Never trust a social network you don’t own, lesson number 999.
After a period of disuse, Facebook has permanently locked me out of my account for something I definitely didn’t do.
Some time ago - I guess a long time ago - I deactivated my Facebook account. I haven’t really missed it all that much. Anyway, yesterday I decided to reactivate it so as to download all the photos I’ve ever uploaded to it for safe storage, along with any that I’m tagged in that I might like to revisit one day. The latter isn’t a native functionality as far as I’m aware but browser extensions like this one purport to enable it.
This should of course be easy. From their docs:
If you’d like to come back to Facebook after you’ve deactivated your account, you can reactivate your account at any time by logging back in to Facebook or by using your Facebook account to log in somewhere else
However, upon logging in to reactivate the account I was met with this message:
My account has apparently been permanently disabled for contravening their spam policy. And because it had been over 180 days since they decided to do that - which I had seemingly no way of knowing had happened given my account was temporarily deactivated - there is no way to appeal the decision.
Obviously I haven’t been spamming anyone given I deactivated the account but there we go.
At the very least, given I’d explicitly suspended my account so wasn’t logging in, I’d have expected to have received some kind of robotically generated email to let me know of the supposed spam crime within the 6 months window that would have allowed me to appeal if I cared enough.
The good news is that it was still possible to export my content; that’s the 1 button that’s still available even with the block. Although, it comes to you in a single big intricate zip file that may take some time to dig through. But if I had a desire to start using my Facebook account again - something that temporarily deactivating your account is explicitly supposed to allow - then that opportunity is gone.
As is my social graph of course. The photos are in the zip somewhere, along with a pretty useless list of all the comments I ever made stripped of context - who knows what it was that I loved so much 7 years ago!? But the connections between me and my friends are gone. I’m not aware of any social network you could upload that kind of data to even if your friends all agreed to sign up to it. Mainstream social networks are silos.
Also naturally it only exports the content I uploaded. So photos by me; but not the photos of me that someone else uploaded, tagged me and shared that I’d probably have liked to keep, let alone photos of friends or family, old or new.
This isn’t all that terrible from my personal point of view. I’ve little interest in using Facebook and I probably have better-quality backups of most of the photos. But some people might fairly be quite annoyed or upset in this situation.
As always the lesson to take away is that if you ever post anything to a social network you might ever care about, always keep a copy of it safe somewhere you control. And if you value your social graph, well, I’m not sure that there is a solution other than being sure to have some other way to contact your nearest and dearest.
Similarly with your interactions; the to-and-from flow of any meaningful conversations you had or any threads that meant a lot to you. You’ll be able to export your ramblings, but without the context of what you were responding to. We all know how annoying hearing only half a telephone conversation is. Again given the private and proprietary nature of the service, it’s hard to know how you can personally mitigate this. Perhaps it’s time to act like it’s 1997 and start printing out everything you found fun on Facebook?
I’m obviously an outlier because I haven’t been using my account for a long time. But other people find themselves unable to access their Facebook accounts for all sorts of reasons in ways that are much more upsetting to them. There are endless discussions online about it, Reddit is a good place to start if you want to find examples.
Here’s this phenomenon making national news last year - I assume it’s not an April fool despite the publication date.
…despite not being an avid user, finding her account locked was still upsetting: “All of the images from my university years and family occasions are on Facebook
“I will no longer have access to 15-plus years of content, which is genuinely sad
“It is also quite stressful not knowing what the issue is, and having no recourse to resolve it. To be given no warning and then no way to access our own data is mindboggling.”
Of course no-one has a legal right to have a Facebook account. It’s a private company entitled to make its own decisions outside of basic legal requirements. Personally I think a lot of people might be better off without an account. But, believe it or not, Facebook truly is a positive experience for some people. And its sheer size and scope creates a kind of monopolisation such that as much as you’re able to “export your data” - which is certainly a good and important thing - there is often little of use that the average person can do with that data.
You can’t simply replicate everything you’d made the effort to create in Facebook at home or in a competitor’s site. Even if you could, you wouldn’t be able to force the people and organisations you want to talk to to move over to someplace new, which is what you’d have to do considering Facebook is not a federated social network.
Being locked out forever would be especially upsetting for those people for Facebook is where their community is, whether this is how their family prefers communicate, where the organisations they have to deal with post or where their support groups are. Innumerable organisations - everything from book clubs to government agencies to medical services to advocacy groups and beyond - seem to have chosen Facebook or one of its equally siloed competitors as a primary place to communicate to their members. It’s a risky thing to do when you do not have the final say as to who is able to participate.