The Facebook Account Suspension Game
Have you ever violated Facebook’s community standards or their ever changing terms and conditions without knowing exactly what you did wrong? Welcome to the Facebook account suspension game. You can join this club from anywhere in the world, at anytime. Obviously, you need to have a Facebook account in order to participate in this funny adventure.
I joined the Meta ecosystem aka the world of the former Facebook spider back in 2011. The beginnings were nothing short of crazy as we were all kind of clueless trying to navigate something called a “social media platform”.
Furthermore, I was among the early adopters and fortunate ones to run those juicy ads that got tons of clicks. Phenomenal times for all pros and nerdy insiders who deployed the Power Editor to better configure the ads and squeeze the most buck out of the traffic.
Back than, corporations and big businesses actively indoctrinated their employees to stay away from Facebook. It was new, innovative and therefore very dangerous according to their specialists. It took these “intelligent” entities almost a decade to pour money into the system and they did so because Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Co. have become too big to ignore.
Control is Sweet
What started out as a colorful and creative playground for individuals, solo entrepreneurs and small business owners has slowly but surely been taken hostage by the big guys. Those who don’t abide to the mainstream narrative that is being cleverly propagated by the tentacles of the dark blue octopus are forced to exit. More so, often times, the gates are closed without any wrong doing of the user holding the account.
Now that is centralized power on steroids.
Three years ago I left the Meta party and joined the world of decentralized blockchain marketing. This meant:
No more Zucks rules and guidelines that get updated and changed on a day to day basis.
No entity with a headquarter that controls your assets (e.g. creative writing, videos, podcast show or artwork).
No fact checkers and machines that decide what type of content you’re allowed to post, read and comment on.
Staying on a megalithic ship that was cruising on a fixed pathway was never my thing. I don’t like restrictions and patterns of limited features that are sold to the end user as highly valuable particles in exchange for their personal data.
Critical thinking and asking uncomfortable questions were never designed for the guests of these cruisers. Those who dare to ascend the ladder of consciousness are expunged without explanation. Such is the exit story of many kindred spirits who were brave enough to find other, more beautiful and respectable shores.
“We Suspended Your Facebook Account”
What a gorgeous message to start or end the day, isn’t it?
Well, I got this message a few weeks back. Actually, I got the message twice. The second time only a few hours after my account was unlocked by the powers to be in Silicon Valley.
The reason for being locked out of my account was supposedly due to the fact that I violated Facebook’s community standards.
What exactly had happened?
For the past three years I’ve not accessed my personal Facebook account. I use the Business Manager every two weeks to check some client work for less then ten minutes and that’s about it.
Recently though I’ve changed the operating system on my main Mac from macOS to Linux and accessed the Business Manager from the newly installed OS. That triggered in my opinion this entire cascade.
Only a few hours later my Facebook account was suspended. Obviously, I disagreed with the decision and by the next day I got an email informing me to go through some random checks and confirm that the account belongs to me.
FYI, my account is secured by 2FA using a hardware key. Cracking that requires some pretty decent knowledge unless you do it from within the Facebook ecosystem.
It didn’t take long though to get my account suspended for the second time. A few hours later and I saw myself going through the same time-consuming ritual. This is when I reached out to Facebook live support which turned out to be a ridiculous mix of AI and human communication line.
Starting a live chat and being served the “You violated the community standards” phrase was idiotic at best. This is when I informed the person on the other side to go ahead and wipe out my account so that we can finish this debacle once and for all. I guess they’re not used to getting these kind of replies from their addicted users.
A day later somebody from Facebook reached out to me apologizing for the mistake and reinstating my account.
For how long you might ask?
Therein lies the essence of what I’m about to share with you as my final thoughts.
Handing over our assets to a centralized entity turns us into “modern slaves” – for a lack of appropriate words. When we build our property on Facebook land we don’t own the keys. We therefore willingly give away our most precious commodity which is time.
The Facebook octopus is a deceptive and yet genius alchemist that knows how to turn time into behavioral data, repackage this gift and sell it for epic amounts of money.
The veil has been lifted and it’s up to us to decide wisely. Those who continue to cruise along and enjoy Meta’s limited “free” world are welcome to do so. For those of you willing to hold the keys and stay in control of your assets, see you on the decentralized spectrum of blockchain social platforms.
Originally published on my blog at StrengthInBusiness.com
