Filling a hole in my ‘End of Year Thoughts’ Series

Facebook Jail — Repeat Offender

I’ve made it a practice to offer my thoughts about the state of the nation every year for the last decade save one. Links to all of them are listed below. The missing year is 2019. For a long time I thought I had simply misplaced it. Not so. Last week I decided to do a search at Facebook for December of that year and see what I was writing about. Here’s what I found: a battle royal against the censors of Facebook that kept me too busy to do as I had done in years previous. Viewed in aggregate, however, the posts from that time do amount to ‘End of Year Thoughts.’ I had been taking time off off from Instapunk Returns since May in order to focus on the swirling issues of the 2020 re-election campaign. Most of my writing time was spent on Facebook, whee I was running into constant censorship issues, including nonsensical penalties imposed by FB fact-checkers. They were almost always clearly wrong, demonstrably from the actual,posts they were objecting to. But there was no chance of a successful appeal from their rulings. Research I’d done suggested they had actually paid USA Today staffers to roam targeted pages and suppress them for violations of “Community Standards.” I even posted about that at one point…


Then, in late December of 2019, all hell started breaking loose. I was working on the End of Year question, FB-style, when things got ugly. Take a look and see what you think…












































And so I was silenced before I could produce the summary posts I was working up to. 

You can find all the other years here by doing keyword searches for ‘EOY,’ ‘Year End’, and ‘End of Year’ for individual years. Some have more than one part. The latest is my longest and probably most in-depth ever: “Year End Thoughts for 2025 — The Big Picture Stuff”.

So. I’m still here. Our story thus far…



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