The irony? Today's harshest censor doesn't wear a uniform but a hoodie, and doesn't sit in some shadowy government building but on a California campus.
Meta — this corporation that's supposedly "connecting" us all — has massively ramped up its crusade against anything that even remotely resembles bare skin over the past few months. Even my book cover was declared an enemy of the state. Mind you: a cover that was already censored. I had deliberately designed it to comply with their guidelines so that buyers could post it later without unknowingly falling into the ban trap.
But Meta still deemed my cover to be "sexually stimulating." Retroactively, all my posts were deleted — posts that had been sitting online completely unbothered for months. Suddenly, warnings for ancient content came raining down on me, as if someone had snuck into my profile at night and hidden pornography there.
As an individual, as a photographer with barely 7,000 Facebook followers, I thought: "Tough luck, Simon. David versus Goliath usually doesn't end well for David." But then something remarkable happened.
Meta banned Playboy Germany.
Let that sink. 1.9 million followers. Gone. Just like that. Without warning, without explanation, without even attempting communication. Editor-in-chief Florian Boitin puts it perfectly: Even when they asked, no one at Meta Germany would or could give reasons.
Now you might object: "It's just Facebook. There are other platforms." True. Just like there would be other newspapers if you banned the biggest one. Or other TV channels if you shut down the most-watched one.
It becomes particularly absurd when you consider that Playboy has been sold at newsstands for decades, is completely legal, and is even available in supermarkets. But on Facebook? Too dangerous for the community.
Meta now operates like a morality police force, automatically enforcing their moral standards. Algorithms decide what gets published, without any human consideration or democratic processes behind them. A private corporation becomes a censorship authority — and this in a democracy that has freedom of speech written into its constitution.
What's happening here is nothing less than setting a precedent. When a monopolist like Meta can delete journalistic pages without giving reasons, it fundamentally undermines press freedom. It demonstrates that decisions about what can be publicly discussed are being handed over to privatized systems.
A problem that goes far beyond nude photography and lifestyle magazines.