Dear Mr. Zuckerberg,

Last Thursday, I awoke to find that our health and wellness website, OrganicAuthority.com, was blocked from Facebook without warning or notice about whatever rule it is we violated. It was almost as if our website never existed. Not a single trace of the site could be found. Our Facebook page was whittled down to images we’d posted without links to our site, and the content of other sites we’d shared.

Like any tech-savvy company, we checked from other browsers. Our smart phones. We waited in hopes that it was just an infamous Facebook “glitch.” But the waiting was in vain as the hours ticked by and still no change. We had vanished from Facebook.

As a web-only magazine, Facebook is our lifeblood–a direct contact to many of our readers. We’ve been on the platform for well over six years now and we strive to follow your policies, play fair, and be a good corporate Facebook citizen. We spend money every single month on ads to extend our reach and drive engagement in what we think helps to build a better community. We invest in creating high-quality content month after month to support and nurture our ever-expanding Facebook community.  

Like many other small businesses, we supported you in your early days, when big brands and media laughed at you. While we’re by no means the biggest site on the platform, we take pride in knowing that even our tiny drop in the bucket helped build your brand. We send our audience to your platform daily to not only help build Facebook, but to also make the world a more connected and inspired place. When our content goes viral on Facebook, we know we’re making a difference in countless lives.

We’ve adapted to the ever-changing Facebook policies and algorithms  that you claim improve the quality of the content and the overall Facebook experience for both brands and the communities they target. But yet, you don’t seem to return the love to those who help to build your platform. You respond by reducing organic reach year after year. You routinely suppress trending news stories you don’t support, and then, you shut sites down, too. Without warning.

You shut down Maria Kang, an obsessed fitness mom-of-three, for expressing her voice on the current state of obesity in America, deemed it hate speech, and blocked her access to Facebook. And now you’ve done it to us (and who knows how many more).

In fact, you’re becoming rather infamous for your censorship. You don’t seem to like photos of plus-sized women on Facebook (or Instagram), you’ve routinely taken them down, too. You have a long history of censoring breastfeeding mothers. And what about sex education? You don’t seem to support that either. You’ve even censored Matt Orfalea’s video of PBS censoring Green Candidate Dr. Jill Stein’s criticism of Hillary Clinton, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and Obamacare. The list goes on of who and what you’ve censored, including journalists, artists, LGBTQ groups, and more.   

Yes, Facebook, for some reason you’ve blocked our small health and wellness website, OrganicAuthority.com, from posting delicious recipes made from scratch, DIY home and garden, content, nutrition, wellness and fitness tips, and important food and environmental news that help to create a safer food system and environment for everyone. Even you, Mr. Zuckerberg.

And not only are we very sad, our fans our sad. In fact, it was our fans that alerted us to the problem. Here’s what some of them had to say:   

Earlier this year, I was thrilled when you assigned us a Facebook account manager for our ads. It helped us boost our reach and best utilize your platform. But then, you took him away, too.

When we discovered our site was blocked, our former account manager kindly referred me to this page: http://www.facebook.com/business/resources, where we used to be  able to chat with live help, but then you took that service away, too. Now, in order to get help, it is nearly impossible! I have to dig through page after page to find out where I can contact someone–anyone!– at Facebook to get help. I’ve submitted several requests including an appeal via this page and other avenues, but I haven’t heard a peep since our site was banned some time last Wednesday evening or early Thursday morning. I even posted a question to your Facebook business page. Still no response.

It’s sad that a company as big as Facebook– and so critical to moving us into the technological age–doesn’t value it’s paying customers. We thought we were in this together.

How can you be an Internet company focused on communication and community-building without a clear communication system for your paying customers? May I suggest you take a page out of Zappos’ book on how to deliver a world class customer experience?

I can only assume that if we were BuzzFeed or another large brand, this would not have happened without warning or explanation; there would be some sort of recourse. Not giving a paying customer, no matter how small,  the courtesy of an explanation, or a chance to correct any error we may have made, is downright mean, and dare I say  UnAmerican. These tactics are arrogant. They stink like the behavior of a bully. The behavior assumes that you, Facebook, are 100 percent correct in your decision to block our site, in what was most likely a technical error. I’ve experienced this before, having ads rejected only to be told by a Facebook customer service rep that the system made a mistake, “that shouldn’t happen.”

As two digital companies living in the technology age we all need one another to thrive and survive. In fact, the digital landscape thrives on collaboration and connections. You couldn’t survive without your billions of users or the brands that spend billions of dollars to advertise. Can’t we at least have a more humane system of flagging content or sites before just hitting the delete button?

Blocking us could have a chilling effect; it certainly affects our bottom line. We are a small, self-funded and boot-strapped independent publisher that isn’t backed by big VC dollars like many other sites in today’s market. We bring a unique, independent voice that’s helping change our food system and empowering your users to take control of their health and feel good about doing it.

We invest in Facebook to help drive traffic to our website, drive revenue, and create jobs. This type of loss in traffic could very well force us to have to let people go. Inaction on your part and an absent path to recourse will affect more than our brand, it will affect people’s lives.

But banning us not only hurts our brand, it’s hurting your brand, too. Users are losing trust in Facebook, calling this blatant censorship and a violation of our First Amendment rights.

We posted a note to our fan page letting our followers know what’s happened and here’s what some of them have to say:

To see all of the comments go to our Facebook page and click on the post published Friday August 26th at 11:25 am PST,  (an aptly sad emoji with a tear). There are even more comments on our second post from Sunday August 28th at 3:33pm (also the sad emoji, because this is sad!).

Facebook, this sucks. We’re hopeful that your system once again made an error and this isn’t a draconian slight to small publishers and businesses. We admit it, we need you. And we sure hope you realize you need us, too.

In Good Health,

Laura Klein

P.S. If you are reading this on EcoSalon, our sister site of OrganicAuthority.com, it’s because I posted a copy of this letter here so it can be shared on Facebook with our fans. 

The post An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, Inc.: In Defense of Our First Amendment Rights appeared first on EcoSalon.

Even when the writer isn’t Mark Twain, changing someone’s words is tricky business. I’ve always said the best editors are the ones who are so subtle that you can’t tell what they change in your copy, and yet your piece is better. So, when considering the new version of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” that eliminates the prodigious use of the “n-word” throughout the novel, there are two big problems out of the gate: One, if we can agree that Twain is an American literary treasure, it’s probably no one’s business to give his work what’s referred to as a “heavy edit.” And two, the man’s dead. Game over. If he’s not part of the discussion (and he’d want to be), it’s cheating to have it.

That said, Twain and his work are part of our nation’s living culture (the story was even covered by Entertainment Weekly) and there are bigger issues at play here than simple editing ethics. One is straight-up censorship. The other is laziness regarding our relationship with young adults – the target group for the two options being offered here: The reworking of Twain’s text for “innocent eyes” or kicking the book upstairs to only be taught at the college level (proposed by Lorrie Moore last weekend in her NYT op-ed, “Send Huck Finn to College”).  Both impulses are well-meaning, but are wrongheaded disservices to our youth and ourselves.

Regarding censorship, taking shots at book banning is easy when the would-be banners are reactionary thugs concerned with thought-policing our culture by ensuring that so called subversive reads (from “Catcher in the Rye,” to “Lolita,” to “The Communist Manifesto”) remain unavailable. Taking on attacks by science deniers and bible thumpers that would cut us off access to scientific facts is also a no-brainer bailiwick for anti-censorship types. (A friend who works in publishing recently showed me an excerpt from a faith-based children’s science textbook used for Darwin-free schooling. Oh dear.)

But it’s a lot more difficult when attempts at information control come from those concerned with issues having to do civil rights, be they about race or sex. (I’m recalling now a professor who once hurled a copy of Homer’s “Odyssey” across a college freshman classroom, symbolically excommunicating it from the canon because of its hideous maleness. This same person later refused to be a reader on my thesis on Kerouac. Doing so would be playing a role in legitimizing what she said was his texts’ misogyny.) The “Huck Finn” controversy is a tough one, to be sure. I cringe when I read the n-word in the novel today as an adult, just as I did when I was young. Likewise, as a Jew, Ernest Hemingway’s great “The Sun Also Rises” has always provoked winces at certain ugliness. I do understand the instinct to get the word out of the classroom.  (The term “injun,” it should be noted, is also dispensed with in the new edition.)

But I turn to Katie, the teen liaison at the local library who’s completing her master’s degree in library science with a focus on Young Adults. Katie’s an old-school liberal, feminist, anti-sexism and anti-racism, solid citizen of the best sort. Here’s an excerpt from a paper she recently wrote about a decision she made that she thought was best for young girls:

“I recalled my decision to remove a popular magazine, Seventeen, from [the local library’s] Young Adult collection and replace it with another publication. As I made that decision, I was aware that I was wielding control in an undemocratic way, but I didn’t see my actions as “censorship.”… I was in denial about my act of censorship because I thought I was right. … [But] It didn’t matter that I had a litany of ‘good’ reasons for wanting the magazine removed – I was putting my personal opinion ahead of patrons’ wants and needs. That prioritization is never acceptable and is in direct conflict with my personal philosophy of affording information access. … I saw how, on a practical level, I must be ready to defend access to material I personally find abhorrent. This is my duty as a librarian and a youth advocate.”

This is the type of (sometimes counterintuitive) vigilance we must display to make sure high school students have access to work that, like “Huck Finn,” some of us might find distasteful. I know we’re talking about curriculum here and not a teen magazine – but we’re also not talking about Nazi propaganda. Keep in mind young adults’ access to material is consistently under attack and it is specifically here that we need be on guard to defend our rights to information. Most efforts to ban books are focused on this part of the society’s population under the guise of protecting innocence.

The second option, being floated by Moore and others, is that we suspend teaching the book until college and adulthood. “The remedy,” she says, “is to refuse to teach this novel in high school and to wait until college – or even graduate school – where it can be put in proper context.”

Refuse? This is an example of the laziness of our approach not only to engaging and teaching this age group, but also to understanding and respecting their cognitive sophistication, and to owning up to the sometimes uncomfortable world in which they live and form opinions. Until graduate school? What does that say about ourselves as adults and our ability to think and learn?

No one would advocate handing material on complex subject matter to young students without teaching it. Try this on: Material regarding safe sex has unsettling terms and concepts that teenagers can’t “get” on their own. Best not to teach it. Doing so might create a (gasp!) uncomfortable classroom situation. Come on, people. Our job is to teach our children – to offer them context. This is not always a comfortable task – for them or us. In this case, we’re talking about our nation’s legacy of slavery, racism, judgment and hatred. The notion that high school kids aren’t ready for important subject matter is really an indictment of our own lack of creativity, if not indifference. And for those teachers who are (so unfortunately) intimidated by these ideas, there are myriad aides especially designed to teach this book and the controversies it elicits. Go ahead, type it in: “Twain Finn Teaching Controversy Lesson Plans.” A child can do it.

As parents and teachers, we do have to make some choices about material that is and isn’t appropriate to teach young people. No one’s saying that “Tropic of Cancer” or “Lolita” should be part of standard high-school curriculum. But these books are not “Huck Finn,” and regardless, if kids are reading them, we best should be ready to teach them. Tossing them under the rug and saying “see you in college” is simply irresponsible.

If we want our kids to grow up to be conscious adults, we have to teach consciousness in dynamic and intelligent ways. We can reopen the arguments around what Twain was trying to accomplish in his great work, why he chose the terms he did and his possible motivations (good or bad) behind their use. But I’m going to leave that to the thousands of teachers who have successfully taught the book and the millions of high school students who have read it, were taught it and learned great lessons about our culture and compassion from Twain’s masterpiece.

Image: khrawlings

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