As an Autistic Man With Debilitating Social Anxiety, I'm Disturbed by Facebook's Intense Rightward Shift
For just one million dollars and your soul, you can be part of this shit show!
Social media is ideal for the antisocial. It offers many of the rewards of social interaction—community, support, and friendship—without the terrifying specter of actually having to talk to other human beings in real life.
Some people are afraid of the dark. Some people are afraid of heights. I am afraid of talking to people. I’m convinced that I’ll freeze up, panic, curl up into a fetal ball, and start weeping uncontrollably.
I’m exaggerating for comic effect, but not by much. If I might engage in an epic humblebrag, five years ago, at the Juggalo Day celebration in Los Angeles, Violent J gave me his number and said he wanted to talk to me about something.
This was tremendously exciting. I had another potential opportunity to collaborate with a legendary performer who has left an indelible mark on pop culture.
There was no downside to calling the number J had given me and a potentially tremendous upside. Maybe he wanted me to ghostwrite a memoir for him or work on a coffee table book project like Weird Al: The Book. How awesome would that be?
All I had to do was call that number to unlock a world of thrilling possibilities.
Get a load of this sniveling little weasel.
I probably do not need to tell you that I never called that number out of debilitating social anxiety, low self-esteem, and a profoundly unhealthy dual fear of failure and success.
I wondered at the time what was wrong with me. Getting diagnosed as autistic at 48 helped explain why I behaved in such a self-defeating fashion. It’s not that I’m shy, although God knows that is true of me. It’s not a mere matter of being introverted, either. I am fucking autistic. I have two autistic sons. Everyone in my immediate family is autistic except for my wife, who works with neurodivergent children and families as a therapist.
I don’t have the non-verbal or scientific/mathematical genius type of autism; I have the kind of autism that makes social interaction agonizingly stressful. I have the type of autism that gives you devastating social anxiety and an unshakable conviction that you don’t understand people or an unfathomably complex universe and never will.
I would have responded if Violent J had sent me a direct message on Twitter. The same is true of email. But an actual phone conversation with a stranger I knew a great deal about was more than my anxiety-addled brain could handle.
How is it even possible for one man to be so cool and hip?
My professional relationship with “Weird Al” Yankovic began over a decade ago when he sent me a direct message through Twitter saying that, of all the writers in the world, including all of the Nobel Prize winners, he had chosen me personally to tell his story in coffee table book form.
I leaped at the chance. That direct message changed my life and my career for the better, and it happened on what I will always call Twitter.
I had a lot of famous followers on Twitter because I was the head writer of The A.V. Club. That was a position of power. Being one of the main writers for a popular national entertainment section enabled me to help artists that I loved in a real, concrete, and meaningful way.
I miss that. I don’t have anywhere near as much power now because I write for a newsletter (Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas) and website (Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place) that have a tiny percentage of the audience that I had at The A.V. Club or The Dissolve.
It’s entirely possible that I had famous followers because they loved my writing and tweets and wanted to support me, but it seems more likely that I had a position of power and privilege in pop culture media, and consequently, folks wanted to at least be my social media pal.
That power was difficult to give up. That’s one of the reasons that I am having a hard time leaving Twitter, even though it has devolved into a rancid cesspool under Elon Musk’s leadership.
I largely owe my current freelance career to my history at The A.V. Club and The Dissolve. That gave me an audience and a fanbase, albeit one small and fragile enough that I am continually struggling professionally and financially in a way that suggests that my struggles will only end when I’m six feet underground.
I wish I could say I don’t need Twitter or Facebook, but the unfortunate truth is that I need every last bit of exposure and support I can get. Unfortunately, this includes Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg’s social media behemoths.
I’m not naive enough to think that Zuckerberg was a mensch who cared about people. He’s a billionaire and a capitalist, and the primary goal of capitalists is to hold onto a system and a dynamic that makes them rich and powerful.
Yet Zuckerberg banned Trump after the January 6th kerfluffle and was seen, and is probably still seen, by much of the MAGA mob as a hated enemy intent on silencing and censoring Conservative voices.
I never thought that Zuckerberg was good. Good people don’t amass multi-billion dollar fortunes while others sleep in the street and die from hunger. Having that level of wealth is fundamentally amoral.
I knew that Zuckerberg was bad, but I thought, at the very least, that he wasn’t as bad as Elon Musk. That dude is the WORST.
At least, that’s what I thought two weeks ago. Facebook went complete MAGA in that time. The best that can be said of Zuckerberg is that he’s not QUITE as terrible as Musk, but he’s close.
Zuckerberg donated a million dollars to the Trump inauguration campaign, appointed Trump allies and friends to important positions within the company, did away with a fact-checking system that MAGA hated, ended DEI, and gushed on Facebook about “Work(ing) with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world, and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.”
In his book Saving America, Trump seethed of Zuckerberg, “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time, he will spend the rest of his life in prison — as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.”
This is the man Zuckerberg is alienating a huge percentage of Facebook users to appeal to, someone on record stating, “(Zuckerberg) would come to the Oval Office to see me. He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful Lock Boxes in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT.”
It’s pathetic. It’s fucking pathetic, is what it is. It sucks because, as an autistic introvert, Facebook has been incredibly important to me for personal and professional reasons.
I don’t have a lot of friends in real life, but I have a lot of internet friends that I interact with primarily through Facebook and Twitter.
I have a Facebook group called Society for the Toleration of Nathan Rabin, whose tenth birthday is rapidly approaching. There are twelve hundred members who like me and my writing, and that I, in turn, have come to really like.
Facebook sometimes does wonders. When I was following “Weird Al” Yankovic in 2018 for my book The Weird Accordion to Al, I found myself stranded in a small town in Indiana with seemingly no way to leave except for hitch-hiking.
The town was so small that it didn’t have Uber or Lyft, but amazingly, the father of a member of the Society for the Toleration of Nathan Rabin lived nearby and was kind enough to drive me several hours to the next stop on the tour purely out of kindness.
It was borderline miraculous, is what it was, and it happened because of Facebook. I’m not just disappointed by the enormous changes Facebook is making; I’m disgusted.
I hate that Facebook is pandering to homophobes and transphobes with guidelines that protect hate speech on the spurious grounds that out of deference to political and religious convictions, bigots should be able to say whatever the hell they want about women and the trans community.
I’m almost ready to leave Twitter, but I will have difficulty giving Facebook up. It’s been a nice home for me for a very long time, but I don’t feel welcome there anymore.
I guess this is the universe telling me to join Bluesky. If they go right aggressively, I might have to start my own social media site. NO ONE wants that.
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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