What Brought Me Back to Facebook

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When I closed my Farrah Fawcett Facebook page in June 2026, I was confident I was done. I had spent four years building that page into something much larger than I ever expected, and I genuinely enjoyed parts of the experience. I loved finding material, sharing photographs and videos, watching people rediscover Farrah's work, and seeing how much interest in her life still existed. However, by the time I shut down the page, those enjoyable parts were being overtaken by everything that came with maintaining such a large Facebook community.

The biggest problem for me was the constant responsibility for the comment section. When a page becomes large enough, comments are no longer simply people reacting to a post. They become something that has to be watched, managed, answered, deleted, corrected, and sometimes refereed. Arguments develop between people that have nothing to do with the original subject; someone eventually says something inappropriate, and suddenly I am dealing with an online dispute instead of spending my time on the things that interested me in the first place. After several years of doing that, I was exhausted.

For this reason, when I recently decided to create another Facebook page, I knew from the beginning that I did not want to recreate the old one. The new page has a new name because my goals have changed. I am still interested in sharing Farrah photographs, videos, archival material, artwork, and interesting pieces from her career, but those things now exist within a much larger project. Over the past year, my attention has increasingly shifted toward primary sources, books, interviews, transcripts, historical records, long-form writing, and the broader questions surrounding how Farrah's life and legacy are being represented.

The two statue projects in South Texas currently underway ultimately convinced me to return to Facebook. Until they developed, I was comfortable keeping most of my research and opinions on the website. The statues changed that because they made me realize that Farrah's legacy is not merely being remembered or discussed. It is being actively shaped and, in some cases, made permanent in ways I never imagined possible when I began researching her life.
My concern is not simply that two statues are being created, but what those monuments represent. Decisions are being made about which period of Farrah's life will become dominant, which images will represent her publicly, and what someone unfamiliar with her life may take away from those monuments years from now. A public monument does more than honor someone. It also makes an argument about how that person should be remembered.

That brought me back to a question that now runs through much of my research: who gets to decide which parts of a person's life survive after that person is gone? The statues are the most visible example, but documentaries, articles, AI-generated images, fan narratives, exhibitions, and other public projects can also shape how Farrah is understood after her death. Once I began looking at the issue that way, I no longer felt that expressing my concerns on the website alone was enough. I wanted my research and writing to be part of that conversation while these choices were still being made. I don't expect everyone to agree with me, nor do I believe my interpretation should automatically replace someone else's. However, when I believe Farrah's choices and agency are being overlooked, I want to explain why and show the material that led me to that conclusion.

My research is also going much deeper than anything I was doing when I started the original page. I have accumulated a large database of material covering Farrah's life and career, and going through it properly requires a significant amount of time. Interviews have to be watched and transcribed, articles have to be read, dates and statements have to be compared, television appearances have to be located, and conflicting accounts sometimes have to be examined against one another before I can determine what the available record actually supports. The more material I collect, the more apparent it becomes that serious research cannot be rushed simply to satisfy the demands of social media.

The website remains better suited to that kind of work. I can develop an argument there, explain how I reached a conclusion, examine conflicting information, and give a subject the amount of space it actually requires. This has become especially important as I have started writing about artificial intelligence being used to manufacture images and videos of Farrah, the tendency to reduce her career back to Charlie's Angels, and the broader question of how her life is being interpreted after her death. These are complicated subjects, and they cannot always be addressed responsibly in a photograph caption or a few lines of Facebook text.

As part of this expansion, I am also developing new coverage of Charlie's Angels on the website that will look at the complete five-season series rather than limiting the discussion to Farrah's first season. I plan to share images from Seasons 1 through 5 and write about the episodes, performances, characters, cast changes, and the actresses who helped shape the program throughout its run. That includes Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith, Cheryl Ladd, Shelley Hack, Tanya Roberts, and the other performers who contributed to the series. Farrah remains the central subject of my overall project, but Charlie's Angels has an important place within her career, and understanding that history requires looking beyond 1976 and 1977.

There is also a practical research reason for studying the entire series. To understand Farrah's contribution to Charlie's Angels, I need something to compare her season against. Looking at what happened after she left the regular cast allows me to examine changes in the writing, character relationships, story structure, tone, and balance among the three leads. What was distinctive about Jill Munroe? What changed when Cheryl Ladd joined the series? Which characteristics remained consistent throughout the five-year run, and which evolved as the cast changed? Those questions are much easier to examine when the entire series is available for comparison.

However, expanding my coverage of Charlie's Angels does not mean I am interested in returning to the same fan-page dialogue that has surrounded the show for decades. I have no desire to spend my time arguing over why someone hates Shelley Hack, who was the best Angel, who was the hottest Angel, which lineup was superior, or revisiting complaints that Farrah should never have left the series. I have already seen enough discussions ranking the actresses against one another and turning every cast change into another popularity contest. Those conversations may interest some fans, but I find them petty and, in many cases, little more than low-grade tactics for generating clicks and followers.

I also know that some of the essays I write will not please everyone. Some people will love them, some will hate them, and others will disagree with the conclusions I reach. I am completely comfortable with that. My objective is not to produce writing that everyone agrees with or to protect a familiar version of Farrah simply because it has become comfortable within fandom. My goal is to examine the available record as carefully as I can and, above all else, preserve Farrah's agency at any cost.

For me, that principle has become central to the entire project. Farrah was a person who made decisions about her career, her image, her relationships, her work, and the direction of her own life. Preserving her agency does not mean pretending every decision she made was correct, avoiding uncomfortable material, or turning her into a flawless figure who must be defended from criticism. In fact, doing that would diminish her in a different way. It means taking her choices seriously, allowing contradictions to remain when the record supports them, and resisting the temptation to replace the person with whatever version of Farrah is easiest, most popular, or most convenient.

This is where the new Facebook page fits into what I am doing now. I no longer want Facebook to be the center of the project, but I do want it to give the research a public voice when something important is happening around Farrah's legacy. I can share an interesting video, introduce a new essay, post something from the archive, share material from Charlie's Angels, or direct someone toward something on the website they might not otherwise find. Facebook can support the project without becoming the project.

One of the most important changes is that I am not going to create a posting schedule to keep the page active. If I have something worth sharing, I will share it. If I am buried in research for several days or even a week, the page can remain quiet. Silence on Facebook does not mean the project has stopped. More than likely, it means I am transcribing an interview, working through a difficult source, researching an essay, comparing information, or organizing material that may eventually appear on the website. I would rather publish something worthwhile less often than post simply because the platform rewards constant activity.

Comments will also be handled differently. Some posts may remain open, particularly videos, photographs, television appearances, or lighter material where people want to react or share a memory. I may leave comments open when something is first posted and close them later, while subjects that routinely turn into arguments may have comments restricted or closed altogether. There will not be one permanent rule because I no longer believe every post has to become an indefinitely open public forum.

More importantly, leaving comments open does not mean I am agreeing to debate everyone who disagrees with something I write. If I publish a detailed essay explaining why I object to a particular statue project, the argument is already contained in the essay. Someone is free to disagree, but I do not need to reproduce the entire argument beneath the Facebook post each time an objection appears. Disagreement is part of writing about complicated subjects, and I would rather have someone disagree with a position I actually believe than alter that position to make a comment section more agreeable.

I also no longer feel responsible for correcting every inaccurate statement that appears beneath a post. With the amount of material I have collected, I will inevitably see comments that conflict with what I have found in interviews, documents, or other sources. In the past, I often felt compelled to jump in and correct those claims. However, if something is important enough to address, I would rather examine it properly on the website, present the evidence, and explain why I agree or disagree. A Facebook comment thread is rarely the best place to conduct serious historical analysis.

The same applies to claims that an image I post is fake. I am not going to spend my time defending photographs every time someone does not recognize an image or assumes it must be artificial because they have never seen it before. My knowledge of Farrah imagery is extensive, and I know the difference between an authentic photograph, an altered image, and an illustration created specifically for a blog post. An illustration used to represent the subject of an essay is not the same thing as presenting a fabricated photograph as a real historical event. The distinction is clear, and I am not going to debate it every time someone makes an unsupported accusation in a Facebook comment.

I am also stepping away from giveaways. I enjoyed doing them in the past, but they required far more time and money than most people probably realized. There was the planning, acquiring or preparing items, creating the posts, tracking entries, choosing winners, contacting people, packaging everything, and getting it mailed out. None of those steps is particularly difficult by itself, but taken together they become another administrative job attached to the page. At this stage of the project, I would rather put those hours into the archive, the website, and the writing.

I don't need another Facebook page to prove I can generate reach. My previous page generated between 23 and 50 million views a year, so I have already experienced what happens when the numbers become large enough to influence how you think about posting. It becomes very easy to start asking what will perform well instead of what is actually worth sharing. You begin feeding the platform because the page has been quiet rather than because you have something meaningful to add. Those numbers can certainly be impressive, but they can also become a distraction when maintaining them begins influencing the direction of the project.

For this reason, I am not setting a follower target for the new page. If the page grows, that is fine. If it remains considerably smaller but brings interested readers to the website and gives me another place to share material I believe is worthwhile, it will still be doing exactly what I created it to do.

My priorities are much clearer now. I want to continue building a substantial Farrah Fawcett research archive, work through the enormous amount of material I have collected, and write essays that examine her life and career with more depth than I could ever achieve through Facebook alone. I also want to study Charlie's Angels more seriously as a complete television series and write about all five seasons and the performers who contributed to it. However, I do not want any of this to become relentlessly serious. Sometimes a great Farrah video is enjoyable to watch, an old television appearance is worth sharing because it has not been seen in years, or a photograph from Charlie's Angels is interesting without requiring an essay to explain it. There is room for both.

What I no longer have room for is allowing social media management to consume the time needed for everything else. Comments, messages, giveaways, constant posting, follower targets, and the pressure to maintain engagement can each become projects of their own if I let them. I spent four years learning what I enjoyed about running a large Farrah page and what I absolutely hated. After that experience, it would make very little sense to return and immediately rebuild the same structure that eventually caused me to leave.

The new Facebook page is another way to share my work while keeping the website and research where they belong: at the center of the project. The statues convinced me that I still wanted a public voice, especially as Farrah's legacy is being shaped in ways I believe deserve closer examination. I have no interest in rebuilding the page I had before. This time, Facebook will be a tool for sharing the work and joining that conversation without letting the platform itself control the project.