They are “love and hate” with Facebook.
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Editor’s note: Many users are tired of Facebook’s seemingly endless series of privacy infringements, and have voluntarily abandoned the platform, but a small number of users find themselves in the opposite situation. Their accounts were banned and could not be reactivated. It was like being kicked out of the platform by their students. No matter how hard they tried (they really worked very hard), they could not log in again. This article describes the “love and hate entanglement” between this small group of people and Facebook from the perspective of specific person encounters. The original text is selected from The New York Times, author Kashmir Hill, original title “Many Are Abandoning Facebook. These People Have the Opposite Problem.”
32-year-old Christopher Reeves is an Uber driver who lives in Seattle. In the past ten years, his daily communication has almost always been through the medium of Facebook: chatting with friends, talking with other Uber drivers, or meeting other single people. But one day in June of this year, he suddenly found his Facebook account logged out, when he was uploading some photos he took while attending the comics conference and family to go to Disneyland.
When Reeves tries to log back in, the Facebook page prompts that his account has been disabled and asks him to provide a photo for authentication. Reeves took a photo with the iPhone but could not pass Facebook review. He took another few shots and ended up with the same result. So he gave up on this attempt and started going to the Facebook service center to find a solution. He found a related page to help Facebook users who thought they had been mistakenly deleted. He filled out his name, email address and provided a photo of his driver’s license on this page.
A few days have passed and there is no news on Facebook. He wants to find a way for him to chat with his friends on Facebook again, but finds it just in vain. He sent a Twitter message to Facebook, but it was also a sea. A week passed and Reeves became more and more frustrated, so he went to Facebook’s office in downtown Seattle. According to him, there were five receptionists sitting behind a counter in the office lobby.
“My account is disabled, I need help”, REeves said this. But the staff told him that no one could help him.
This made Reeves feel desperate. “What if my account can’t be reactivated?” The receptionist suggested that he create a new account. (This actually violates Facebook’s Terms of Service, which states that users can only create one account (your own account).))
Reeves created a new account as suggested by the Facebook staff, but it was also disabled for a few hours. He created a new one and the result was disabled again in a few minutes. Now, three months after his account has been disabled, Reeves can’t figure out why he still can’t log in. “If you don’t have Facebook, life will be quite dull and boring,” he said.
Although many users are tired of Facebook’s seemingly endless series of privacy infringements, they voluntarily give up using the platform, but a small number of users find themselves in the opposite situation. They were kicked out of the platform, no matter how hard they tried—they were really, very hard—and couldn’t re-log in to the platform.
33-year-old Jessica May lives in Maryland and is an activist for the interests of people of color. In March of this year, she found herself passively withdrawing from her Facebook account and asking her to authenticate. She is not surprised by this. Some malicious provocative users often report that she violated the rules of the website and reactivated the account. She has done it many times before and will succeed every time. But this time, her attempt to regain access failed. She is now using a second professional account she created a few years ago, which was rarely used before.
She tried to find the answer to this question online, but found that countless users have the same experience as her. She complained about this in the YouTube video and expects Facebook people to see it. She said: “You hijacked our social network, together with our memories. I have a lot to say, there is still a lot to share. What am I doing wrong? I just want to know why this is happening, but all I receive is silence.”
This is like a Facebook version of a judicial system where users are told that their account is disabled because of “suspicious activity.” They can choose “appeal” and fill out a concise form with just a name, contact information and an ID photo, and a mysterious review process begins. The next wait may make them feel endless, especially if you can’t contact the Facebook staff, which is even more maddening. They will become more and more anxious, and then these Facebook “Islanders” will start to turn to Twitter, Reddit, QuoRa and the big message boards for help, and the other helpers may also include me. Because I have written some cases of user disputes with these platforms, the banned users who are addicted to acebook have found a way to find my inbox and send multiple emails every day to update their “cases”.
“This really makes me panic”
Facebook has more than 2 billion active users, but it has long been accused of indulging in the expression of various statements and creating various social panic on its platform. In May of this year, Facebook announced that it would ban more than 3 billion “false accounts” in six months. In the post attached to this statement, Alex Schultz, vice president of Facebook user growth and analytics, wrote: “Our goal is simple: find and remove as many fake accounts as possible, and try to avoid real accounts as much as possible. .”
Users like Reeves and May are most likely unfortunately shot in this wave of operations to remove fake accounts. But according to data from the US Federal Trade Commission, the number of people complaining about Facebook accounts being banned has been on the rise for the past few years. The committee tracked down three such complaints in 2015, 12 in 2016, and more than 50 complaints each year in the past two years.
Schultz said that once Facebook disables a user account, the user can no longer re-join because they will deploy an “advanced detection system” to look for “use suspicious email addresses, suspicious behavior or remove with previous Other signal patterns associated with other fake accounts.”
34-year-old Travis Hinton lives in New York and is a dishwasher. Since 2012, he has been using Facebook to keep in touch with friends, and he has also used this platform to post posts about abandoned subway stations. In July of this year, his account was disabled, and he repeatedly tried to create a new account with a series of new email addresses, but these new accounts were quickly disabled without exception.
Hinton found the Facebook customer service number and dialed the phone. “For customer service, please press 1”, Hilton presses the 1 button as prompted. “Thank you for calling Facebook users to operate the service. Sorry, we do not currently support the phone service.” Then the call is over.
Hilton was very angry because he was excluded from Facebook. He has been yelling at Facebook on Twitter many times, and has repeatedly vented his anger at Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram post comment area (although Instagram is owned by Facebook, Hilton has not lost access to Instagram). In addition, he still has not given up trying to create a new Facebook account. He creates new accounts on different computers and mobile phones every week, even in different geographical locations, but these accounts will be disabled again in a few minutes.
Facebook’s decision is vague and concealed by the outside world, and sometimes it will be discovered afterwards. In 2013, a videographer named Chris Leydon found that his Facebook account was disabled without any explanation. He later shared his trauma on the well-known technology website The Next Web. In 2017, The Next Web site added an editorial statement at the top of the post posted by Leydon: “The publisher was accused of multiple crimes including sexual assault on minors and was found guilty.” Facebook previously disabled him. The account number may be related to this because Facebook can scan private messages, which will reveal inappropriate interactions between adults and minors.
The Facebook spokesperson said: “Let the bad guys stay away from our platform. This is our top priority. Our current detection technology is not perfect, sometimes we make mistakes, so we also provide users with regained access. The tools required for the right.”
The Facebook review found that 14 banned accounts belonged to the New York Times liaison, but found that only five of them were supposed to be banned. Facebook advised others to regain access through the appeals process, and most people reapplied in accordance with this recommendation, but so far their accounts have not been reactivated.
Some users also suffered irreparable damage because their account was banned, and Colton Berk is one of them. Berk, 23, is a barista in Portland, Oregon. In 2017, his Facebook account was banned, and it was a few months before his brother died in a car accident. “It really scares me,” Berk said. “I have a lot of photos with my brother on the platform, but I have not saved it. If the account is banned, it means I lost all the photos.” He expressed his appeal to Facebook, but the other party said that his account has been permanently disabled because of “fraudulent activity.” After that, Berk had to use the alias Bolton Cerk to return to the Facebook platform again. He said: “I have to use fraudulent identities to regain access to Facebook. This is really ironic, because now I really did what they had accused of before me – ‘fraudulent activity.’
Some Facebook banned users who have no choice but to start have sought help from the court. In 2011, he lived in Staten Island (New York, NY, USA)Mustafa Fteja, an island in the city, took Facebook to the New York court after the account was disabled. Fteja is a Muslim who accused Facebook of alleged religious discrimination. Facebook handed over the case to the local court in the area where the company was located—the US Northern California District Court. The case was eventually rejected because Fteja, who chose to defend himself, failed to submit the correct documents. In May of this year, an anti-drug abuse organization filed a complaint against Facebook in Poland. They believed that Facebook’s closure of their organization page violated their right to freedom of expression. The case is still under trial. The court asked Facebook to keep the data of the organization’s account and pay attention to the fans until the trial is over. Normally, Facebook deletes all data for that account six months after the account is disabled.
Jonatan, a Facebook user in Sweden (he asked us not to disclose his full name to avoid being contacted by other Facebook users who wanted help) and found a way to contact Facebook staff after their account was disabled. method. He smiled and said: “I contacted them through a job application.” Jonatan browsed Facebook’s talent recruitment page and filled out a job application form for the chief developer, but in this form, he did not Filling in his qualifications, he describes the fact that he can’t reactivate his banned account.
A few days later, Jonatan received an email from a Facebook recruiter who told him that although this is not a formal channel to solve the problem, he will help check out Jonatan’s account. This method is very effective, and his account is quickly reactivated. “Just, I rarely use Facebook now,” Jonatan said finally.
In contrast, Reeves is not so calm about his own experience. Facebook later reviewed Reeves’ account at the request of the Times, confirming that he was inadvertently “involved in a security check.” However, the problem with Reeves remains unresolved. In early August, he apologized to me, because he often bothered me and expressed his disappointment. He also mentioned that he was “extremely eager” to reactivate his Facebook account before his birthday on August 15.
On August 14, Reeves came to the Facebook Seattle office again and asked for help again. The receptionist also said once again that they could not help him and told him that the customer service staff was not working at the office. “I am very depressed, but I try to keep calm,” Reeves told me. “I didn’t yell at them, nor did IDo other things that are out of the ordinary. After all, I really don’t want to spend my birthday in prison.
Translator: aiko