> Yes, absolutely. If you don't see something on FB...it's gone forever.
The archives exist, but their usefulness to those who see themselves as FB’s users - who are in fact not so much its users as simultaneously its unpaid laborers and its product - has never been FB’s priority.
Despite an intoxicating adolescence - built on the foundations of a dubious birth, but which was masked by the excitement of the uprisings in the Arab world, which happened to coincide with the period of FB’s greatest “democratic" potential - FB has become in its maturity the abomination it was always destined to be: an abomination, hidden behind an algorithmic enigma, wrapped in a large, data-mining turd. Given the imperatives associated with its own requirements for profitability and market share, and simultaneously in maintaining the advantageous position of dominant, US-based capital interests, FB will continue to congeal - slowly and in faltering steps, but inexorably - into an ever-more-durable version of the porously gated community of narcissists it has always implicitly been: the social media incarnation of a canned-hunting game reserve for people irredeemably attached to remaining blissfully ignorant of their complicity in strengthening the datasets on which our collective oppression relies.