Well, it turns out you shouldn’t call out FB to reduce the spam and fakery… it will come back to bite you on the proverbial ass. Turns out the FB AI algos blocked my account. I honestly don’t really know why.
Apparently, I was trying to impersonate a brand account (I’m not even sure what that means or what they’re talking about). It was enough to ban my account, however. I was also told that I could reapply to have my account unblocked… I’d need to upload my ID. Well, that I ain’t gonna do right now. We all know how that ends. Plenty of IG accounts have had their accounts blocked for similarly BS reasons.
The weird thing is all my profile photos recently disappeared. I don’t know what happened. That had lots of images of me. All wiped out. So apparently FB can’t tell the difference between real accounts and bot accounts.
Despite all the verbiage about ‘building trust’… apparently it’s your trust that is for sale to the cheapest bidder, a bot from somewhere shovelling spam or worse. FB Groups are inundated with BOT accounts, hacked accounts, and spam accounts from all over the world.
FB ads are replete with spurious ads for ATM cards, for frauds of all kinds (even to the extent of people being murdered), fake health products, fake websites selling fake products from fake companies with real ad accounts (how is this possible?)… yet my humble account is somehow found to be incompatible with their Community Standards.
Well, I call BS. The community standards as applied by FB to their members are double standards: somehow it is okay to allow advertisers to breach the standards with impunity, yet members who breach, or are believed to breach, the CS get turfed out. It’s quite clear that FB only respects dollars. Advertiser accounts should have higher standards than members, for sure, especially in sensitive areas.
But my friend, Patrice, reminded me that FB is only a tool, and from now on I will no longer be FB’s tool. I’ll use it for my ends, if I decide to continue using it. The jury’s out on that right now. I won’t be Zuckerburg’s tool any more.