deep down inside, my heart let out a sigh of relief. I haven’t been posting or keeping up to date with people I know as regularly as before. And together with Instagram, Facebook has become obsolete, micro-agressive and sometimes plainly annoying with all the posts from unknown people and constant ads that it feeds the users ceaselessly. A social media platform that is no longer social, it has stopped serving its original purpose of connecting people you want to keep in touch with, and unfortunately has become an advertising machine that I have always wanted to distant myself from for quite some time. Had it not been for my family and friends, I might have abandoned it completely. And now it actually gave me a good reason to stay away.

So all this long rant is just to mark an end of my relationship with Meta. The bitter truth is that I have no control whatsoever with the crops that I grow on someone else’s land, while being fed with useless, toxic junk food. From now on, at least for a while while I’m figuring out what to do next, I’ll be posting regularly on my own ‘property’ – this website. I’m returning to a longer, deeper blogging dotted with small updates of my artist’s journey. Here, my writing, painting and photos are all mine. Noone can take them away from me without my permission. So if you ‘re reading this because I was nowhere else to be found, please keep in touch. This is my garden of good thoughts and beautiful paintings.