Why Does 🏳️‍🌈 Lambertville Keep Using Facebook?

by David Vanadia
May 13, 2026

If Facebook was a city, you’d never go visit your family there.

Mark Zuckerberg admitted in 2025 that the “original joy” has left Facebook, yet billions of people still use his social media software every day.

Facebook has become a standard social media platform, in part, because it allows users to easily create discussion groups about any topic or place.

There are multiple Facebook discussion groups dedicated to Lambertville, NJ, but the Lambertville NJ Facebook page appears to be the largest and most active with over 45,000 Facebook users as members.

Some of people in the Lambertville NJ Facebook group are residents, but many are former residents, recent or future visitors, or people who just like to see what’s happening in town. Posts on the Lambertville NJ Facebook page can be seen on the Internet by the public unless individual privacy settings prevent it.

Note: You can view some of the Lambertville NJ Facebook group page without being logged into Facebook. That’s how this article was researched and written.

Part of the description for the Lambertville NJ Facebook group says:

“Lambertville and New Hope have had a LGBT presence for decades, and takes great pride in welcoming all residents and visitors. “Hate Has No Home Here” signs dot lawns throughout the city, a reminder every day that Lambertville is an inclusive community that not only recognizes diversity, but also celebrates it.”

That statement is true. Living freely, in peace, in a peaceful place, is why a lot of residents pay huge mortgages, high taxes, and ridiculous rents to reside here.

The cost of living in Lambertville is expensive, but joining the Lambertville NJ Facebook group costs nothing—except your privacy if you’ve joined Facebook.

The Expectation

The Lambertville NJ Facebook page code of conduct reads:

The Reality

The Lambertville NJ Facebook page has a clear pattern of repeated bullying with hateful comments and derogatory vitriol towards LGBTQ people coming from local and out-of-town trolls who have nothing to do with Lambertville.

For example, when a city council member posted to announce the 2026 street closure schedule for the New Hope/Lambertville Pride Parade—which has been happening annually since the 1970s—the comments section quickly went sour.

As you would expect from a Facebook flame war, people voiced their opinions...

...which included “gay people are coming for the children.”

The flames kept firing back and forth with some users even posting political images and memes that featured anti-LGBTQ quotes or visual “jokes.”

Comments like these give Facebook precise demographic information about their users so they can sell targeted ads and profit off our fears and differences.

Meanwhile, visitors to the Lambertville NJ Facebook page who are looking to find information about an event that celebrates American freedom end up being served hateful, homophobic rhetoric, which hurts our neighbors and our town.

Another Example

A news article about the 2026 Pridefest was published on the Lambertville Facebook page, and the trolls got all emotional in the 100+ comments.

Why Do They Allow Hate Speech Against LGBTQ People?

I refreshed the Lambertville NJ Facebook page while writing this article and saw that someone posted to ask why the administrators allowed hate speech.

The question appeared twice, as shown above. Both posts were visible, and both had comments. However, neither post was available when clicked and they completely disappeared from the Lambertville NJ Facebook group feed.

Maybe they’ll return. Here’re links to the first & second posts to check.

There was even an AI summary, as shown below, but it also disappeared.

It’s possible the person set their posts to private or deleted them altogether.

Where Are the Lambertville NJ Facebook Group Admins?

Soon after the admins were questioned, an admin published a new post.

Another administrator commented on that post and threatened to ban people.

iT dOeSn’T MaTtEr WhAt sIdE oF tHe FeNcE YoU aRe oN

The good news is that, after a user got an administrator’s attention, many of the demeaning comments were no longer visible. The bad news is that the damage has been done, and the bombardment will happen again when something LGBTQ-related gets posted on the Lambertville NJ Facebook page.

It’s easy to blame the administrators here, but good moderation requires time, and possibly even training. A small group of volunteers can’t perpetually be online to monitor the behavior of 45,000 people, and that’s by design.

Facebook sluffed the responsibility of content moderation onto its users in January of 2025. The cost of paying humans to moderate billions of users must be astronomical. By skirting moderation, Facebook saved money and gained access to a greater quantity of content for training its artificial intelligence.

Facebook benefits when we interact in raw and revealing ways inside small, monitored—but not moderated—containers. Facebook’s user agreement states that AI responses may be generated from group content, so our posts and comments could end up on someone else’s screen as an AI chat response.

That begs the questions:

What, exactly, are we indirectly teaching Meta’s AI?

Why are Lambertvillians on a platform that profits off of hate and abuse?

Why are you still using Facebook?