It happened without warning.
I shared this video from YouTube. A few minutes later, I tried to share a newspaper article and was greeted with a prompt asking me to “prove I was human”. I entered the captcha, and then was prompted for a video selfie.
WTF?
I didn’t really feel like Meta needed my biometrics, so I closed the window.
A few minutes later, a friend messaged me in WhatsApp to tell me that my Facebook page was gone.
I forked over my biometrics (and we really need to talk about why Zuck should have that information. Ever.) and was routed to a page informing me that my appeal had been submitted.
Appeal?
That’s when I found the notification email im my spam folder. My account “doesn’t follow our Community Standards on account integrity.” The linked page was an utterly vague few paragraphs of no-actual-information. Less than an hour later, I received an auto-email informing me that my account was permanently disabled and I could not request another review.
The personal connections would be an inconvenience. But 15 years of social media networking – that’s another story.
I created a new account. Disabled within an hour.
I cleared cookies, changed my VPN, made a new email address and made a third account. They allowed it. But the moment I commented on a post, they ‘restricted” it – no interactions for a week. Apparently, sharing the location of a community clothing donation bin violated their community standards too.
Interestingly, my (linked) Instagram account wasn’t touched. Apparently, the terribly-programmed AI is Facebook specific.
What happens next?
We’re seeing this more and more, as the badly-managed bots make decisions that are no longer reviewed by humans. The difference is that the bots are also getting smarter about recognizing when we create a new account and start over.
I was lucky. I’m a geek. I know geeks. And one of those geeks knows people at Meta. I got my account back. It still gets restricted every time I make a comment, but so far it hasn’t been entirely cut off again.
I’m copying and saving info from saved posts, reaching out to treasured contacts to share my alternate spaces. I am connected with many of them on more reliable platforms.
My most-treasured writing group is taking heed, and has ramped up activity on our discord server. Writer friends are looking critically at their Facebook followers and considering how and whether to press to migrate them to web sites, newsletters, Substack…
And I’m re-evaluating.
A year ago, amidst a flurry of folks commenting on wanting to leave Facebook, I wrote a post talking about why there is no Facebook replacement at the moment. That challenge still exists. Social networks only work when your network is on them with you.
But the time may have come for a new approach.
Moving forward
I try not to fling myself in every direction. I can’t keep up with dozens of platforms. But the biggest barrier to Facebook replacement is that nothing does everything it does. So it might just be time to suck it up and deal with a few extra platforms in order to ensure there’s a backup.
Public conversations? I’m on BlueSky
Groups? I’ll be encouraging any group I’m in to follow my writing group’s example and consider a discord server.
Business contacts? Already have them on LinkedIn. I notice a lot more people are posting and communicating in the posts there than in the past.
Substack, PillowFort, personal web sites like this one or other genre-appropriate spaces for fan communities.
That leaves just my personal connections on Facebook. I have their emails, phone numbers, and other paths to talk to them. If I miss one – we probably have a mutual (back in the dark ages before the internet, we managed that one. We can manage it again.)
I’m still not Leaving Facebook. But I’ll be working more actively to ensure I’m not dependent on it.
What about you? Unless you have a friend who happens to have a direct line to one of the handful of actual humans still working inside Meta, you might want to have a plan too.
