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I lost my facebook account about five years ago--total outright account ban. No recourse at all. It happened to a group of about 10 people that had been administrators of a local non-profit's facebook page and who had managed groups for the organization in the past. Our non-profit was non-denominational and helped local teens with after school type programs. We never knew why our personal accounts were banned. Best we could figure was that we used a tagline in the past in some facebook comments and posts that later got co-opted and spread by a "white power" group in the USA. We were located in Canada.

At the time, some people recommended buying an Occulus device and calling their support because they were able to recover accounts and they had human support. We tried appealing to the company on social media, but we didn't have any luck.

I had to rebuild my social media profile and our organizations profiles and I lost 14 years of Messenger conversations, posts, and photos. These memories were just gone. It sucked. For the non-profit, it meant lost donations and lost connections for our alumni. Keep your own content off-platform.

Buying an Oculus actually did allow me to successfully restore my wife's Facebook after it was hacked, thanks to finding probably the same thread you're referencing.

The amount of emotional capital held in various platforms is terrifying when you consider how easy it is to be locked out.

I now regularly "takeout" all of our actively used platforms and store them on physical media.

This is corporate fraud and I would love there to be an internal email discovered, "Hey, our game plan is to control the Oculus ecosystem purely so people have to buy it if they want their Facebook account unbanned (which we'll randomly do on occasion, to ensure this happening)"

Does this still work?

I registered an instagram account to share my art, and was banned entirely, immediately, before I could even upload an avatar, with zero explanation. I emailed several times, did the license scan thing, and even messaged support from my personal account, and I still have never gotten any sort of explanation.

shrug This and that other thread today about Slack just seems to be what happens when you're determined to remove as many humans from your processes as possible.

Try Pixelfed or even Bluesky. Pixelfed is the fediverse alternative to Instagram, and there are some independent app devs working on Bluesky apps to be similar in look to it.

You won't find the reach, but you'll find a little community of other artists that can be a lot more personal & fulfilling than you would find on mainstream social media.

https://pixelfed.org/

I know this happens with a lot of companies but I see this as a direct consequence of Mark Zuckerberg owning companies

Everybody knows his history. Yes you can, "steal an idea". He does it to everyone. He did it to Snapchat. It shouldn't be a surprise the things he owns are substandard garbage

Makes a good case to have separate brand accounts for nearly everything and to do little from your own personal identity accounts

> At the time, some people recommended buying an Occulus device and calling their support because they were able to recover accounts and they had human support. We tried appealing to the company on social media, but we didn't have any luck.

This is one of the weird things about social media; it can be extremely valuable to people, but there's no way to actually pay the company providing it for the privilege of having a fair manual review from customer service.

The internet has been like this forever. In the 90s I was banned from hotmail for having an inappropriate email address because my last name is Cummings. No recourse for some idiotic regex filter.

I guess the only solution is to self-host. I've even been migrating my dedicated server to a homelab I'm slowly building. But that's a very time-consuming option, has a high chance of breakage, and not even available for 99.5% of people. And most people don't wants to spend hours and hours of private time to babysit own email server, which is understandable. Finally, it's not free.

I wonder what would have to happen for people to become more digitally sovereign, but I doubt it'll ever happen. If anything, we're going in the other direction.

Ahh, it's called the Scunthorpe problem! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

> The problem arises since computers can easily identify strings of text within a document, but interpreting words of this kind requires considerable ability to interpret a wide range of contexts, possibly across many cultures, which is an extremely difficult task.

Humans have issues with such tasks, too, apparently. Hence their push to change IT terminology, e.g. master -> main git branch.

Indeed, I got my Hotmail suspended because of something not terribly different. Thank God in those days not every account insisted on 2fa through email

What happens if your last name is Cummings and your home address is in Penistone, South Yorkshire, England?

Or perhaps in the quaint fishing town of Dildo, Newfoundland.

Don’t forget about Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, England!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pussy,_Savoie

Hi Richard

Clbuttic.

I know that feel, I'm Hugh Mongous.

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