Tell HN: Meta developer account suspended | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Meta developer account suspended

172 pointsArthurVL183 comments

Hi all, my Meta developer account was suddenly restricted without warning, and there’s no way to appeal or reach support. I believe this may have been triggered by a location (read, IP address) change: I’m a student-entrepreneur who recently moved from China to Kenya for school holidays.

I’m building a WhatsApp-based accounting tool for African small businesses, and this restriction is blocking critical operations. I’ve come across others facing the same issue, with no review option or clear reason: https://www.reddit.com/r/WhatsappBusinessAPI/comments/1kvolv...

https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/1h1c79w/developer...

Some of the people in these posts were able to contact Meta support, but it seems like Meta has disabled direct support chats.

Thanks in advance.

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As I wrote on a past comment:

The real customer service for any Meta-related service is their legal department.

I've worked for a marketing firm whose clients (High End Fashion Industry in EU) were very prone to straddling the line regarding the Instagram ToS. If an account was disabled by some automatic trigger the lawyers would write/fax Meta asking for the account restoration, usually with no fuss on their side.

As you may guess, it wasn't exactly cheap. No idea if a lawyer may do something like that for you inexpensively or pro-bono given the nature of your app.

IME this also only works if you're a significant spender. Otherwise you get form responses.

Won't lie, my experience was strictly with some big brands, so I have no idea if even their legal ignores lesser accounts. But we're talking about going for a notarial route, they should at least acknowledge the request.

Big brands have a completely different experience. You can pay a small fee to be verified, which means you're immediately only going to be locked for actual violations (or at least borderline cases), not for things like logging into your account on vacation.

But verification is only available if you're "notable", whatever that means. Definitely not for us small businesses.

Sure, but here we're talking about something different. Ignoring a legal parcel in France means receiving, years from now, a "request for personal appearance of the parties" somewhere from a local court to the cour de cassation, where they will have to notify that your request was ignored. It's in their interest to give a quick reply, even just to say "Uhh... nope, sue us if you want to go on with your lost cause".

Of course, I have no idea if any of that is applicable to the legislation where currently the OP resides.

> Instagram ToS

I am curious, is there something in there that legally binds them to restore an account automatically disabled? I was under the impression that, since Instagram is a free service offered by a non-state company, they are not legally obligated to keep any account opened. What would the lawyers sue Meta for? As I understand it, if you build a business on instagram and your account gets deleted/disabled for whatever reason, you have no grounds to sue Meta

As my boss at the time eloquently said: LVMH is not gonna take "sorry but our ToS" for an answer after they spend millions in their latest ad campaign because if you squint hard enough you can see Lea Seydoux's nipples. And meta knows that extremely well, so there never was any doubts about them restoring any accounts no matter what the ToS says.

Haha, I believe I know what kind of ToS violations you are talking about. Multiple LVMH (and subsidiaries) accounts doing live streaming on Instagram with unauthorized tools. We had multiple instances of account being blocked automatically and being unbanned within an hour because somebody at LVMH put pressure on them.

...All while the Paris (or Milan? Can't remember for sure) Fashion Week was live. It was a stupidly nerve breaking job, I'm glad I'm very, very far away from it.

Shoutout to The Level Group guys (https://www.thelevelgroup.com) who kept the infra live and running during all that madness.

I travel a lot and this has happened to me several times. My business Instagram account was completely and irreversibly disabled because I tried to use it while in Thailand (I'm based in Vietnam).

My Google maps account was blocked also when traveling, but fortunately after several weeks I was able to get that one back.

With Instagram though I just had to make a new account. I also have a Meta Business account (business.facebook.com) and the Instagram account was linked there. The Facebook business account, pages were never blocked though, just the Instagram one.

Unfortunately after a few months I just had to accept it and make a new account. I hope you have more luck, but I assume it's the same with any Meta products. There is no support you can contact, no way to get redress. If it's possible, try to avoid using Meta products to build anything. I understand that's not always possible though, I run a bakery and absolutely must have both Google Maps and Instagram, much as I wish I didn't.

Why do you -need- Instagram and Google Maps? Why not market in more classical ways that will make you stand out in a corpotech world?

> My Google maps account

What is a "Google maps account"? I have a Google account, which I use with their various services.

Google business account. Which is different than a Google ads account - I was able to get in touch with Google ads support easily but they said the two departments can't talk to each other. It took several weeks to get through to business account support.

Edit: and note, I log into both of these via my personal Google account, which is also a different thing.

I follow several influencers on Instagram and YT with over !M subs that have been locked out of their accounts with no explanation and no response to their information requests. One opened up a Twitter/X account to try to request help, but unfortunately, since that account was new, he didn't have much traction.

Remember that Whatsapp belongs to Mark Zuckerburg, not you, the users, or the developers. They can ban anyone for any reason at any time, and it does not need to be a good reason. There is no appeals court for corpotech.

This is a great lesson on the fragility of building businesses on private, centralized, and proprietary platforms.

It is a lesson I wish I learned a lot earlier in my career.

>There is no appeals court for corpotech.

Unless you live in the EU. [1]

[1] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/dsa-out-co...

Yeah, this is a perfect example of the need for regulation of the mega-apps.

This will never happen in any useful way internationally on an open internet.

The only winning move for users is to invest in decentralized open source unkillable alternatives.

It's already happening in the more stable democracies.

It depends entirely on comments like the one you wrote here.

To me it is obvious they had more than enough time and opportunity to do it properly themselves and the tools at their disposal get more glorious every year. Users grow more and more dependent on them. Services control more of our lives.

They have LLM's now! Really good ones! So good they can format and sort 90% of the customer service issues into well known boxes.

You can also have people pay for support. 1000 euro might be nothing compared to losing an account. Write me a nice report what exactly went wrong. It can be [] my fault [] their fault. It can result in [] permanently banned [] account restored. They can [] refund the fee [] ask for ____ more money.

They thought themselves to important to do it themselves. You are unworthy of even the worse kangaroo court and unworthy of trial by robot. Those are pretty damn low standards.

It will eventually happen because we have lots of wealthy influential people in the global law apparatus and they are really being mocked here.

Mega corps are going for the heaviest punishment they can apply for all possible offenses they chose not to describe. LOL You aren't sentenced to death only because they lack the means to do it but I'm sure they are killing plenty of people indirectly.

I even think out taxes should pay for their customer service.

On the open internet, no, but the financial system is both closed and very valuable to companies like Meta. Europe can't stop American websites collecting personal data without consent. It can stop them getting any payments from Europe though. Usually that's worth more to them than the data.

I’m in Europe and the EU was certainly no help when Google blocked me from Adsense with no recourse.

This is a 3 year old act, when were you blocked ?

Did you open a complaint with a certified Out-of-Court Settlement Body?

Meanwhile, in the real world, people who actually run businesses have to rely on quasi utilities like the stuff that meta offers, because building a business for the people who are willing to to use mastodon is not a fucking thing.

Buy a domain and make your own system. Only use other people's platforms for marketing and pr, or as commodity providers that are easily replaced. You can make your own business that you actually own and control. It's even cheap - only need a domain and a vps.

Both domains and VPSes aren't yours. More importantly, your customers will never find it because they're idiots who only look on Instagram. Meta encourages this kind of idiocy, of course. You get to choose: accept reality as it is, or deal in false reality and go out of business accordingly.

I run a profitable b2b tech company that does not use any Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Meta products.

Is that the easiest choice? Hell no. But it makes us a lot harder to kill, and is great for morale.

> b2b

There you have it. Now try B2C.

My team and I produce tons of software for consumers, but we open source all of it for free. Proprietary software should not exist and consumers are getting raked over the coals enough as it is.

Yet you're implying the actual revenue comes from the B2B side.

This is exactly why Google, Meta, etc shouldn't have the power to own such a huge part of the (western) web

We, the users, gave them that power. We can also take it away.

You actually can lead a productive socially rich life and even run a tech company in the modern world without using any products by Google, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, etc.

There are open source alternatives to everything if we do research beyond what is advertised to us.

What kind of mobile phone do you have?

lol, unrelated to anything, but I had a police detective in my house about a year ago for something unrelated to me, though he did question me. At the end, he asked for my phone number. "Oh, I don't do phones. I've got a VOIP number if you want." He was so friendly up to that point, but then he clearly SCOWLED at me; I was so taken aback that I laughed at it.

I know this is OT for the thread, but I'd be interested in hearing how you're using VOIP, provider(s) you've used, and any interesting hacks.

I'd recently twigged that I don't want a mobile phone that forwards to, say, an Asterisk server I control, but an Asterisk server (and VOIP number(s)) I can optionally forward to a mobile or other service (e.g., possibly Jitsi Meet or Signal).

That last I could then interact with on a subnotebook laptop or tablet device. The phone would principally exist as a tether or true-emergency comms.

We used Asterisk at work for a long while (and probably still do, but I've been out of professional IT for nearly a decade) which routed to hardware SIP phones or else Zoiper on both PC and Android on-call phones. While I maintained the Asterisk server environment and set up new SIP phones occasionally, the in-the-weeds VOIP stuff was handled by a technician at our local VOIP company, and the Asterisk setup existed prior to me joining, so I'm sorry to say I don't have much insight to offer.

I can say Zoiper worked just fine for employees and Zoiper installs were set up very similarly to how we set up take-home phones; they had/have a browser extension to click-to-dial numbers in our ticketing systems, which was nice -- there may be good FOSS software out for these tasks now.

I don't do anything special at home; I just use a headset connected to PC for Google Voice with a free (in the US, at least) number and don't even see when calls come in unless they leave a message or I know someone's going to call and I leave a Google Voice tab open. Messages get forwarded to email. There are sometimes services I can't sign up for as a result of only having a VOIP number -- Anthropic in particular comes to mind as a company which blocks VOIP numbers for signup, but no essential services (e.g. bank, broker, kids' school) in the 10 or so years I've been phoneless. Yealink makes a really nice DECT headset I use (a WHB640) in and around the house, but it's way too expensive; fantastic range, though.

Thanks!

I use a VoIP account from a pocketable linux laptop when I need SMS or calling capability on the go, which is rare. It can normally wait, so I normally carry no devices at all.

Not carried a cell phone in ~5 years.

Some users gave them that power over other users. It's not enough to avoid Meta yourself. Your would-be customers need to also avoid Meta, and good luck making them do that, when you have no contact with them, because you're not on Meta where they're looking!

Whatever the reason, they should have at least communicated it before banning the user. Leaving people in the dark makes them rightfully angry.

You see so many marketplace accounts suspended without a good reason that it seems like people are making more effort to get accounts suspended than meta makes to restore them.

I know someone who got suspended every day at 9 am for 50 to 70 days in a row. Every time there was a message with an appeal button. A few hours later everything was back to normal. Eventually the message didn't arrive. >the end<

There was also an alternative option to solve an issue with a product listing. There is no way to skip that if you don't have any listings.

Most interesting part were the days without any other activity on the account besides the ban/unban ritual.

They just made a new account and continued to but and sell similarly, no issues for over a year.

The trigger is not in the data(!)

I suggest you put a way of contacting you into your HN profile in case someone wants to help.

i have faced the same issue severally, opening different accounts that get suspended immediately with no activity and no clear reason of suspension. Very draining.

Someone find a Meta employee to submit an Oops.

I hope too,

I hope so

> Thanks in advance.

I understand the spirit of this post but this makes it sound like HN is FAANG's support forum. Maybe as a last resort it is, but too on the nose for me.

The presumption is that for someone without a hyper-connected Silicon Valley social network, someone here currently probably works for Meta, could get in touch with them to verify their claim, and possibly help them submit an Oops. Many megacorps don't have any sort of official approachable support path and DGAF about individual users.

My (former) personal account was instabanned twice for simply browsing the 2FA page during the Meta hiring process. It turned out I had a zombie FB account that I'd prefer to have obliterated because I didn't have access to the email it was associated with any longer, e.g., @stanford.edu, and that was tripping the "one FB account per human" rule.

When I worked there, employees were no longer allowed to submit an Oops request for anyone other than, IIRC, themselves or close family (and they had to personally vouch for those). Very user-unfriendly for sure.

Oops oops )':

MPK emitted a not-so-subtle, semi snob culture, for sure. I guess it got worse[?.]

As in most organizations, the genuine cool people and the genuine coolness of the culture gradually evaporates is replaced with an uncool simulacra.

Microkitchen selection and quality went down a lot, and I hear it's not great these days.

Opines for the sea of VMware Palo Alto micro/kitchen snack shelves c. 2011.

PS PSA: Anyone interviewing on-site somewhere for partial WfH or complete RTO, evaluating their snacks should be high on the list because it sends signals like they're cheap/adequate, considerate/not, and boring/awesome. Not exactly a "brown M&Ms" signal, but close.

HN's policy is to deprecate HN-as-customer-support-of-last-resort:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34444459>, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190090>

(I ... somewhat disagree, but can understand the viewpoint, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36580124> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36444020> for example.)

Honestly good luck. I left a company and removed myself from the meta account which triggered the deletion of our whole app. Impossible to recover. Meta suck.

My advice is to build such solutions around open products like Signal, XMPP or Matrix if possible. Or even Telegram.

On top of providing a better developer experience compared to Meta's ultra-locked and limited APIs, they aren't subject to the whims of a giant faceless company that can kill your product for no apparent reason with no chances of appeal.

Especially if you're doing these projects for folks in the developing world. Let's not lock them in proprietary American spyware like the whole West has already done :) from a user's perspective, if things are done properly, it'll just be a matter of installing another app.

And btw using a Matrix server with a WhatsApp bridge could also be a temporary solution to bypass the ban. But I haven't tested it with business accounts.

I think you're ultimately correct, the trouble is the same as what advertisers discovered when they tried to do the same thing years ago.

Facebook owned the users. Similarly, WhatsApp owns the users.

The choice between:

1. Tying yourself to a platform that could boot you at any time, while also reaching all the users they already have

2. Bootstrapping something from scratch with 0 users, when all the users you want are already using said platform and have little incentive to leave

Choice 1 is often the only viable option, particularly if you're financially dependent on the results.

I also think we repeatedly see, even on HN, that "it'll just be a matter of installing another app" is actually a huge mental hurdle for many people - especially those who aren't technologically savvy enough to know how to use something that isn't Facebook/WhatsApp for communicating with people.

Choice #3 is to leverage every platform and work to educate your customers on how to reach them outside of any of these platforms.

Buy a domain. Lead everyone to your domain.

I don't disagree, but the words "leverage", "educate" and "lead" are doing a tremendous amount of heavy lifting.

Especially when your competition in leading, educating and leveraging is Meta.

Indeed. If they are your customers, then it’s your job to work on effective communications. remember how we did it before the days of social media? It can be still be done- just learn the channels outside Facebook and establish points where the customers can reach you there. Make it painless and easy. That might mean managing your own support platform instead of using Facebooks for free.

This reminds me of a thread a few days ago where I pointed out a similar thing you’re saying here. I think you make a strong case that, in the business context, this tie in is mandatory.

It’s all well and good taking a principled stance on not using FB/WhatsApp/etc. While you’re doing that, your competitors are selling out, using them, and getting to your customers more easily than you are. They might get cut off but that’s tomorrow’s problem, while your problem is here and now.

In many markets, avoiding WhatsApp if you need messaging kills your company on arrival.

Then it sounds like the best business in those markets is to disrupt Whatsapp and educate users on the problems of relying on billionaires like Zuck for privacy.

If it's so easy, why haven't you done it yet?

Nothing worth doing is easy. Personally I run my business without corpotech to do my own part.

Signal is a closed centrally controlled network that has a hard requirement on users to pay money to centrally controlled telco providers to get accounts making it impossible to be legally anonymous in most countries. It is also very unfriendly to custom clients or automation. In those regards it is no different from WhatsApp.

Matrix however is a great choice imo.

I've never paid for signal?

I suspect they are referring to how you need a phone number from a provider presumably linked to the ITU to sign up to signal?

Correct

WhatsApp has a critical advantage in Kenya from my experience: telecom operators such as Safaricom include quite generous WA bundles in their customers' subscriptions, allowing one to use it even though they would otherwise be out of credits. Being out of credits/airtime is not uncommon, since the economical bundles are sold as expiring in 24h/7d/30d.

It's more generic than that. If you build on other peoples turf or your operation depends on others you risk everything on a change of terms or a service vanishing entirely. The company could be big, could be small.

One classic joke is buying your competitors supplier.

While I don't enough about the problem domain and the app, "just don't use WhatsApp" is not necessarily helpful. The dev experience might be better, I dunno, but your product also needs users, and in my countries / communities, WhatsApp is the only thing they use, and meeting your users where they are is important.

Forcing your users to first install one more messaging app is going to cause people abandoning you immediately or slowly churn, which can make or break a product.

As a rule of thumb, getting access to human support is only a thing for paid accounts. If you just opened a free account and are not paying any money to Meta, Meta is rightfully not considering you a paid customer and is unlikely to spend valuable human time on you. I don't know why people think that internet-mediated services are free, you don't just jump on a train or coach for free.

In this case I think the pricing is based on usage, so it's not possible to pay ahead. https://business.whatsapp.com/resources/faq "We charge based on the number of conversations" "There is no additional fee to access our platform directly."

Understand the feeling of being rug pulled. But you built something in another person’s walled garden, gotta be prepared to get kicked out anytime.

Perhaps channel your energy to building something else more stable, and stop adding value to Meta (because they really dgaf about you)

Thanks for what?

This is the way of the world. Unaccountable mega-corporations, the feudal lords of the modern world.

Half of people here work at said mega-corporations, I think.

And a lot of the other half want to grow their idea into their own mega-corp. This is YC after all.

Yeah, the cloud-feudalism/techno-feudalism isn't much different to old feudalisms. The lord can change their mind about what us serfs are allowed or not allowed to do in their realm, and we have little to no recourse, their henchmen can refuse us access and take all our belongings.

Huh, interestingly, a particular superpower has also become very feudal the last half year.

HN is the support contact of last resort. Occasionally you can resolve an unresolvable problem by posting it here. Especially when there's enough outrage or some CEO happens to browse or one of the higher position people usually does damage control PR here.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive/indignant comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

I know there is much to be indignant about, but it kills the curious conversation that this site exists for, and that only makes everything worse. No one is saying you owe unaccountable mega-corporations better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Not sure this site is a support forum for Meta either....

I hope the poster is able to reach Facebook / Meta and resolve this - but I wanted to, in fine HN tradition, go off an a related tangent - the recent Pycon keynote by Cory Doctorow - who’s pointed out that for decades the US has threatened economic sanctions (ie tariffs) against allies in order to get their way in things like digital markets.

But now the tariff gun has been fired there is little incentive not to make the digital global markets a level playing field - enforce open interoperability, reduce the cost of App Stores and so on - something that would enable a small entrepreneur in Kenya to build on top of a global spanning utility platform without fear or favour

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