
What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012) - lisper
http://www.optimizationtoday.com/social-media/what-i-learned-when-facebook-disabled-my-account/
======
krylon
On the one hand, I cannot help but feel for this person - Facebook, without an
explanation, did significant damage to this person's career. At least that's
the way he paints it (though he mentions a rule in his mailbox that deleted
mail from facebook automatically, so there might have been a warning and all
that - we'll never know).

On the other hand, well, that is precisely what some people warned us of -
give a single company that much power, and it will inevitably be abused, be it
by malice or incompetence.

But it is not easy to give any useful advice, because there is basically no
alternative to facebook - you can go with the flow or stay away from it. But
there is not "something like Facebook without all the problems that come with
it being a single large profit-driven corporation". The only solution I can
think of is for lots and lots of people to pool their money and start a non-
profit Facebook. And even then, I am not overly optimistic, because by now the
network effect is far too strong.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
Folks have tried starting alternatives to facebook: I think the real problem
is that facebook is more similiar to a phone company that only connects its
users to others that have the same phone company. It was the only game in town
for a while, so this has made it into a near-monopoly.

If facebook was required to have some level of across-platform access, this
might level the playing field and give us actual choice. Unfortunatly, I think
this will take legislative action to accomplish. Until then, luck and time
might change the course of things.

~~~
davidcbc
Facebook has never been the only game in town. It has just been and continues
to be the best game in town.

~~~
leni536
And the best by being the largest...

~~~
davidcbc
"People use it" is a pretty important feature for a social network though.

Whatever replaces Facebook will have to be "cool" enough to get people to
actually want to use it. "Facebook but with better privacy" just isn't cool,
so the average person isn't going to bother.

------
Jaruzel
I know the article is old, but the author showed a severe lack of common
sense.

Facebook is NOT a backup. If you only keep stuff in your Facebook account,
then it is as 'at risk' as if you only kept on the hard-drive of your ageing
laptop that you bought on discount in Walmart/ASDA ten years ago.

This oft quoted adage also applies: 'If you are not paying for the product,
then you are the product'. The author seemed to think that Facebook owe him
for some reason, and that he is fully justified/entitled in begging for his
account back. Facebook is a private company who most of the time let the
general public mingle in the lobby of its HQ[1]. As their lobby is still their
property, they can refuse entry _whenever they like_.

Something needs to be done about Facebook's near dominance of the Social Media
space. If we let this run unchecked for much longer, there won't be an
'internet' \- just millions of stale, abandoned websites all simply
redirecting you to their respective Facebook Pages instead. It also wouldn't
surprise me if at some point, new phones will be released where the browser
app is no longer installed by default, but the Facebook app is. Even if this
happened today, most non-technical users wouldn't even notice.

\---

[1] Because the lobby is full of adverts from Facebook's business partners and
Facebook gets a nice cut if you buy something being advertised.

~~~
flexie
Law is full of regulations and court precedents that restrict what people can
do to their private property. Here on HN people seem to think that private
property is like a subclass in python where the owner is free to define
whatever method or property he wants and overwrite rules inherited from the
society superclass. It's not.

Landlords cannot just evict renters based on the landlord's own terms of
service, not even a renter's non-paying children or girlfriend with whom the
landlord didn't contract, and not even the renter himself although the stopped
paying: The landlord needs to follow the rules of society, go through a
bailiff's court or follow similar strict procedures defined in society to
ensure that mandatory law is followed.

Not everybody can set up a medical clinic on their private property, even if
they offer their services for free.

TV stations in many European countries can't show hidden ads in programmes and
cannot show ads for kids for certain products. Even though the viewers didn't
pay. Even though they are free not to watch.

In most places landowners cannot freely decide to do what they want with their
land, like building a factory, without taking into consideration zoning laws
and without hearing the neighbors or wider community as well.

For millennia, what we today call criminal laws, have applied on private
property as well. You can't just hit somebody in the face because they are in
your house and the terms on the door clearly says that you can. Think that's
ridiculous? Well, it used to be that restaurants in America could chose to
serve whites only. It was the choice of the property owner. Until it wasn't.
Courts and congress decided that such practices were so despicable that the
general interest of non-discrimination outweighed the interest in business
owners getting to decide for themselves. Same with businesses hiring men only.
Today most of us regard it as obvious that non discrimination laws trump the
interest of private owners. A few decades ago, most people thought the owner
could choose freely whom to hire.

I hope we will start regulating the new advertising industry comprised of
social networks and search engines more tightly.

~~~
userbinator
_You can 't just hit somebody in the face because they are in your house and
the terms on the door clearly says that you can._

This may be worth a read:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_doctrine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_doctrine)

~~~
flexie
Note how the conditions for invoking the castle doctrine are set by society,
not by the property owner. It's not a method defined within the class. It's a
method inherited from the superclass.

------
suhastech
Big companies don't owe you anything by hosting the files for you, because you
are the product. Something similar happened to me in 2012 but with a Gmail
account[1]. So, I built an app to backup my emails.

The whole ordeal, in hindsight, was the best thing that could happen to me, it
taught me a good lesson on data sovereignty in the internet world and opened
up a small passive income stream.

[1] [https://thehorcrux.com/why-i-built-horcrux-
app/](https://thehorcrux.com/why-i-built-horcrux-app/)

~~~
JetSpiegel
Yeah, I too was a victim of a random Gmail ban without warning or recourse, so
I stopped using webmail ask together and keep all my mail local.

~~~
suhastech
Agreed.

I always tell people I know to atleast use an email address with their own
domain, if they can't set up their own server.

[https://thehorcrux.com/about/#advise](https://thehorcrux.com/about/#advise)

~~~
qrbLPHiKpiux
In one line, you said Google disabled your account.

In another line, you say have your own domain and let FastMail or google apps
manage your mail.

I don't understand ./?

~~~
leni536
1\. You can still backup your email if you want to.

2\. You get to keep your email address if you ever get banned.

I do not think there any benefit in operating your own mail server.

------
antihero
I think the worst thing that they do is disable your ability to send messages.
This weekend a friend committed suicide, and I had just started a seven day
ban due to idiotically posting the wrong photo (a nude) to a meme group.

Whereas most of my closest friends have me on WhatsApp, so I could reassure
them I was ok, it was really fucking horrible getting a bunch of Messenger
messages asking if I was ok and being completely unable to respond to them.

Poor timing I know, but if they expect people to use and depend upon
Messenger, it's actually really irresponsible to take away the ability for
people to communicate with each other, plus I see no benefit in doing that.

Most of my friends I eventually managed to get in contact with in other ways,
but others I couldn't. Sure it's technically my fault for posting smut whilst
drunk, but hindsight is 20/20 and we all make mistakes.

Furthermore, there appears to be absolutely no form of appeals process or a
way to say, get the ban suspended due to it being some messed up times.

With great power comes great responsibility.

~~~
King-Aaron
I know it's not directly on-topic, but I find it amazing that people end up
copping a seven-day ban for a bit of titty, but then nothing is done for those
videos of people killing puppies and shit.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
There are plenty of racist extremist kooks on FB, and their posts are rarely -
if ever - banned.

Apparently a stray nipple is more of a threat to society.

~~~
InitialLastName
A stray nipple is a cheaper binary test than "above some threshold of
ideological hatefulness"

~~~
jjnoakes
"cheaper binary test" shouldn't be the way to decide though.

~~~
AlexandrB
It's _the_ quintessential Computer Science way to decide. "Which algorithm has
lower complexity? Nudity filter? Ok, use that one."

This is why it's very frustrating that any equivalent of "the public square"
on the internet is almost always owned by a private entity.

------
ggm
The meta-lesson from this, is that hosted domains, services have to meet the
AUP of the host, and your SLA with the host has to cover off on dispute or you
are in a high risk situation. I have a personal domain hosted at google. I
stand at risk of having them close the google account but retention of the
domain is outside of that situation, I would need to be rejected by both
google, and the dns registrar to lose all control of that personal domain (not
impossible. not unlikely if google WAS my dns registrar). I might lose the
data, but I can at least have continuity of service at my own risk levels if I
do some basic minimum of holding copies off the domain or managing the state
of the domain outside of google.

In facebook, this is just a lot harder. There is no outside. The tools to
upload and manage content as a small enterprise are much less clear to me.
What I've seen suggests most people treat it as the repo, and write into it as
the repo, and operate in it. They don't upload to it from an external state or
use an API.

But it would be true in AWS, in any hosted solution, in any space which you
think is your space, but is actually a brand like myspace: if you don't own
it, you run it under their terms and conditions.

Its a contract. you might not like it, but that 30 page ream of randomly
mutating text T&C matters.

I've talked to people who got shut out. It sure hurts. I do not like to think
what I would lose, should I fall into breach of my T&C or be detected as being
in breach, and blackhole the notices.

My colleagues who do, or did work in google say that whilst it looks
arbitrary, if you respect their mails of warning and commitment, if you reply
in sequence through the hoops, you can survive being called out. If you dis-
respect their sequence, or try to avoid hoops, you will suffer.

My experience with FB is similar, helping persians who suffered abuse of yahoo
emails by opponents of their world view, marked as recovery accounts for
facebook pages. If you do the right sequence (mutating) of things with FB, you
can recover. But its not well documented at any specific point in time what
that sequence is and you cannot easily get third parties to help you.

~~~
ghaff
The reality is that you are always subject to T&Cs and decisions of a wide
range of third-party service providers. Even in the most independent case,
you're probably still dependent on domain registrars and one or more ISPs--as
well as being affected by the actions of organizations like Spamhaus.

What you can (and often should) do for critical services is to use providers
that don't create huge dependencies on a particular provider. It's probably a
lot easier to switch from sites hosted on Digital Ocean to AWS than it is from
Facebook to X. Furthermore, if you're hosting sites on a site that actually
exists for that purpose, I have a lot more confidence I'll be able to work
through issues than one hosting sites more or less incidentally (as in the
case of Facebook).

------
jauer
From 2012. This part is quite dated: "Facebook can disable your account if
your display name is different than that on your birth certificate".

~~~
GoToRO
Right. Now they make you upload a photo with your full face showing. No need
for certificate.

Just create a new account, now.

------
seattle_spring
Every person I've known to have their FB account deleted also happened to be
people who posted inflammatory, toxic content on a daily basis. most of them
also acted that way in PMs with people, but on an even more terrible level.
Harassment level conversations, and probably a much larger scope than I was
directly aware of.

I am not at all convinced that Facebook just deletes accounts for no reason.
Sure, high-profile people get maliciously flagged sometimes, but I seriously
doubt these randoms who get deleted are telling the entire story.

~~~
rexpop
Facebook is such a mega-center of cultural life, that for it to have a black-
box method of permanently banning people is dangerous, however you may feel
about the "attitudes" of the people who're ostracized.

Maybe I am inflating their role.

~~~
seattle_spring
It's not a black box method. Their Community Standards[1] are pretty cut and
dry, and every person I've known to have been banned was flagrantly
disregarding those standards for months prior to their accounts being
deactivated.

[1]
[https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards](https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards)

------
MikeVanBike
I learn to quit facebook very early days. I don't like the privacy violations
or that big brother spying you feeling. Also account deletions are happening
to everyone who talk against facebook. Crooked as google. Both really
disappointing services all the way.

People, please use alternatives

~~~
smeroth
Alternatives to Facebook that's not made by Google?

~~~
dredmorbius
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social)

[https://gnu.io/social/](https://gnu.io/social/)

------
subroutine
As others have pointed out: fb is not your primary disk, so back up your pix.
If they're offering a free service, you are the product.

I'm gunna add one obvious thing to that list... fb is not _your_ product.

As I was reading through that article, it was all - client this, client that.
"I can't admin my client's fb pages." _Admin_. A fb page admin. Cuz it sort of
reads like: I perform guerrilla social marketing, SEO, and branding campaigns
for a myriad of clients on someone else's social network, and they banned my
account for spamming their users.

 _" Why would fb do this to me"_, he asks himself, but then realized
something, " _something very important - I hate getting bullshit spam all day
from facebook, so I filtered all Facebook updates to Skip Inbox, Delete.
Surely the answer to why they blocked me was there somewhere._ "

------
Jaruzel
Site down. Cached copy:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20170525042302/http://www.optimi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170525042302/http://www.optimizationtoday.com/social-
media/what-i-learned-when-facebook-disabled-my-account/)

------
snakeanus
And this is why we should move away from services with a centralised point of
failure.

------
Joeri
If this happened, then under the EU data directive facebook would be obligated
to still provide all data they have on someone even after they disable their
account. So, the data would not be gone as long as it was not deleted.

------
helloindia
From my experience, it's nearly impossible to get help from Facebook/Instagram
if what you need is not listed in their help page. I used to have two Insta
accounts and two FB accounts(personal & professional). When Instagram released
a new version to add multiple insta accounts, I did the mistake of adding my
work account. But Insta was so buggy that it merged my imported FB friend list
of both my Insta accounts. This incident made me never trust Insta/FB/Whatsapp
again.

~~~
tajen
Slack has a flawless multi-account implementation, which surprised me in this
era where corporates try to aggressively create links between our accounts
(import/suggest users, merge, or share the advertising ID). But, for example,
if you do politically controversial activity on one Twitter account [1], I
wouldn't add it in the multi-profile iPhone app: I would be too afraid of
being banned from one and losing all accounts together, or the identity of all
accounts be shared with law enforcement. I wonder what Chrome shares between
multi-accounts profiles, but I have low trust in it for isolating data.

[1] I criticize my city's law enforcement, by filming where crime happens,
where the police really is and the faults they do. I don't think it's illegal
but I still wouldn't want my identity shared to them.

------
zamalek
> So what did I learn from my experience with Facebook? Back up your account!
> You never know if/when they’ll decide to delete you.

Just delete your account. Find a way to share your photos without any of this
nonsense: Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Flickr. Not only do you run the
risk of Facebook deleting your stuff, but [when I still had an account] it was
was a dreadful UX for exploring photos. Use products built for photos if you
want to get the most out of your photos.

~~~
barking
Yes. Thankfully I've never felt the inclination to join Facebook and reading
stories like this just makes me angry at Facebook and at people for making
them so powerful.

------
naskwo
(cough cough) www.famipix.com More info: [https://www.famipix.com/privacy-
promise](https://www.famipix.com/privacy-promise)

And: free for schools, with intuitive (and well-documented) features to let
schools quickly share photos with parents.

And of course download a zip of your albums whenever you want.

-

I started this site in 2005 to share photos of my growing family, as I was
living abroad. I've never shared any meaningful photos on Facebook.

------
mnm1
This applies to almost any online service including Amazon, Google, etc.
Basically, these services are so unreliable and risky that using them for
anything critical is dangerous. Even if you pay for them. They can and will
shut down accounts for no reason. That is a risk people should be more aware
of. Since the services are not dependable, it's a mistake to depend on them.

~~~
tajen
I run my whole company on a Digital Ocean account. I'm frightened at the idea
of the account being suddenly shut, for example if I miss a payment and the
process had a bug.

------
wfunction
Anybody know what those who have the "wrong" name on Facebook but who can't
change their name anymore (because they already changed it once and got
reported or something) are supposed to do? Obviously IDs are going to show
your legal name rather than the one you go by, so if you send one in, won't
you just be giving Facebook proof that you violated their ToS, and won't they
just ban you instead of updating it? Or if you don't send one in, then how can
you change your name to the "correct" one so you don't lose your account like
this later?

------
johnchristopher
The article is from 2012. Not that I have seen Facebook changing its ways,
anyway.

------
lyra_comms
We've always felt strongly about Facebook's views on real names: they're
intrusive and unfair.

So we made Lyra, a better conversation service which lets you have whatever
name you like (among other things).
[https://hellolyra.com/c/343](https://hellolyra.com/c/343)

We're a nonprofit and don't take investment, so excuse the plug :)

------
pqwEfkvjs
Pretty weird, I have been operating a number of fake accounts for spamming,
trolling and information retrieval purposes for years and never got a single
account blocked.

I've only got challenges to identify people in pictures if too many people
deny your friend request in some time window. But this is easy to solve as you
can see the faces by searching their name in second window.

------
uranian
You should have learned to be very happy they disabled your account! Facebook
is for idiots and for companies that milk those idiots. This event likely
saved you for wasting even more of your precious life time. Be happy and do
some great things with your life without feeling the need to constantly show
off.

~~~
blowski
I partly agree with you, as I quit Facebook years ago, and have never wanted
to go back. That said, I don't think people who use it are idiots. In fact, I
can see that they get a lot of value from it. A lot of genuinely valuable
content is siloed in Facebook - you're not an idiot just because you can't get
it from somewhere else.

~~~
uranian
I didn't say all people who use it are idiots. But willingly sharing your
private data for free while waiving all your rights? If you realise that
facebook runs AI on that data and knows much more about you then you could
ever imagine, and if you realise they are selling that data to companies you
might not like so much, or what else more, that's pretty stupid imao.

------
basicplus2
Am I reading it correctly that this guy never actually found out why his
Facebook account was disabled?

~~~
gjjrfcbugxbhf
Sort of. Facebook never told him. But he guessed that it was because of either
real name policy or more likely because one of his clients ran a single semi
spamy marketing campaign.

------
bcrack
Although unfortunate for the author (and a huge inconvenience), such cases
display in the best possible way the problem of depending on non-federated
communication tools which promote disowning your data under ridiculous privacy
policies.

------
faragon
TL;DR: don't use Facebook for messaging, nor as disk backup for photos.

------
turc1656
Seems like an appropriate time for this Andrew Lewis quote - _" If you are not
paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product"_

~~~
turc1656
Haha. I have to chuckle. I'm really curious why anyone would downvote this
comment, unless of course they worked for Facebook.

------
covercash
That site is struggling under the HN load. Maybe they should have optimized
prior to today?

~~~
onurozkan
I hope he learned new things after this load.

------
marenkay
Consider not using Facebook at all. It has zero value for the user, it only
has value for Facebook.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Facebook has _enormous_ value for the user. They didn't get this popular by
accident. They provide a wonderful service, and they chain it to acceptance of
their awful terms.

Imagining that your use case is the only use case is the great bane of geeks
and developers. If you want to help build a world without awful tech
companies, you need to stop doing that.

~~~
turc1656
I have to agree with Marenkay. I left Facebook a long time ago and haven't
missed it on bit. There was some minimal value, I suppose, in being able to
have anyone contact me if they didn't have my email. And possibly organize
invites for events. All of this is, of course, possible without Facebook, they
just made it easier. However, the real issue is the secret cost of Facebook
far outweighs any benefit the user derives.

Also, the reason Facebook is popular is not because it adds extraordinary
value for the user, it's because it caters to things like curiosity,
narcissism, and ego that reside in all of us. It's feeding those things that
keep the user hooked and coming back. Not "value". The extraordinary value you
speak of is what the shareholders have.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Again, your use case is not the only use case. Facebook doesn't provide value
_for you_ , and that's perfectly reasonable. But at this point you're
basically a guy who doesn't care for falafel standing outside a packed falafel
restaurant trying to figure out what character flaw drives people to eat
there, since _obviously_ they can't just like falafel.

I don't use Facebook much, in part because of how awful its policies are, but
when I do use it, it remains a fantastic tool for keeping in touch with
friends. At this point someone always declares that it's actually just
narcissism, because email and IM exist and nobody actually _needs_ Facebook,
which is a lot like someone 20 years ago declaring that this email thing is
just a fad because we already have phones and mail.

~~~
marenkay
> it remains a fantastic tool for keeping in touch with friends ... that is
> exactly what I question about FB. Their notion of friendship is merely on a
> level of "people you met at least once".

