Facebook And Instagram Just Disabled My Accounts For No Reason

I am completely powerless to do anything about it, and it scares the hell out of me.

by Ben Cohen

A recent experience with both Instagram and Facebook has left me shaken and deeply worried about the future of our society if these companies are left unchecked.

Recently, both my personal and Banter related Instagram accounts have been disabled. Days later, Facebook stopped me being able to post to our page that has almost 40,000 followers. No warnings given, no reasons given other than a message saying Facebook cannot determine my location (this despite me going through all their security checks multiple times). When I try to log into Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) I now get a message saying that my account has been “disabled for violating our terms”. My personal Instagram account only has personal photos, and the business account only has links to articles on The Banter Newsletter. No hate speech, no conspiracy theories, no fake news, and no nipples.

For the past two weeks I have gone through endless loops trying to reactivate my accounts. I’ve reset passwords, enabled location services on my phone so they can see that it is me posting, contacted support, sent tickets, and been put in touch with Facebook employees through friends. No one anywhere has done anything about it. A contact at Facebook finally messaged me telling me it is likely Facebook cannot determine my location and has suspended access to my page. Given I’ve never had any location determination issues in the 14 years I’ve been using Facebook and have verified my company and personal identity info whenever they’ve asked me to, this explanation seems unlikely. I have gone through the verification process (again), but have no visibility whatsoever as to when I might be able to use the page I have spent nine years building.

No Facebook, no traffic

Most of our referral traffic still comes through Facebook despite our best attempts to have nothing to do with the platform. Without access to our page our traffic is suffering. Less traffic means less readers, and less readers means less revenue for our already bare bones business model.

Instagram was a new avenue for us, and I was quite excited to start promoting the newsletter and our podcast on the more visually slanted platform. While we didn’t have a huge number of followers, those followers were interacting with the site and signing up for subscriptions. That has all disappeared.

Facebook abuses publishers

In 2018 I had to close down The Daily Banter and move to a newsletter format precisely because Facebook decimated all of our traffic. Having allowed right wing militia groups, Russian bots, and conspiracy theorists to hijack the network during the 2016 election, Facebook turned around and destroyed the vast majority of small to medium sized publishers who relied on their referral traffic to stay afloat. We have slowly managed to build back up, but we are still dangerously reliant on them for exposure to new readers and contact with our current readers. Facebook is of course well aware of this, and yet is threatening further decimation of the news industry by slowly thinning out political content on the network. Mark Zuckerberg is not willing to do the heavy lifting of vetting media outlets properly, so he is using an algorithm to arbitrarily “reduce” political content on people’s newsfeeds.

What say do publishers have in Zuckerberg’s latest about-face? How can one company destroy thousands of media companies and news organizations around the world with completely random algorithmic changes? Why can these tech companies boot users off their platform with no warning, no reason, and no way to find out why?

These issues are important to all of us. Facebook harvests our data for financial gain and gives us little in return for it. I have given them years of my data and had my business destroyed several times over in return. I cannot even get an answer as to why I have been kicked off of the platform I have been forced to rely on to keep my business going.

A one way relationship

This grotesquely unfair exchange that many of us have experienced, along with the company’s disastrous impact on civil discourse has destroyed trust in Big Tech and created a nightmarish dystopia that is increasingly difficult to extricate ourselves from. From communication with family and friends to what we see, read and hear about the world around us, Facebook is an all knowing, all powerful Big Brother that controls every aspect of our lives. It has consumed the internet and turned it into a data harvesting machine that makes millions while we click away. Author of ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’, Shoshana Zuboff offers a bleak assessment of the future we have unwittingly signed up to.

“Right now, however, the extreme asymmetries of knowledge and power that have accrued to surveillance capitalism abrogate these elemental rights as our lives are unilaterally rendered as data, expropriated, and repurposed in new forms of social control, all of it in the service of others’ interests and in the absence of our awareness or means of combat,” writes Zuboff.

We pay for Facebook, Instagram, Google and Twitter by letting them monetize every aspect of our lives.

A new relationship with social media

Whether we like it or not, social media networks are here to stay. They have created huge business opportunities for millions of people, fostered interesting and innovative communities, helped take down authoritarian regimes around the world, and allowed us to stay in contact with friends and family.

Social media is a powerful tool that can be used for good, but as the platforms have grown in size and power, that tool is now being used against us.

While some activists demand complete freedom on social media networks as a human right, I think this is a huge mistake. I am in favor of social media platforms kicking off users who engage in hate speech, incite violence, or spread demonstrably fake news and conspiracy theories. Tech platforms are private companies, and when you sign up to use them you agree to abide by their terms of service. If you break them, you deserve to get booted off. However, tech companies must also be required to give users detailed, specific reasons as to why they are being removed from their platforms. If tech companies are making money off of your data, they at least owe you an explanation.

What is clearly necessary is the strict regulation and break up of big tech companies, particularly Facebook. Society must determine how much data these companies are allowed to harvest and what recourse we have when they abuse our trust. Media companies must also be freed from their extraordinary grip. It is not fair that responsible publishers can have their businesses decimated and access to their followers shut down with no warning and no reason given. Social media has become the portal through which most people get their news. As a result, social media platforms have outsized influence over the news. They determine what you see, when you see it, and whom you see it from. Publishers like us then have to close our eyes and hope the tech giants are looking favorably upon us on any given day.

Will anyone see this article outside of our email subscriber list? I now have no idea, and that frightens the hell out of me.

Help us circumvent Facebook and sign up to our newsletter via email. No ads, no spam, ever.

Read the latest for Banter Members:

Bob Cesca: Wise Up, Progressives, The Democrats Aren’t Your Enemy

It’s baffling how some progressives believe committing political and policy suicide is a desirable outcome.

by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC -- It didn’t take long for some of us to completely scramble our priorities beyond recognition. Joe Biden’s only been president for 44 days, give or take, and already some progressives are talking about a Republican take-over in the 2022 midterms. Why?

From what I’ve seen so far, progressives are declaring the end of Democratic control of Congress because the COVID relief checks will only be $1,400 rather than the allegedly promised sum of $2,000. On top of that, they’re also upset about Biden’s refusal to ask Vice President Kamala Harris to override the Senate parliamentarian on her ruling to keep the $15 minimum wage out of the same COVID stimulus bill.

Somehow, the Biden administration and the congressional Democrats are being blamed when, ultimately, the real culprits are the Republicans along with Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Neither group will allow these provisions to be added to the stimulus, and it doesn’t appear as though anything will budge them from that position given the political realities of their respective home states.

When it comes to the $1,400 checks, Joe Biden certainly mentioned $2,000 checks in early January but usually in the context of the previously issued $600 stimulus checks -- what Biden referred to as a “down payment” on the $2,000 total. Nevertheless, some progressives have misunderstood Biden’s words, overlooking the “down payment” part as well as what was happening with the late 2020 stimulus that included the $600 checks….

This is an excerpt from this week’s Members Only piece. To continue reading, please go here.