Another Important Announcement

This one is for the Facebook folks

I fear my days on Facebook may be numbered, not because I want that to happen. Rather, it seems the platform is vexed with me, and is threatening to delete my page. It could happen at any time, which is why I beseech you, if you enjoy my Sweary History stories, please get a FREE subscription:

There is also an app if you hate email.

I’ve run the page since 2011 and have over 300,000 followers. Years ago, there were a few incidents where I misbehaved and was put in Facebook jail, but the longest was a week, and I’ve had a clean record for over two years. In the last month, however, I’ve received some disturbing warnings from the platform. Of course, even though I’ve paid thousands to advertise on Facebook, there is no one I can actually talk to in order to set shit straight. It’s all automated, and from what I’ve heard from my marketing person, the technical problems at Facebook run deep, and a lot of the people who work there don’t give a fuck about fixing these issues because morale is in the subbasement.

A month ago, I got a warning on my personal Facebook account that I couldn’t send Facebook messages for 24 hours because I’d violated their terms due to a message sent using my business page. Okay. Seems weird that they’d punish my personal page for a message sent via my business page, but whatever. I looked, and it said my business page was at risk of deletion because of complaints about messages sent from it.

For years I had an automated message that you can see below, complete with a troll whom the message was designed for.

I expect that some people complained about the “fuck you” part, and the Facebook AI listened. Side note: Kinda hilarious that she love reacted it.

Anyway, worrying over my page, I decided to shut down messaging completely rather than change the automated message. A couple of days ago I got a second warning from Facebook. This time, I can’t message from my personal page for three days, again because of a message sent from my business page, even though messaging has been shut down for a month. Again, Facebook is warning that my page is at risk of deletion, and there is no way to complain or state my case or anything. There is no button to appeal or any of that shit.

That automated message went out to several thousand people over the years. If enough complaints are in the system and finally getting processed, it could go poof at any moment. And if that happens and you don’t subscribe to this here Substack, you’ll likely never hear from me again. No more free Sweary History for you. Sad face.

So, again, I ask you to pretty fucking please subscribe. I shall repeat that most of what I post is free. The paid stuff is more personal stories. Free or paid, I want you to join almost 40,000 other subscribers.

I think social media is slowly dying. In an earlier post I explained that Facebook killed the reach of business pages to drive advertising revenue, and that it worked. Quality content by talented creators has been replaced on your feed with AI generated dog vomit clickbait that is paid for. Coming from a former Facebook junky who struggled to limit my time on the platform, it’s been easy to cut back because most of what I see there now is content farm garbage written by the latest plagiarism software.

But when you subscribe, you get my stuff sent directly to you and you never miss a post, like yesterday’s post about the Radical Dr. Vera Peters, a badass pioneering cancer doctor who faced down a bunch of misogynistic fuckgiraffes to greatly advance women’s health. You had less than a 2% chance of seeing that story if you relied on fucking Facebook to show it to you; it reached fewer than 5,000 of my over 300,000 Facebook followers. So please avoid the algorithmic fuckery and do the subscribing thing:

Again, if you hate email, don’t forget about the app:

And please tell your friends by sharing this post:

Since I paid for you to see this, I might as well double dip on that payment and ask you to buy my book ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.