Lost in Meta’s Web: My Account Suspension Nightmare

One day, I was minding my own business, checking in on Facebook, when I saw a mention of Meta’s new X/Twitter competitor, “Threads”. I decided to create an account and look around. This might have been the worst decision I’ve made in decades. Literally. Like literally literally, not “we-don’t-know-the-difference-between-hyperbole-and-changing-a-word’s-definition” figuratively literally.

(TL;DR – All my meta social accounts are gone so check out my new social account contact info below!)

During the process, Threads urged me to create an account that was connected to my Instagram account, because it would take a lot less work, and all my IG contacts would go with me. I did so without thinking, because hey, they’re the same company anyway, right? Now that I had a threads account, I poked around for about ten minutes. Then, my poking was interrupted by Threads telling me that my Threads account had been suspended because ‘an associated Instagram account’ had been suspended.

I went back to Instagram, and tried to log in. Sure enough, my account had been suspended for “fraudulent activity”! I clicked the “Appeal” button, and began a half-hour long ordeal involving multiple 2FA logins and relogins, questions, checkboxes, and dealing with taking photographs of myself and my Photo ID along with cards containing my name and the date. I completed all this and submitted.

The denial came ten minutes later, along with notification that because my appeal was denied, my account was now permanently deactivated, with no further appeal. I no longer had an Instagram account, and I wasn’t allowed to create a new one.

I was angry and confused. I decided to log in to Facebook and post about it to see if any of my friends had an idea what had happened, at which point I discovered that my Facebook account, which was connected to an entirely different email and phone number from my Instagram account, had nonetheless also been suspended because ‘an associated Instagram account’ had been suspended, and likewise I was banned from creating a new account.

I spent hours using things like new devices I had never previously accessed Facebook from, new phone numbers and emails, VPNs, and even the dark web to try to create a new Facebook account, but was repeatedly denied due to “an associated account”. I was apparently permanently banned from any Meta social media service. I was cut off from hundreds of friends, family, and contacts, with no option to even send them a parting message giving them external contact information.

They wouldn’t even let me download my own data or friends list.

[Edit:On my thirty-somethingth try, Facebook actually sent me a file with “my data”. It includes no friend info or any of the content I’ve posted, so basically, I’m fucked!]

I web searched and poked around, and discovered that this is happening to a lot of people, every day. I read hundreds of messages telling roughly the same story, along with at least 3 times as many “The things I tried to solve this” messages. A few of these stories had happy endings, but most didn’t. Two people would attempt the same solution, and one had success and the other did not. There was no rhyme or reason. None of them worked for me…

So here I am, a social pariah because Meta’s AI is stupid and broken, and Meta’s humans are unwilling to respond in any fashion. I have (had) a lot of friends and contacts that I met and have only known just through Facebook, with whom I suppose I’ll never speak again. I have previously long-lost relatives and old friends who I reconnected with via Facebook and complacently never interrogated for external means of communication. They are lost to me. A couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t take my wife to the restaurant I wanted to take her to because they only take reservations through their Facebook page and have no other online presence. There are venues whose only online event info and reservations are on Facebook. I can no longer go to them. I can’t use the Oculus VR set or Ray Ban Meta Smart Glasses, because they require a Facebook account.

I was a fool for trusting Facebook, and lazy about backing up my digital life, and now, I’ve lost almost 20 years of content and contacts. I’ll keep trying, but at this point, I’ve pretty much given up hope.

The good news is that I’ve spent several years trying to build a social media presence on several other services. I did abandon Xitter after they closed their API so I couldn’t propagate my posts there, but I have active accounts at:

• Friendica –friendica.rogueproject.org/pro…
• Mastodon – 2 separate accounts, one for general topics: mastodon.cloud/@Blaise
  and one for the maker community: makersocial.online/@BeerBruin
• Bluesky – bsky.app/profile/blaisehartley…
• Primal (NOSTR) – primal.net/p/npub1anjnl66vaspy…

I keep these accounts synchronized as much as possible with a third-party client that unifies my access, so any one of them is a fine place to connect with me, but if you are coming from Facebook, I recommend using Friendica. It’s nearly identical, but with no ads and a number of extra features, and you can also connect with anyone on mastodon or Bluesky with it. Learn about it at friendi.ca/. The only hard part is picking a server, because open social media are distributed! Personally I use venera.social, but I’m told most Facebook escapees are signing up at friendica.world/ or my-place.social/.

And hey, if you are (were) one of my friends on Facebook, would you be a mensch and forward this note to any friends we have (had) in common? Thanks!

[ADDENDUM]I’m still smarting to have lost all my contacts, but maybe this is a really good time to leave Facebook: