Yukon Whorenelius

In 2014, Facebook put in place the Real Names policy. Many of my friends were banned for using their trans names, drag names, leather names. The names their community knew them by. They said they were going to fix it, but four years later, I *still* have friends being suspended.

Facebook & IG's moderation policies have become aggressively conservative in the last couple years, as @PupAmp has chronicled. You can be suspended for using the peach emoji. For calling yourself--a gay person--"faggot". For nudity, even with genitals and nipples covered.

Instagram's content restrictions and aggressive enforcement means that many of us gays have a chain of alts, and are used to jumping from account to account as our mains are deleted or suspended. Our tights are too tight. The butt angle a little too direct. We skirt the edge.

When I brought this up at a party last week, almost everyone in the room had a suspension story. It's just a fact of life that every few months to years, you're going to be cut off from a good chunk of your friends and extended circle; perhaps lose your history permanently.

There's something here about how enforcement-on-report allows for suspensions to be weaponized against us when we piss someone off. I was suspended immediately after calling a white supremacist "horny". Who knows if that was what it took. Anyway, some other time.

This is a shitty way to live. I'm tired of having the word "queer" push your tweet into the "potentially offensive" hidden realm. I'm tired of having our accounts banned from appearing in searches or autocomplete. I'm tired of losing my sole means of connection with many friends.

And I think it's going to get worse, for those of us out here on the edge. Tumblr's dead. Facebook and IG are write-offs at this point. Twitter's been the last platform where I felt like I had a decent shot at this kind of expression--and even here, I censored myself constantly.

But here's the agony for me: the communities we built on these platforms were *good*. So many of my friends are here. All I gotta do to keep in contact is... be less gay. Don't show S/M. Don't show skin. Careful of that "repeated violations" clause, cuz it might get ya.