Social Media?

Some of you may have noticed that I disappeared from Facebook on 10 March 2026. I received an email from the Facebook people saying the following:

"Your Facebook account has been suspended. This is because your account, or activity on it, doesn't follow our Community Standards on fraud and deception. If you think that we've suspended your account by mistake, you'll have 180 days to appeal our decision. If you miss this deadline, your account will be permanently disabled."

They don't give any indication of what I'm supposed to have done wrong, and none of the links they have given me even work. I think I've successfully registered an appeal by clicking "Yes" to "Do you want to appeal?" but now there seems to be nothing else I can do. There's no customer support, no help desk, no way of contacting them at all. They say it usually takes "just over a day" to process an appeal. It has now been over a week and, from what I can gather online, other people in this situation have been waiting months. I haven't found anyone saying their appeal was successful or unsuccessful — it seems we are all just waiting.

I think this all started about a year ago when Meta introduced automatic bot patrols looking for dodgy activity. The bots are prone to hallucinations, and often misinterpret what they see. There's an ethical issue here. If they are using bots to detect potentially problematic behaviour, they should then do a human check before taking any blocking action, not just block on the bot's suspicion. Back in the 1990s, when I was working on AI-based techniques for scanning medical images for abnormalities, the approach was to let the software flag up images that looked out of the ordinary, but the images singled out would then be checked by a trained human clinician. We didn't just authomatically refer the patient for surgery on the say-so of the machine!

This incident is most irritating as in the 20 years I've been on that platform I've built up some genuine friendships with people I've never met in the real world, as well as keeping in touch with many real-world friends from whom I am geographically separated. It's ironic that this has happened almost exactly at my 20-year anniversary of joining the site. Most of my public pages appear to have vanished too, making it difficult to publicise the music, writing and other stuff that I do.

So how should I proceed? Just wait, in the hope they will eventually reinstate everything? It could be a long wait. Start a new profile from scratch? From what I read, this is what most people in my situation do, although I believe it is against the rules of the site. It would allow me to rejoin groups, but not to regain access to pages. Or should I look at alternative social media sites? I'm already on X/Twitter, but that site has gone in directions I really don't want to follow. What else is there? People have mentioned Bluesky and Mastodon, and whilst they might be more laudable than the big commercial platforms, their general uptake seems low. The most active and popular alternatives all seem to be owned by the same people who have botted me off the old site. Looking at usage statistics, the most successful social media site not run by Meta appears to be YouTube. Hmmm... I'm already on there, but I've never tried to use it for social networking.

Maybe I should write poetry, make music, go out in the fresh spring air and turn the computer off! Thanks for reading this — I wrote it mainly to have something to point people towards if they wonder why I've suddenly disappeared from the mothership.

Haworth Hodgkinson, 19 March 2026 (which would have been my father's 95th birthday)