My Facebook Account Was Disabled
Another chapter in social media harassment may end with permanent deletion of my FB page.
As you know yesterday my post about the stabbing in Ohio and Black violence was removed by Facebook, allegedly for violating their Community Standards on “hate speech“. But harassment didn’t end there.
Just hours later I logged into Facebook just to be greeted with a message that my account was disabled and I lost ALL ACCESS to the site. I can’t write on my personal profile, I can’t use Messenger and I can’t post on the CS Facebook page.
I’ve submitted the review request - the application forced me to record a selfie video, moving my head left, right, top, bottom, so they can identify my face from all angles.
Yeah, folks, your entire head has to be scanned by a video device just so you can “prove“ you’re a human and maybe, just maybe, they will let you back in if they want to. That is, assuming they have someone to review your request because “Covid-19“.
This is what you have to do, until your entire head is recorded:
Right, left, up, down… Congratulations, Mr. Zuckerberg now has your entire head in his database.
So, what does this mean for me?
There’s a chance that it’s just an algorithmic check and I am going to be unblocked. This account is new, I set it up about 2 weeks ago and deleted my old one, which was constantly being banned for some alleged infringements without any examples given. I recently got 30 days for defending myself - an quite gently, no cursing - against harassment by someone else (who wasn’t restricted despite my reports).
Wiser by my experiences last year, I do not use any alternative accounts and stick to one only - alas even that wasn’t enough.
Still, this is the first time I’ve ever had my account disabled entirely - I can’t even contact my friends now. Since my Critical Spectator Facebook page is tied to my personal account - because that is how Facebook keeps all of your professional pages hostage - it could be permanently and completely deleted if my account is erased for good.
This is probably the most absurd part - you can run a page for a bakery or a pet store but if you “allegedly“ infringe some Community Standards, you can lose it all in one swipe, with no ability to appeal the ban. Facebook apparatchiks can erase your entire professional life on the platform along with your personal life, regardless of how many years you’ve been on it.
In the current, interconnected reality, this is a particularly painful penalty because we’re all using the digital tools to connect with others.
I have put in thousands of hours on running my page and, again, I am seeing it set on fire and can do nothing about it.
Global governments need to come down on this privatized, corporate totalitarianism and come down hard, before they begin deciding who should be in the government (and they’re already at it, as we have seen during Trump’s presidency and the elections in 2020, suppressing negative coverage of Biden).
I’m not going anywhere, of course. I’m going to keep running this Substack blog (along with several others) and my Telegram channel that you’re encouraged to join here: https://t.me/criticalspectator
Through my friend, whom I added two months ago as an editor on the FB page and who still has access to it, I have published a post encouraging everybody else to subscribe, just in case my page is gone forever.I’d be grateful if you could do me a favor and shared it, so that it reaches as many people as possible. I have 26,000 followers there but only 10% of them have signed up here thus far - most of them shortly before the temporary deletion of my page last year, which I eventually managed to fight off successfully. This time I don’t know what to expect.
Hopefully I can find an alternative to Zuckerberg’s shameful “platform“. I’m considering recording podcasts and videos to diversify away from FB, where publishing anything is increasingly difficult.
Nevertheless, if you’re around, please still head to Facebook and share my post to drive as many people here as possible, because it’s hard to say how long my page is going to survive there for - and I really want to save as much as I can from the efforts of the past 2.5 years. Thank you!