We are turning off comments on our Meta pages

July 7, 2026

Moving forward, Clean Air will be turning off all comments on our Facebook and Instagram posts.

Why are we making this change?

We have always regarded social media platforms as a tool for organizers to use – a digital bullhorn to amplify our message.

However, increasingly, these bullhorns are held by billionaires who do not share our values or goals.

In 2022, when Elon Musk purchased Twitter, we were one of the first WNY organizations to stop using the platform, because we knew what would come next – control by Musk of the narrative on that platform, and a far right authoritarian shift in the boosted content moving forward.

As we have all observed in the time since, this prediction has unfortunately borne out.

We now are acting on similar observations that we have made of our Meta accounts.

Mark Zuckerberg is not a friend, and his platforms are not safe.

The irresponsible lack of moderation and poor enforcement of community standards across Meta platforms and an algorithm that boosts controversial posts to drive engagement on the platforms has inflamed hate and violence globally. This is plainly evident to anyone who has ever waded into the comment section of any news post.

Globally, this has spilled into inciting violence and even genocide. In 2022, Amnesty International directly cited Meta as one of the main instigators of the Rohingyan Genocide in Burma/Myanmar.

There’s an adage that you do not engage in arguments to change the mind of the person you are talking with, but instead to change the minds of the people listening in, and to show you are an ally to marginalized communities by pushing back on hateful rhetoric rather than letting it stand unchallenged.

But, with the rise of AI, much of that audience are no longer real people. An estimated 20% of all social media accounts are now AI bots – and some estimates of Meta platforms put this well above 50% of accounts.

Of the real people on Meta, many others are paid by the far right to post hateful content, and still others are paid to spread divisive content, especially in the lead-up to elections. “Troll Farms” have been a major issue on Meta platforms for well over a decade now, and there doesn’t seem to be any meaningful effort by Meta to rein these in.

Meta makes money by keeping people engaging on their platform – they do not have an incentive to reduce the engagement that that these farms drive.

In 2018, operatives in Russia targeted WNY through Facebook and seized on the murder of India Cummings to try to set up a rally. This was not an attempt by people driven by the injustice and horrors of the conditions at the Erie County Holding Center. This was an attempt to try to use the murder of Cummings to incite divisiveness and suppress turnout in the midterm elections. Local organizers immediately called out the suspicious nature of the rally, and the lack of any local leadership in the organizing of this rally.

Engaging with these bot accounts and troll farms just makes hateful and divisive content more attractive for Meta’s algorithm to spread widely. News stories which have attracted ugly and bigoted comments are boosted to the top of the feed, and people from marginalized backgrounds are then subjected to that hateful content when it then pops up on their feeds.

Every time staff needs to take time to reply to a comment on one of our posts and engage in a back-and-forth discussion, that takes away from their time and capacity for their other work.

Posting in Facebook comment sections is not organizing and does nothing to build our power or our base, but is a very effective distraction.

To be clear, we are not deleting our Meta accounts and will continue to post new content – because of a lack of appetite for monopoly busting, Meta has made itself, for now, irreplaceable in modern comms strategies.

For example, there is no easy replacement for neighborhood Facebook groups, which we find valuable for learning of possible industrial polluters. We also are keeping the Meta private message functions open.

However, until Meta is forced through monopoly busting and regulatory legislation to create and enforce equitable moderation and is held to account for the harm it has caused by allowing violent, white nationalist and fascist rhetoric to spread and thrive on it’s platforms, we cannot in good conscience continue to use Meta platforms as we have, and we will reduce our use of their platforms.

Comments are now off.

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