Facebook Obliterates People — and There’s Nothing you can do about it

See also: Facebookdisabledme Subreddit. According to this post, it can take 3-6 weeks to get reactivated. Sometimes longer. I’ve seen estimates of about 1.5 million FB accounts being suspended per month. Here’s an online petition protesting Meta’s actions.

Update: The account was restored 25 days later.

Up to now I have been politely indifferent to Facebook — everything it is, and all the problems associated with it. I signed up in 2007, but I didn’t start posting there until summer 2008. For about a decade, I posted things there 5 or 6 times a week, and I managed 2 groups and 5 special interest pages. From about 2018 onward, I posted less frequently — maybe 3 or 4 times a week. More than a decade ago, Facebook changed its algorithm so that people who liked Pages would never see its content unless page owners paid to “boost” these pages. That caused many artists and content creators to move away from Facebook or depend less on it to reach fans. Some have moved onto another Meta property (Instagram), while others have increased their presence on LinkedIn or TikTok. Geekier types like myself have moved to Mastodon and Bluesky and maybe other sites. (For a while I was an active participant on several StackExchange and Reddit discussion boards, but now I mainly just lurk there).

This year I probably checked Facebook once or twice a day and post there once or twice a week. Earlier this week, I tried using Facebook’s tool to export my data out of FB (which I used to do every year or so). Immediately when I pressed the Submit button to initiate this process, Facebook surprised me by suspending my account and removing all my FB content from the site. At this point, I paid very careful attention to what was going on. Was I on the correct facebook.com domain? I have always been extremely scrupulous about using Facebook and maintaining browser security. I keep my passwords safe in a password locker and use relatively complex passwords.

Facebook asked me to “appeal” the decision by uploading a recent photo of myself. So I did:

After I uploaded this photo, I received this message:

Five days later, I am still waiting and had time to reflect on what Facebook has been doing to me and the world. I don’t like it at all.

I’m guessing that eventually the suspension will be lifted and Facebook will provide no explanation. Why should it?

Why have I continued to use Facebook?

First, because that’s where many older and less tech-savvy users are.

Second, some of my friends overseas are there, and it’s often easier to reach them through Facebook than elsewhere. I wish more people had personal websites where they can be reached. I wish it were easier to locate the emails of people I haven’t seen in a long time, and I wish places like linkedin made it easier to contact people who were not already connections.

Third, some content creators (and especially musicians) post updates on Facebook and nowhere else. Some social groups post events and activities on Facebook — and nowhere else.

Fourth, (I admit it), it is occasionally fun to lurk and read content by people I hardly know.

Fifth, family and friends have posted photos on Facebook — and nowhere else.

Sixth, I follow very closely wall posts by about 20 people on Facebook. Many of these people are or were bloggers (and post their content elsewhere), but one or two friends post content on Facebook — and nowhere else.

Seventh, as I mentioned before, I maintain some 2 or 3 low traffic pages for authors. I don’t use them often, but once in a blue moon, I need to post something on it.

Eighth, occasionally old friends use Facebook to contact me out of the blue, and that is often wonderful.

Nine, I do enjoy some of Facebook’s photo management, tagging, etc. It’s pretty easy to post a few nice personal photos and get likes and comments from people.

Tenth, for a while I used Facebook as a way to feel the political pulse of friends and family. Over the last few years, this is no longer true, often because Facebook serves so much slop that it’s hard to tell what people really believe these days.

Eleventh, as a publisher and author, I often promote some of my ebooks and creative projects (as well as creative things by actual friends). Frankly, this has been the easiest way to inform many people — even though FB buries a lot of content, and I doubt that friends see many of those links.

Twelfth, it’s a good way to learn when friends or families have died or have had serious illness.

Why I am motivated not to use Facebook

First, I have long been aware of how Facebook violates privacy and resells user data to the highest bidder.

Second, I am aware of how Facebook ads are becoming more unavoidable.

Third, in the last two years or so, my Facebook feed has been flooded with posts by unknown people and organizations. I remain suspicious of anything which Facebook has decided to feed me. Often it’s celebrity news or whatever I happen to be doing research on. Facebook often just creeps me out. Sure, I may like Seinfeld and Star Trek, but that doesn’t mean I love constantly receiving “news” from all sorts of random “people” on these topics. 95% of my motivation for going on Facebook is to learn what my friends are getting excited about, not to read the things that Facebook has decided I should be interested in.

Fourth, in the last five years I have been seeing overall decline in engagement from my Facebook friends. Facebook has not only been clogging the feed with garbage, but clogging it so much that actual friends who might be interested in my posts rarely have the opportunity to view them.

Facebook and Enshittification

Cory Doctorow wrote eloquently about how social media services can become shittier over time as the cost of switching to another application increase:

For social media, the biggest switching cost isn’t learning the ins and outs of a new app or generating a new password: it’s the communities, family members, friends, and customers you lose when you switch away. Leaving aside the complexity of adding friends back in on a new service, there’s the even harder business of getting all those people to leave at the same time as you and go to the same place….

…

This enshittification was made possible by high switch­ing costs. The vast communities who’d been brought in by network effects were so valuable that users couldn’t afford to quit, because that would mean giving up on important personal, professional, commercial, and romantic ties. And just to make sure that users didn’t sneak away, Facebook aggressively litigated against upstarts that made it possible to stay in touch with your friends without using its services. Twitter consistently whittled away at its API support, neuter­ing it in ways that made it harder and harder to leave Twitter without giving up the value it gave you.

When switching costs are high, services can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business. The higher the switching costs, the more a company can abuse you, because it knows that as bad as they’ve made things for you, you’d have to endure worse if you left.

This enshittification process is pretty widespread and inescapable. Despite this, it still was worthwhile for me to repost my content onto Facebook. Until now.

Where to Find Online Content by Robert Nagle (Hint: Not Facebook!)

In a way, Facebook is nothing more than a blogging platform for dummies. If you subtract the privacy issues and advertising and generated content, it’s actually an easy and user-friendly way to blog.

But I post my stuff at several places. Here they are, ranked from most important to least important.

1. My idiotprogrammer blog. Almost all my content originates in megaposts on my blog. It consists of 20% personal stuff, 20% political stuff, 20% promoting my stuff and 40% cultural blogging (music, books, movies, etc). I even add to things I posted over a decade ago (such as this, this, this and this). My blog contains lots of things I never bothered to post on social media. I have been blogging there for 24+ years! BTW, the most recent posts are usually a mess.
2. Mastodon. Now my favorite site, although almost none of my meatspace friends are on it. About 70% of my posts is culture blogging, 10% is self-promotional, 10% is political, 10% is personal. About 95% of my posts were originally posted on my blog.
3. Blue Sky. This has more users (and more phantom users), but essentially I just repost the same things that I post on Mastodon. I like Blue Sky less because it has a smaller maximum character count than Mastodon.
4. Robert’s Roundup newsletter (sent by email). About four times a year I send out a newsletter with highlights from my blog and publishing information.
5. Facebook. I mostly repost the same things I post on Mastodon, except that I occasionally post personal photos and slightly more political posts.
6. Video platforms. I have started posting book-related things on YouTube. At some point I may have a modest presence on video platforms once the Tik Tok situation is clarified.
7. Instagram. Despite the popularity, I post rarely on Instagram because it is overrun by ads and spam, it is not easy to browse through and it is cluttered with short meaningless vids. Plus, most of its functionality requires that you use the phone app. I am reluctant to use any of the Meta phone apps for various reasons. No, thank you, I’ll use only my browser.

Life after Facebook

I didn’t expect to be forced out of Facebook and my content obliterated. Also, I never expected to be unable to view Facebook’s content. It really makes me mad.

Perhaps Facebook will eventually restore my account and my access, but from my point of view, the damage has already been done.

Like I said, I haven’t used Facebook much in the last 3 or 4 years. But I have used it often to look up people, communicate with people whose emails I didn’t have.

But now I assume that Facebook can randomly destroy your account and its content — and there’s nothing you can do about it.

From now on, why should I trust Facebook about anything?

Post-Script: Facebook’s Lie about Downloading your Personal Data

Facebook suspended my account immediately after using its export tool to export personal data onto my local device. My best guess is that this action triggered some bug — even though I have used the same export tool about once a year without incident.

When Facebook announced about 10 years ago that it had created a tool to export personal data onto your computer, I was relieved and ecstatic. I could back up my data and keep a local copy for reference. The zip file was about 300-600MB, and I made this backup about once a year. I

After my appeal was filed, I noticed that the dropdown box on the right side of my suspended account still had a button for suspended users to download your information. But the only info it let you download was your basic demographic data — not your posts or photos or list of friends or comments. That was worse than useless.