Early last week we recorded an interview with illustrator Jesse Duquette. Then we got the word over the weekend: Meta not only shut his account down, but permanently deleted its posts and eradicated his community of over 200,000+ followers. Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaminions decided Duquette’s incisive and hard-hitting cartoons were just too much for Instagram. (Meta is the company that started out simply as Facebook but now includes Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp as well as other properties.)

This is the same Mark Zuckerberg who in 2019 told students at Georgetown University that “Frederick Douglass once called free expression ‘the great moral renovator of society,’ and repeating Douglass’ words, ‘slavery cannot tolerate free speech’.”

Apparently Duquette’s style of cartooning was intolerable.

This episode is a twofer: Part One is a deep-dive into the life and times of an artist and political commentator at work. Part Two explores the aftermath, when the AI of the world’s most powerful social media company, proves incapable of discerning satire, and banishes a popular presence based on its own misunderstanding of what it thinks it knows. 

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