Most of us know Facebook as a way to find and connect to people and share certain aspects of our lives. That was the original contract offered by Facebook: Share (some of) the details of your life in order to make/maintain personal connections in exchange for free use of Facebook’s aggregated, shared data.
That initial contract is has been broken.
Mark Zuckerberg has changed his game plan, as that old contract no longer services his aspirations. He’s moving in a different direction, called Meta. My purpose here is not to break down what Meta is, although I’ve commented on it before, but I’ll sum it up this way: Meta is Zuckerberg’s vision to meld your work and personal life with his machine such that you cannot live without this new, machine-enabled universe that designed for you. That’s it in a nutshell. I believe Zuck/Facebook/Meta is crushing and demolishing the old platform that some have come to like, perhaps even love, and in many cases come to rely on. Facebook (the old) is a global robot with an autoimmune disease and is either tactically or randomly destroying the old – one user at a time.
This past week, my wife’s Facebook account of over 13 years was permanently disabled within a matter of hours, and in 30 days it will be permanently deleted. All attempts to restore it have failed because no real person exists with whom she can plead her case. The bizarre manner in which it went down, which included a request for her to submit her cellphone number and input the code that was sent, upload a picture of her driver’s license, and allow Facebook to take over her phone and take a video to prove she was real, suggests an outside hack, but online articles indicate that this is now Facebook’s standard practice for ostensibly confirming an account is real (I say ‘ostensibly’ because it never works). In addition, the entirety of her presence and actions (to include all data in Messenger) were instantaneously hidden.
The ruthless anonymity of the subsequent communications suggested that the entire process was likely carried out by a ‘bot’ (automated, artificial intelligence, robot-machine interaction) with no human intervention. It presented her with a trumped up technical ‘community standards’ crime in her account settings and then swiftly closed the account, even after she jumped through their hoops and provided personal identifiable information (PII). Unlike the usual Facebook crime where someone posts something objectionable and then goes to ‘Facebook jail’ for a week or a month (a crime, a sentence, rehabilitation, then restoration) the apparent objective of this purge was to strategically eliminate the popular account of a model, high-engagement ‘Facebook citizen.’ Her posts were G-rated, popular, entertaining, engaging, and informative. The closure of her account was instant and permanent, with no real appeal process that involves human involvement.
Since the closure and after some unusual digital roadblocks, she pieced together a new account and returned online – but it wasn’t the same. To use an analogy, it’s as if she previously lived in a beautiful house in an established neighborhood, surrounded by artifacts and memories from her life. Then her digital home was invaded at gun point and she was escorted out of the house and neighborhood and left in a barren place, forced to take up residence in a bare condo. Five days later, on Christmas Day no less, that account went down as well, with even more erroneous claims and language (impersonating a famous person/another individual).
Even if she wanted to rebuild her entire digital home again from scratch, she could never trust the bots that just destroyed 13 years of Facebook ‘citizenship.’ The new short-lived account was like being dropped into metaphorical government halfway house under a police state: different rules, frequent warnings, and threats – and only a fraction of the capabilities that she had before. Her online presence was violated.
I’ve never entirely agreed with those that claimed that FB (or other social media platforms) were entirely superfluous, expendable, or a corrupting influence on our souls. I speak of the practice of online engagement in general, not specifically about FB’s various traps set for its users. Given the geography, size, and complexity of our connections, some virtual connection is necessary. We don’t live in a town of 788 people where everybody knows everybody in some form and regularly congregates at the diner, main street, or town square. One can argue that we should, but that’s not reality. We’re all mobile, coming and going from afar.
In the 8 days since this happened, we’ve learned of at least 8 to 10 friends of friends who endured the same thing. Online forums also support that this is happening with increasing frequency. I don’t believe it’s random that these full account take-downs have afflicted so many people in a short period of time. I do believe there’s a connection between the uptick in cancellations happening so soon after the October 28, 2021, unveiling of Zuckerberg’s Meta aspirations. In a way it doesn’t matter specifically how long-term FB users are being disenfranchised. Whether the cause is errantly programmed, out-of-control bots (what I call a Facebook autoimmune disease) – or a carefully schemed, gradual bulldozing of legacy ‘properties’ to make way for new development, no one’s Facebook account is safe any longer. Anyone who values their connections and accumulated content on Facebook needs to take action to secure whatever digital assets are dear to them, plan for protections of other vital data on other platforms, and start to conceive of a life after Facebook. To put it another way, Facebook as we know it now will be unrecognizable 2-4 years from now – if even that long. It’s becoming increasingly unlikely that the legacy users as I described at the beginning of this article will have the ‘old’ services of Facebook available to them in that timeframe.
What follows is a crash-action list of measures and perspectives that all Facebook users should start planning for today in preparation for the Facebook/Meta realities to come:
Make accommodations to monitor for identity theft. Facebook has collected a great deal of critical PII from you. They cannot be trusted to securely hold it or even use it with integrity.
Start to make alternate provisions to take care of vital personal connections made or maintained via Facebook.
Make an honest assessment of who you are in your virtual community, in the past and moving forward. Now is the time to make changes if needed. This may entail pulling back and giving less of yourself in virtual communities, or conversely, increasing your online presence on platforms that you have more discretion over.
If your account is attacked by bots or even some Gen-Y fact checker, protest what can be protested. Not all account shutdowns are the same. Unless you’re totally stonewalled by the Facebook bots, hold Facebook to their own rules. If they said you have 30 days to get your content, force that as much as you can. Do so because it’s the right thing to do. Insist on more specificity if you’re indicted on some trumped-up charge. You’re surely not the first to experience this so find out the who, when, what, and why in your network. Those testimonies are online. FB has lots of enemies and victims, they can’t all be silenced. You might find some like souls out of the quest.
Find out who inside or outside of Facebook made the decisions. A robot? Internal people? Outside contractors? Find out for yourself now for your own benefit, but also for the benefit of others later because obviously they’re rapidly changing into a regressive platform wherein they radically minimize their effort, cost, and responsibility to the users and maximize the exploitation that they get out of us, for their own ends and their political allies. Just understanding that dynamic opens a set of possibilities that might explain what happened to you.
Moving Forward
- Re-read Facebook’s Terms of Service and Community Standards. They update them regularly and expect you to know what they now consider a violation. Note that this action won’t necessarily prevent your account being arbitrarily taken down, but at least forewarned is forearmed.
- Box out the most essential functions that social media can accommodate that cannot be managed elsewhere. Take any other functions elsewhere that can be taken elsewhere. Diversify.
- Focus on your ten or twenty most vital friendships, have a dimension with them outside of Facebook, and everyone else can receive postcard version of our lives.
- Memes may be becoming a dangerous occupation, especially if conveying serious truth to a crowd threatened by Progressives.
- If you continue using a Facebook account, be aware that the volume of your posts and activity may become a liability. It’s very possible that Zuckerberg has become quite stingy about the resources that it takes to give users a few laughs. Reserve your posts for the zingers.
- Take note of what you search for, read, and even say around your online devices. It’s no secret that your devices can and do listen and they are monitored by AI bots (This is the sole function of home assistant devices). Take note of any correlating actions or activities that arise in response to sensitive dialogue. Be prepared to say or do some things far away from any connected devices
- We must speak the truth, but quite a lot of it won’t necessarily be on Facebook. This takes strategic thinking. What are we prepared to say and who needs to hear it and what channels are going to best convey those truths? The answer to that question may inform future choices that have heretofore not been on the table.
- Depending on your age, you didn’t have FB as a child or young adults We probably won’t have it as elderly folk. The trajectory of FB is damned; internally, from new technologies (designed to protect us from the proliferating abuses of Facebook) and from enemies at their gates. It will either become part of the ubiquitous Big Brother machine or it will be a huge, glorified junk mail app (MySpace anyone?), both of which we should stay far from and neither of which suit our core uses.
There are conceptual platforms being formed that eventually negate Facebook. I’d give it a 2-4 year window. Obviously, that doesn’t help now, so it’s imperative that you apply the deeper lessons about minimizing tech-dystopian control of our lives.