Hunde verboten: Speciesism on facebook

I joined facebook on April 21st, 2010. In the short biography for my facebook profile I wrote: "I'm losing all my friends; they have stopped replying to my emails, they don't pick up the phone anymore. I suspect they've all gone lost in facebook." Normally I don't meet my friends on The Net but in the park -but I was curious and had to write something. Three weeks later I'd got 100 (ONE HUNDRED!) friends, most of them luvly small furry creatures like myself. Ten days later we were 250, just three more days and I had hit the 500 friends mark (dogs and dog people are sociable beings and it looks as if there has been a snowball effect). This happened one week ago.

One week ago I was the luckiest dog on Earth because I just had reached the 500 facebook friends mark. Now I've got three warnings from the administrators of the site within the last three days because, in their opinion, I'm adding too many friends too fast: apparently my account has been flagged as "potentially abusive" for making an "inappropriate use of the site" and I've been summoned to significantly slow down my activities on facebook, or else my account will be permanently disabled. I'm not sending any more friendship requests nor messages or the like because I want to keep my account and my canine friends -but I'm not happy about this situation.

I guess all this has got to do with the speciesist views of facebook as well (I am a dog and most of my friends are dogs of course). I've been doing some research and have found out that pet accounts may be tolerated on the facebook but they are considered a violation of the site's rules, so they can be disabled by the administrators anytime without even warning the account's holder. I've even made another concession and changed my profile picture: now it shows me with my owner, she's a human being. I feel less independent -and a bit humiliated too- but I'm prepared to follow this stupid rule if it keeps me on the facebook -not so much for staying here at any price as for trying not to lose my friends. But, for now, I'm in a rather pessimistic mood.

My account has been flagged as "potentially abusive" for getting too many friends too fast -and I thought facebook was all about socialising on a global scale. The most annoying thing about this situation is that I'll still be in the hands of the administrators of the site, no matter how well I behave. From now on I'll misuse my blog as a means of backup, to keep a record of some of the contents of my endangered facebook account. It'll make me feel freer.