A warning to anyone jumping over to Threads: I spent a significant amount of money and time building a sizable Facebook page for my old site The Daily Banter. We had over 40,000 highly engaged followers, including some pretty well known media people who would regularly share our work (Bill Maher, Rachel Maddow to name a few). We also worked with other pages with hundreds of thousands of followers, and made a good chunk of change from Facebook mobile ads.

We spent years trying to combat disinformation, particularly on Facebook where much of the Russian content farms did their damage. Then Facebook reduced our reach by 90%, then slashed our ad revenue in half. This destroyed our business. I could pay my staff, but not myself. I lasted about a year doing that, and then had to fold. I got no explanation from Facebook. No point of contact, no way of resolving anything. Just some bullshit reply from Adam Mosseri, the then Facebook News Feed boss, on Twitter saying “you should have only seen a 25 percent decline”.

This is why I will never, ever trust Facebook/Meta or whatever social media spinoff Zuckerberg creates. It is a fundamentally dishonest, horrible company that harvests your data and sells it off for huge amounts of money. You own nothing on their sites. Not your data, not your followers, or even their contact info. They can, and will pull the rug from under you for no reason at all.

I get social media companies cracking down on hate speech, disinformation etc, but we did not engage in any of that. And still we got crucified.