My friend, the author Bruce Joffe, is in Facebook prison.

The phrase still sounds faintly comic, like somewhere your aunt gets sent for posting too many Minion memes. But the joke is wearing thin.

Bruce was given no real reason for his suspension. He is a sharp critic of Donald Trump, and that may be relevant, or it may not. I cannot prove the connection, which is part of the point. The punishment arrives without a charge sheet. The cell door closes, a vague message appears, and the accused is left to interpret a sentence that nobody is willing to explain.

He is an intelligent and well-educated man, not the sort to post anything profane or slanderous or beyond the normal range of civilised argument. He has opinions. If having opinions is now a punishable offence, we are further down the road than most people care to admit.

He is not the first friend of mine to vanish from Facebook for "free speech." I put the phrase in quotation marks because free speech, in the platform age, has become a peculiar creature. It is not quite dead, but it has been throttled, demonetised, risk-scored and occasionally locked in a cupboard for its own safety.

The old argument about censorship was simple. The state must not silence you. The villain was a man with a red pencil and a stamp marked FORBIDDEN. That is not how censorship mostly looks now. Now it looks like a grey button that says "your account has been restricted." It looks like a comment that never appears. A post that reaches twelve people instead of twelve thousand. A video that is technically online, but somehow nobody sees it. A moderation decision made by a machine, reviewed by another machine, appealed through a form, and rejected by a paragraph of corporate blancmange.

This matters because Facebook is not a private noticeboard. Nor is X, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, or any of the other big platforms. They are where public conversation now happens. To be ejected from them is not the same as being asked to leave a pub. It is closer to being told that the public square is privately owned, the guards are automated, the rules are secret, and no, you may not speak to the manager.

Meta does publish documentation about account restrictions and enforcement actions, but the lived experience is more opaque than the official language suggests. The framework exists. The person on the receiving end still feels as if they have been judged by a machine that will not show its workings.

I have noticed the same thing in newspaper comment sections. Years of prodding, testing and rephrasing have taught me that certain viewpoints will not survive moderation. Sometimes the forbidden zone is obvious. Sometimes it is not. During an election it seems to close in. Regular commenters on the major papers' sites learn the dance: use initials, use codenames, avoid naming certain people or countries outright, speak in riddles so the moderation goblin does not wake. A democracy in which citizens are trained to disguise ordinary political speech as a crossword clue is not really a democracy. If you cannot say what you mean, in plain language, about the people who govern you, then the vote becomes a ceremonial trinket.

Then there is surveillance. Being watched used to require effort. Someone had to follow you, open your letters, tap your phone, stand outside a meeting hall. Surveillance was expensive and had natural limits. Now we carry the watchtower in our pockets. Our phones know where we sleep, where we work, who we meet, which doctor we see, which protest we walked past. Cameras watch the streets. Doorbells watch the pavements. Cars record the road. Apps demand permissions for everything.

We are told this is convenience and safety. We are told that if we have done nothing wrong, we have nothing to fear. That argument is childish. I have done nothing wrong with my bank card, but I am not in the habit of publishing the number on a billboard. Privacy is not the hiding place of criminals. It is where ordinary thought is allowed to develop before it has to defend itself in public. Without it, dissent becomes dangerous and journalism weakens. People begin to pre-edit themselves. They learn to lower their voices, and that is the deeper damage. Surveillance does not only record behaviour. It changes it.

In Britain, the Online Safety Act has pushed the internet further towards age checks and identity systems. Ofcom's guidance required strong age verification for sites with pornographic material from late July 2025, and the regulatory direction is towards more "highly effective age assurance" across online services generally. Supporters call it child protection. Critics worry it is the plumbing for something larger: a world in which access to information depends on proving who you are.

Children should be protected. Of course they should. But "protect the children" has always been one of power's favourite cloaks. It is warm, respectable and difficult to argue against. The question is not whether children matter, but whether the proposed cure quietly installs a permanent identity checkpoint at the front door of the internet. No ID, no entry. That is not an open society. It is a velvet rope with a database behind it. And databases leak. They get copied, sold, subpoenaed, hacked, and quietly merged with other databases. Information collected for one reason has a habit of finding another. Today age verification. Tomorrow fraud prevention. Then extremism. Then misinformation. Then whatever phrase happens to be in fashion when the next frightened committee wants more control.

We should be especially wary of systems that make anonymity look suspicious. Anonymity is not always noble, but it is often necessary. Whistleblowers need it. Abused spouses need it. Dissidents need it. Sometimes anonymity is not cowardice but armour.

Then there is money. This, I think, is the real frontier, not space, whatever the men with rockets would prefer to believe. For thousands of years humans have had some form of personal economic freedom. Never perfect, often brutally unequal, but usually some way to transact outside the immediate gaze of authority. Coins in a hand, notes in a pocket, a tenner slipped to a nephew, cash for a second-hand guitar, a few euros for vegetables at a market stall. Civilisation is built from small freedoms the way a wall is built from bricks.

Cash is imperfect. So are language, kitchens, cars and shoes. The fact that criminals also use something has never been a serious argument for taking it away from everyone else.

Yet the direction of travel is clear. More payments are digital. More banks close branches. More shops prefer cards. More governments are studying central bank digital currencies, while assuring us that privacy will be preserved. The Bank for International Settlements describes central banks as exploring CBDCs for public-good objectives, with privacy and design questions still live rather than settled. I do not claim every digital money project is a Bond villain stroking a cat. Some proposals include offline payments and privacy-preserving mechanisms. Some central bankers genuinely understand the danger. But the architecture matters more than the brochure.

Cash allows a transaction to end. Digital money may allow a transaction to live forever. It can be stored, searched, blocked, reversed, taxed, frozen or made conditional. It can reveal where you went, what you bought, who you supported, what you read, and which mistake you made. A cashless society is not just one without notes and coins. It is one in which permission can become part of payment.

Imagine a future government deciding that certain purchases are unhealthy, suspicious, extremist or simply inconvenient. A protest movement finding its donations throttled. An unpopular writer discovering that payment processors have become nervous. A campaign, a union, a church, a troublesome blog, quietly starved by compliance. You do not need jackboots when you have payment rails. You do not need to burn books when you can make distribution difficult, visibility uncertain and financial support unreliable.

That is why Bruce's Facebook prison matters. Not because his suspension is the end of civilisation; he will survive it. It matters because it is one small visible tile in a larger mosaic. Speech controlled by platforms. Comments filtered by newspapers. Phones tracking movement. Identity checks creeping in. Money drifting towards full traceability. Companies performing public functions, governments leaning on platforms, platforms leaning on users, and citizens learning to speak in code. The room is shrinking.

The cleverness of it is that most of this is sold to us as freedom. Free markets, free platforms, free apps. Free speech, provided it complies. Free expression, provided it is safe. Free money, provided it is traceable. Free society, provided nobody important is made uncomfortable. We should not accept the bargain. Freedom is the ability to think privately, speak plainly, spend lawfully, read quietly, assemble peacefully, argue honestly and live without being continuously measured by systems we cannot see. We are not losing it in some grand bonfire of banned books. We are losing it by login screen, moderation queue, compliance notice, algorithmic nudge, unexplained suspension and cashless convenience. The cage is not iron. It is terms and conditions.

 

One of the things I've noticed since I gave up the booze (in May 2024) is that I'm an exceptionally judgemental person. I don't know where I get it from as my parents were really easy-going, tolerant folk. Not me. Hardly an hour goes by where I don't find something to moan and groan about. I thought perhaps I was just experiencing the common cognitive bias which psychologists call the 'fundamental attribution error'. That's the one where, for example, while driving you think that everyone going slower than you is an idiot, yet everyone going faster than you is a lunatic. It's a fallacy because we make assumptions about the other drivers without considering the reasons they might be proceeding at a different speed - a wedding cake on the back seat or ferrying a heart-attack victim on the way to hospital, etc. However, I don't think that applies in my case. I think the world really is a crazy place full of crazy people doing really dumb things!

So here are just a few of my pet peeves - the things that are currently making the veins in my temple throb. See if any of them chime with you.

1. Foreshadowing pre-roll on YouTube videos.

We used to see "COMING UP..." a lot at the start of American TV shows, but in the last couple of years it has been creeping into low budget videos on YouTube and social media. I even saw it on a two-minute YouTube short. I watched an interview recently which was about an hour long, and about every ten minutes I heard the punch line of gags that I'd already heard in the pre-roll. I normally skip these things if the author has been thoughtful enough to include a bookmark to where the content really starts. If not, I sometimes get impatient and randomly skip forward so I'm probably missing some of the action but it's worth it not to have my brain cells assaulted by repeated information. In one five minute video I saw so much pre-roll I swear it took up half the video. Does anybody 'like' having to endure pre-roll? I have a sneaking suspicion it's really only there because some media studies teacher came up with the idea because their course was a bit thin on content, then every student takes it as gospel rather than questioning its actual value. Its real value to me is that I have unsubscribed from channels that are big on pre-roll. Stop this nonsense now!

2. Intentionally wobbly camera work.

This has been around for a long time, and there is a time and a place for it, but in 2025 folk are still doing it for no good reason. I was watching an episode of a show called The Mentalist, which admittedly is ten years old, but the camera was wobbling so much it made me feel seasick. There is a case for doing this in action scenes but the fly-on-the-wall documentary style is long gone. Get over it. The technique is also extremely bad for streaming since the constantly moving background is much harder for the algorithm to compress the video stream, so if you see this malarkey on Netflix, someone needs to get a sternly worded memo.

3. My Android Phone's Interface.

Christ on a bike, I could write a book about what's wrong with the mobile phone market, but I'll confine myself for the purposes of this blog to the recent 'One UI' update on my Samsung A25. For some reason, they moved the audio player controls to the bottom, so now it is next to impossible to hold the phone steady while reaching down to change tracks with my thumb. To change tracks safely without dropping the thing I need to engage my other hand. One-handed people must be up in arm about this. I wrote to Android to complain but of course nothing will happen. Our feelings as customers have very little importance in the grand scheme of things compared to the whims of some self-satisfied graphic artist and the corporate bod who commissioned him to make the interface look snazzy!

4. Cuisine

The very word cuisine itches my scrote, being French (pretentious moi?) yet originally coming from the vulgar Latin word for kitchen. Cuisine is used when a TV show or a Sunday magazine supplement is going to wax lyrical about regional food that is a fancy dress version of what folk really eat there. I was triggered while watching episode six of Searching for Spain with Eva Longoria. I generally feel obliged to watch shows like this about Spain since I live here. This series is OK but tends to skip around the regions focusing on their unique 'cuisine' - gnashes teeth. In the episode in question, the house special was four slivers of fried fish served on a log, "inspired by my grandma's recipe". What happened to plates? Was nanna a lumberjack? Why the compulsion to serve tiny portions of food on roofing slates or Citroen hubcaps? For the love of Grok, give me some decent grub on a dinner plate!

5. Facebook's disappearing posts

Social media suffers from so many ills, I almost feel bad for singling out Facebook, but this one yanks my chain on a daily basis. Often I'll want to add my 10 cents to a post by making a witty, well-observed comment. However, so as not to appear a complete knob, I normally want to fact-check what I'm going to say and open a second browser tab to make my enquiries. Then, certain of my facts, I return to Facebook to fashion my killer invective, only to find the original post has gone. Facebook refreshed the page and the post has disappeared, never to be seen again. Sometimes I've spent half an hour researching, planning my comment, only to be unable to write it! No wonder people are giving up on social media!

6. Open soda bottles

This hints that I might have OCD issues, but on occasion I'll be watching a film or TV show and a character will pour some cola from a big two-litre bottle and not put the top back on. That's it for me. I've lost all interest in character and plot. The only thing that matters in my life at that point is that I'm watching a fizzy drink go flat before my eyes. Art imitates life - do people do this? Do they not know every second counts with fizz? There should be a law against things in media that are this triggering. I lose sleep thinking about it!

7. Modern day slavery

I've covered this in previous blogs, but the gist is, businesses keep getting us to work for them for free while they enjoy the profits. That's why I don't wear merch - why should I turn myself into an advertising hoarding? I've mentioned in previous blogs how online banking and sorting recycling are sneaky ways in which we're made to work for free, so other people can make a buck. I only recently realised that supermarkets are another example of this. In the 1965 thriller The Ipcress File, Michael Caine and Guy Doleman are pushing trollys down the aisle in the supermarket and Doleman's character says something like "I can't abide these new American shopping methods". He's a man after my own heart. We think nothing of it today, but before supermarkets existed, one would have gone to the butcher's or the grocer's and they would have served the goods to you, instead of you being the 'picker' pushing the trolley around. Elon Musk recently tweeted we're all going to be living lives of leisure while our personalised robots do all this sort of thing for us. He also wants to sell us a bridge.

8. Bullying

I got a distaste for bullying at school. Though I wasn't a huge victim of it (apart from always being chosen as the goalkeeper) I saw how it affected other kids and it stayed with me. Even today I really hate to see it, and unfortunately there's a lot of it about in 2025, much of it emanating from that guy in the White House. 

Trump's threat to sue the BBC is only the latest in a succession of heavy-handed attacks he's made on media outlets and universities for the crime of disagreeing with him. What really grinds my gears is that with all his swagger and overbearing bluster, he clearly thinks bullying is "projecting strength". While I'm no expert on strong men, I strongly suspect they don't have to keep telling you how strong they are. I'm pretty sure previous presidents used their position to apply leverage, but did so without the self-fêting fanfare that would have made them look like a dick.

9. Streaming

I know I'm on solid ground here, as social media has been full of posts recently where folk have been cancelling Spotify, Netflix and my personal pet hate, Amazon Prime. It was on Prime Video that I was watching The Mentalist mentioned above. As I worked my way through each series (which is a great show BTW), I swear to Grok that the number and frequency of adverts sneakily increased. Maybe it's because I'm British and grew up with uninterrupted viewing on the Beeb, but I find this sort of caper very distasteful, especially since I'd forked out my hard-earned cash for an annual subscription. Why in the name of Lord Reith, do they think it's OK to charge a subscription fee and show advertisements at the same time? So I'm done with Prime - still have several months left but I won't be watching any more videos on there thank you very much. 

10. Privacy

Last on the list (I kept it to 10 - it could have been a lot longer) is privacy, and I felt compelled to add this in reaction to the proposed UK digital ID card. I've read a lot of reaction to this on social media and a common misunderstanding is that folk ignore the digital bit altogether. They say things like, "other countries have ID cards and they're OK" or "I have a driving license and a passport, what difference does an ID card make".

Well, quite a lot actually. Your passport doesn't send an update at three in the morning telling half the government, three contractors and a bloke in IT called Kevin that you went to Wetherspoons twice this week and bought some cold & flu tablets and a pregnancy testing kit. In fact, few countries do have truly digital biometric identification, and the consequences of having one are potentially very serious. 

We're stumbling into an Orwellian future that makes the movie Enemy of The State look like a cosy Sunday evening drama where the worst thing that happens is someone loses a dog. At least in the movie you could disappear by throwing away your beeper. With the proposed digital ID, we move another step closer to Big Brother knowing everything about you. Now I don't have any brothers, never mind a big one, but I reckon there are some things it's best that your brother doesn't know. 

I'll leave it at ten moans for now. How do these grab you? Is it just me, or do you have a similar list of gripes? I'm already getting ideas for a part two of this blog!