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.