Dear Pride & Pages Community,

I promise I’m not ghosting you! This morning, I was logged out our social media accounts on Instagram and Threads while using the app and was notified that the Pride & Pages Book Club pages (@prideandpagesbooks) are “compromised” and I am currently unable to access those accounts.

As a brand new newsletter, this is devastating on many levels only one week into building this community of queer book lovers, but especially when I’ve been having so much fun celebrating queer joy with you all there.

Meta is notoriously difficult to get answers from when you don’t have a massive advertising budget and a blue check mark. (Was it referencing Rebecca Black lyrics on Threads? Sorry, not sorry.) My hope is that this lock-out is temporary due to the rapid growth and engagement on the Pride & Pages accounts over the past week or some glitch on their end.

My worry is that there are other factors at play. In browsing Reddit for answers, one theme that comes up pretty consistently is that accounts labelled “compromised” often post queer content. I don’t know if this is what happened to Pride & Pages, but combined with other whispers of algorithms suppressing queer content and Meta’s affiliation with the incoming administration, it isn’t unimaginable.

Which, to be honest, is one of the biggest reasons Pride & Pages was born to begin with. I knew this was a possibility going in. LGBTQIA+ rights are being threatened and queer voices suppressed across the United States, including via book bans. Algorithms can be programmed to block queer content. Our accounts can be flagged with no explanation. We can be cut off from our online communities with the click of a button.

But Pride & Pages is not going anywhere.

I truly hope this is just a matter of time and the Meta powers-that-be realize the Pride & Pages community and engagement are real. What I’ve read says it might be a day, a week, a month, or forever. No matter what happens, Pride & Pages will be branching out to other platforms (not Twitter, ofc), and we’ll keep you updated on where to find us.

What can you do to help?

• Recommend Pride & Pages to a friend: forward one of our newsletters to queer readers and authors, or share our sign up link at: www.prideandpagesbookclub.com

• Hang out with us on Bluesky at: https://bsky.app/profile/prideandpagesbooks.bsky.social

• Email us directly at [email protected] if you have leads on how to access our accounts again or why this happened or if you have any other questions or ideas or need someone to validate your decision to get bangs or just want to say “hi!” (It’s lonely without y’all!)

Thank you for reading and for being here ❤️ I hope you have a great weekend full of queer books and lots of time to read them, and I’ll see you Sunday with the next Queer KU Reads newsletter!