Facebook has new rules, and they are not fun; like Dua Lipa’s, not fun at all. You could not dance to these rules. You must henceforth desist from any post that could “facilitate, encourage or coordinate sexual encounters between adults”. Since sex between consenting adults was, last time I checked, legal – indeed encouraged by responsible media platforms such as ours – this struck me as peculiar. Facebook has always taken strange positions: for ages, the weirdest was that it would remove pictures of breastfeeding, but not pages that made light of rape.
This is the strangest yet, particularly given Mark Zuckerberg’s well-known creed of do-what-yer-like. If he can withstand the pressure of parliaments across the globe to appear before them, and if he can weather every accusation with a sturdy, “No, I didn’t … OK, yes I did, but I won’t do it again,” which special-interest group can possibly have leaned on him to make this radical move? Which evangelical church, which celibacy movement, could have got under his skin?
It may be a counterintuitive piece of image management. No one uses Facebook to make their sexual overtures anyway. Even people who don’t know what end-to-end encryption means know you have to use WhatsApp, which is, of course, owned by Facebook, but totally different because it is green and Facebook is blue. Facebook is obsessed with memories: 10 years ago today, you … celebrate three years of acquaintanceship with … Bombardment with enough of that regret, nostalgia and exquisite sorrow at the passage of time is draining. You’re no more likely to facilitate sex between two adults in that environment than you are to take up the trapeze.
