During the Christmas break in 2020, while we were in lockdown, I got kicked off Facebook.
I was told by the FB bots that I had contravened community guidelines and would never be allowed to have my Facebook account back EVER AGAIN!
They never said what had been posted that had caused such egregious offence to warrant this action by them and I was wracking my brains to think what I’d done or what I could do to fix things.
I searched online like a mad thing trying to see if others had experienced something similar, and to learn what they might have done to get their accounts back.
It wasn’t good news.
The robots that run Facebook…
It seems that unless you’re someone who spends millions advertising with Facebook and have some kind of special relationship or influence with them, if you lose your Facebook account for some reason you absolutely cannot get hold of a human to talk to.
There is zero customer service other than AI and robots.
While you have a right to access and download the data that you’ve shared on Facebook, you don’t have any other rights on their platform. The fact that you might have made Facebook the home for your business, that you’ve spent money with them paying for Facebook Ads for years or you’ve spent years nurturing and building a following of friends and subscribers simply doesn’t matter.
It’s their platform. They decide who can or can’t use it.
If the bots say no, you’re done for and you can’t get your account back!
End of story.
* This is what I discovered at the time when I was frantically researching to see if someone else who’d experienced the same thing (there were LOTS) had found a workaround. Things might be different now.
I was, however, able to download all my info from Facebook. It was quite unnerving to see how much data they have on us and our habits – particularly our buying habits, which, according to this article, is only a small portion of what they actually know about us.
And then, while I was looking through all the folders from my Facebook life, I came across one called ‘Logins’, and discovered other sign-ins to my account from other locations than where I was living during the lockdown.
So I am assuming I lost my account because some nefarious individual(s) hacked my account and posted content that got me banned.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
Imagine how the world might be if all these wilfully destructive people put their obvious skills to work in service to others rather than service to self! The world would be a different place.
What a waste!
For a while I felt shocked, angry, frustrated and bereft. I’d lost ten + years building business and personal connections. I was really sad to lose touch so suddenly like that from all my friends.
And yet, while all those things were coming up, and on the surface things appeared bleak, I was also aware of feeling so much cleaner and lighter.
All the data collection they do to build their AI power to control our perception, behaviours and culture I find really disconcerting, and the censorship to free speech that Facebook, Twitter, Google and the other social media platforms were collaborating on at that time felt awful. So on one level there was an upside to being unplugged from it, even if I’d not chosen to do it myself.
And because at the time I wasn’t using any other social media platforms, I found myself strangely free from the online world.
That all coincided with having recently moved back up north, where my parents and some good friends still lived. I went walking in the countryside nearly every day and I spent a lot of time gardening. So I had a complete step back from the online world and started having much more time with people I cared about IN REAL LIFE.
I think that was one of the biggest lessons for so many of us; that our busy lives, work and online lifestyles gradually made us forget how important and valuable real face-to-face human connection is, having time to connect with ourselves, and our innate connection to the natural world.
We need this kind of connection to be balanced, happy humans.
A reset to stop us being slowly boiled to death?
Until humanity had that global wake-up call and we were given the a chance to look at the world and where we are going with fresh eyes, too many of us were either unaware or unwilling to acknowledge the negative impacts of modern living and working.
This collective unconsciousness brings to mind the anecdotal parable about boiling a frog; the premise being that a frog placed in boiling water will immediately try to save itself and jump out of danger, but one placed in cool water that is gradually brought to a boil will not notice the heat until it is boiled to death.
We have collectively been seduced by the wonders of technology that created the online space, and while it has so many amazing benefits, over time we can clearly see the negative impact on our mental, physical and emotional wellbeing, especially on the younger generation, but still we cling onto it.
We need to be aware of negative threats that arise gradually, leaving us unaware of the danger until the situation is critical and in many cases, terminal.
Tiptoeing my way back onto social media
My break from being online felt very healing. It gave me a new perspective and greater awareness about how it impacts my energy and wellbeing. I’m much more mindful now of when I’ve had enough screen time and when I’ve been sitting at my computer long enough and need to move my body, and I’m really aware of the ‘shoulds’ that pull me to be more present on social media these days.
But I did succumb to the pull to get back on social media, and I’m still working out how to have a happy relationship with it, and to have it be my servant, and not my master.
If you’d like to connect with me you can generally find me on Instagram and Facebook (Yes, I managed to start a new account, so fingers crossed the plug doesn’t get pulled again!)
I’d love to connect with you on Facebook. If I know you already and you send me a friend request I will accept it, but there do seem to be a lot of people I don’t know who all seem to be marketers trying to sell me stuff. I’d rather just make genuine connections, so if we haven’t connected before, please send me a message to say hi, and we can connect from there.
It seems that a lot of people have had experiences with hacking or false accounts and stolen identities on Facebook. Since I set up my new account and started sending friend requests, so many friends emailed or WhatsApped me back to ask if it was really me, which is the sad truth of how things are, but it’s good that more people are aware and taking care of themselves.
So my message is, stay safe and protect yourself online, because what happened to me could happen to anyone.
At the very least, if you don’t have a strong enough password on your most important accounts, change them. Don’t use the same password for all your accounts, and consider using a service like Lastpass which is an encrypted vault for all your online passwords and can automatically create strong ones for you and fill them in for you when you go to login to a site.
The basic version is free and has lots of functionality.
If you’ve experienced your own social media security problems I’d love to hear what happened, how you managed the situation and what you took away from it, so do let me know in the comments below.
And if you haven’t, then I’m really glad and I hope you continue to stay safe and happy online.
Until next time,
Take care!
Lots of love,
