They Took Down My Community of 25,000. Now They’re Coming for Me

This Is How Big Tech Erases Patient Voices

Back in May, Facebook shut down my group of 25,000 people living with obesity. That community was more than just a Facebook group. It was a safe place to share victories, ask questions, and feel seen in a world that so often looks right past us. Facebook didn’t erase a group, they erased the stories and lived experiences of 25k+ humans.

The reason? Someone in the group posted information from Eli Lilly’s own patient access program, Lilly Direct. It was factual, legal, and newsworthy. But Facebook called it “attempting to sell drugs.”

Since then, I have simply told myself it was an algorithm making a mistake. Cost of doing business on these platforms.Today, it became clear that it was not that simple.

Now They Are Threatening Everything

I just received a notice that Facebook is threatening to remove all my accounts, including my personal profile, my professional presence, and every connection I have built there over the last nearly two decades on the platform.

No selling. No instructions on how to take medication. Just telling the truth. Empowering people with obesity to have better conversations with their medical providers.

Mind you, this is all happening while thousands of people are pushing, selling, and profiting off of the sale of chemicals sold for injection labeled: “not for human consumption", all on the Meta platforms. We’re simply sharing the news. We’re not participating in anything that could remotely be construed as a “grey area”.

It is hard to describe what it feels like to put your life’s work into building something that matters so much to so many, only to watch it be erased by an inept ai algorithm that lacks the ability to decipher the human toll of such decisions.

The Personal Toll

Being a patient advocate for people living with obesity is not just content creation. It is carrying the stories of people who are already marginalized by society. We are judged for our size, dismissed in medical offices, blamed for our disease, and too often left without treatment.

When platforms silence our voices, it reinforces the same message we have heard our whole lives. That our stories do not matter. That we should sit down and be quiet.

I will not sit down. And I will not be quiet.

This Is Why On The Pen Exists

I built On The Pen to tell the truth about obesity medicine, GLP-1s, and the system that controls access to them.

We have covered shortages, exposed bad actors, fought for better coverage, and given patients a platform when no one else would.

Now we are being targeted for it.

The Only Way We Win Is If We Are Too Big To Shut Down

If Facebook can wipe out 25,000 people in seconds, they can erase the rest of our presence just as easily. That is why we need to build our community where they cannot pull the plug.

Follow me everywhere right now → linktr.ee/manonthemounjaro

If you believe that patients deserve a voice, become a paid subscriber on Substack. The more we grow, the harder we are to ignore. Our goal is simple:

📢 Too big to shut down. Too loud to ignore.

They may control the platform, but they do not control the truth.We are going to keep speaking it, and we are going to do it together.

Follow everywhere → linktr.ee/manonthemounjaro

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