"Croton Uncensored" is here to stay, its founder and sole administrator says.

Michael Tobey resists calls to deep-six the increasingly toxic Facebook page and to ban anonymous posting. He calls for civility in discourse, but it appears that ship has sailed.

With 3,800 members, no rules, and no moderation of any kind, the Facebook group “Croton Uncensored”—which will celebrate its third birthday later this year—is the social media site one loves to hate. The group has become notorious for its toxicity and frequent overt racism, along with nasty fire fights between MAGAs and anti-MAGAs.

Fortunately for the reputation of our village, the majority of the posters are no longer from Croton, as pro-Trumpers from all over the country have discovered a Facebook page where they can say whatever they want about anything and anybody without being scolded or banned by a moderator.

Just over a year ago, the Chronicle published a profile of the group’s founder, long-time Croton resident Michael Tobey, and his original vision when he created the page in October 2023. It came after a flurry of bannings of Crotonites from some other village Facebook groups (including the Chronicle’s editor, who launched this publication the same month) for vague violations of thinly veiled, politically motivated taboos, and pretty much came out of the blue: Tobey was not himself a vocal or visible social media habitué, but more of an occasional lurker. But he had seen the overt censorship on some other Croton Facebook groups and did not approve.

Tobey’s original credo for “Croton Uncensored” made it clear things would be different in the new group:

Tobey clearly does not consider himself responsible for what the group has become, and he is probably right to feel that way. The page is a living laboratory of what people from many walks of life will do and say during the Trump era. Perhaps at some point it will be a subject for study by sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, and other experts whose job it is to try to figure out why we have all become so crazy, one way or the other. (If it is not already; we see at least one PhD thesis if not many.)

A year ago, when we profiled Tobey, the page had just under 900 members. That was shortly after Trump took office in his second term; there is no question that fierce debates over how wise the American people had been to elect him again fueled much of the site’s massive growth, nearly 3,000 new members in just one year.

Those who can’t stay away from the site have found various survival methods, including blocking those whose posts one can’t stand—a procedure that has been used by both sides of the political spectrum to avoid seeing what they don’t want to see. That does not work for anonymous posts, however, whose authors cannot be blocked. The various anonymous posters, of which there are many, have come to dominate the discussions to a large extent, leaving village residents to wonder if they are unknowingly saying nasty things to their next door neighbors—or perhaps even their husbands, wives, or children.

(On the other hand, there are a number of known Croton residents on the page, posting openly and sometimes bravely, no matter what their views.)

We leave you with a selection of some recent posts, and defer to your own judgement about the site’s intellectual level.

Current posts on Croton Uncensored

************************************************************************************************************

To share this post, or to share The Croton Chronicle, please click on these links.

Comments policy: No hate speech, personal attacks, or trolling. Please be as polite and respectful as possible. All moderation decisions are final (this is NOT the “Croton Uncensored” page.)