Facebook Bans Guy For No Reason, Acknowledges Error, Re-Bans Guy For No Reason
Matt was kicked off of Facebook for no reason in March, got the social networking site to admit its error and reinstate him after a few weeks in April, then got the boot again and has been floating around in outer darkness ever since. His tale of despair:
As of today, May 13th, I'm banned from Facebook and have been for almost two months now. Here's the kicker: by Facebook's own admission, I've done absolutely nothing wrong. I don't know what's going on here or why it's going on — all I know is that I need your help in resolving this matter.
Gather 'round, friends, and let me tell you a tale of Facebook woe:
March 25th: It was late. I was poking around Facebook, just killing a little time before bed. I hit F5 at one point to refresh my News Feed, and out of the blue, Facebook asked me to login again. When I tried to do so, I received the following message: "Your account has been disabled. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page here." So, one minute, everything was hunky-dory, and the next, I was banned for reasons unknown — no warning, no explanation, nothing. Fantastic.
Puzzled, I immediately read through the aforementioned FAQ and their ToS, hoping to narrow down just what it is I could've possibly done to trigger such action, but nothing stood out. It was all pretty standard fare — don't harass our users, don't spam, don't post pornography, and so forth — none of which seemed to apply to me. One point of interest: "Accounts can either be disabled for repeat offenses or for one, particularly egregious violation." Certainly, nothing I've ever done on Facebook could reasonably be classified as an egregious enough violation to warrant the instant, permanent ban with which I'd just been slapped. No, something wasn't right here.
Fortunately, at the end of the FAQ, they offer a solution: "If none of the above are applicable, and you think your account was mistakenly disabled, please contact us here." So I did. On the night of March 25th, I sent a letter to disabled@facebook.com outlining everything I mentioned above — I was disabled for reasons unknown to me, I've never been warned in the past or done anything that would reasonably come even *close* to constituting a "particularly egregious violation", and I'm just your average, everyday user who can't for the life of him figure out why he was targeted.
April 13th: Almost three weeks later, I *still* hadn't heard back from anyone. Frustrated, I decided to poke around their site to see if I could find an alternate means of contact that might expedite the process. As luck would have it, my search yielded a "My Account Has Been Compromised" form. Could someone have broken into my account and done something of some sort to get me banned? With a password so strong, it didn't seem likely, but then again, what other explanation was there? "What the hell?", I figured. I filled out the form, sent it off, and continued playing the waiting game.
April 14th: Less than 24 hours later, I received the following response to my form submission:
Hi Matt,
Your account was disabled in error. We have reactivated it and you should be able to access it again. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. Please let me know if you have any further questions or issues.
Thanks for contacting Facebook,
Anthony
User OperationsSUCCESS! Not one to take chances, though, I spent an hour or so skimming my account from top to bottom in search of any content that could possibly be construed as a violation of their ToS, but found no such material. Shrugging my shoulders, I carried on as usual, hoping this ordeal was finally behind me once and for all.
April 21st: But it wasn't. I arrived home on the 21st, loaded up Facebook, and was once again greeted by the login page and the "account disabled" message. Say whaaaaaaaaaat? At an almost complete loss for words, I immediately fired off a brief follow-up to Anthony informing him that I was banned again and asking that he investigate the matter further. To date, no response.
April 30th: It occurred to me that, depending on how Facebook's support system works, my previous ticket might've been closed and, therefore, my letter to Anthony may never have reached its destination. Just in case, I fired another letter off to disabled@facebook.com. To date, no response. [Curiously, when I first wrote back in March, I received an immediate auto-response to the effect of "thanks for your letter, you'll be hearing from us soon". I received no such auto-response this time around. Are subsequent appeal requests being filtered?]
May 7th: Decided to give the "account compromised" form another shot. To date — you guessed it — no response.
May 13th: Having reached my wits' end and run out of other options, I turned to the Consumerist for help. But, uh, you knew that, didn't you?
Long story short, at this point, I've been banned from Facebook for 42 of the past 49 days for NO REASON WHATSOEVER. In a day and age where having your Facebook access revoked is tantamount to having your social life revoked, this has gone from simple misunderstanding to completely and totally unacceptable. And yet, despite being, by Facebook's own admission, not in the wrong here, I remain banned almost two months later, and I seem to have no further recourse outside of continuing to sit about, waiting on a response that I doubt will ever come. It's as if they're done talking to me, there's nothing I can say or do to change that, and that's all there is to it. I feel like I'm on the playground in elementary school all over again. Or at the bar on a Friday night, for that matter.
Keeping in mind, then, that, with the excess of friends, pictures, and other general content I have in my account, simply creating a new one and moving on is out of the question (particularly since, if I'm getting picked off by some malfunctioning auto-ban script, in all likelihood, they'll just ban me again after I spend the hours upon hours it'll take to put together a reasonably close approximation of my former profile), what's my next move, Consumerist?
Nearly han three months without being tempted to take someone's "How Well Do You Know Me?" quiz or being spammed by his stalker acquaintance's latest Mafia Wars exploits? We don't know whether to pity Matt or envy him.
What would you do under such circumstances, Consumerists? Go back to Friendster? Start talking to people in real life once again?
(Photo: www.betaart.com)
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Comments:
I blame Mafia Wars
In a day and age where having your Facebook access revoked is tantamount to having your social life revoked...
Too easy...way too easy. Just imagine I entered a snarky, insightful and hilarious comment here.
Facebook is going to destroy itself at this rate. I play Mafia Wars and a few other apps and use Facebook to connect with friends, but it is frustrating when FB sends warnings whenever it thinks you are doing something wrong. This kind of over-moderation is going to drive people away. I have friends who have various FB features disabled as a slap on thw wrist. Add too many friends in a day, you get a warning, post too many comments, the feature is disabled, and so on.
Then there are the poor people like the OP who get their account disabled for no reason. It seems near impossible to reach a human being at FB when there is a problem.
@OP, you probably have friends reporting your posts as inappropriate - either to be asses or because something there legitimately is. are you being annoying in any way - posting more than a dozen times a day, promoting a product, taking 50 quizzes a day?
I envy him. I want to get off the "grid" but it is too late.
You should file a chargeback, get all your money back... oh, wait.
@Canino: People like that should be required to write 2 pages comparing their lives to a darfur war orphan stricken with HIV before being allowed to write.
Matt has proven that people without Facebook accounts actually can and do exist on this planet. It is a lesson for us all.
@TheWraithL98: Facebook has already admitted it's an error. Someone screwed up, and now they're compounding the error. Seems pretty straightforward.
No it's not. It's just getting rid of the stupid people. If you get your account disabled because of mafia wars, you're too stupid to live much less be on facebook. How hard is it to simply not spam-add people or spam-comments on add sites? Do 20 a day and no one gives a rat's ass. 200 a day and you run into the pink box and get your stupid butt tossed. Frankly, I'm pretty happy about the blocks because god knows no one needs any more spammers on the site.
@FoxHoundADAM: Seconded. I mean, it would be different if this were a service the OP actually paid for (like adultfriendfinder.com).
Maybe the guy has a last name that sounds "offensive", and the FaceBook bots flagged his account? LOL.
@Heather Russell: I had no idea any of that was going on. Maybe Facebook is just trying to save them from themselves :)
by, you know, encouraging them to go outside...
@FoxHoundADAM: Are you talking about your comment?
You do know you don't have to read every story Consumerist posts, right?
@LatherRinseRepeat: That's it. Sorry, Matt Slapzbiches, the Polish are once again the butt of someone's joke.
But, it's just Facebook - not anything critical.
"What's that Lassie? An automated computer system has twice failed, stranding a hapless intarwebs user in an abandoned mine with only his job, car, computer, fast food, and Real Live Friends®? Oh noes! I'll call Al Gore right away!!"
@henwy: I don't spam my MW exploits on my wall and add friends slowly and still got the pink box for adding 22 people in a day. I just don't get why you get in trouble for social networking since that is the purpose of the site. If someone annoys me, I just hide them from my feed or in a really bad case delete them as a friend, it is pretty simple.
Long story short...
Too Late
Not that this isn't an amusing story, but is lack of Facebook access what we're describing as an "ordeal" these days?
Wow, our grandparents must be proud.
@FoxHoundADAM: Why is anything on the Internet? Why are we even here? What if we're not really here? Oh man, what if we're all someone's dream and they're about to wake up?
This brings up a related point -- why isn't there any way to back up the contents of your facebook profile? People these days spend hundreds of hours creating a profile on facebook...your list of friends, links, photos, etc.
THis is valuable data, at least based on the amount of time it took to create and the effort taken to maintain it...but there is no way to back it up.
Facebook ought to provide a way that users can "download" their profile in some standard xml format, as a backup.
This is a larger problem then just facebook -- most "cloud" services suffer the same issue (backed up your gmail account lately?) but this may become a real consumer issue.
@William Brinkman: I don't think Darfur's war orphans have much of a social life, so I can see how this is similar.
"My" Facebook account went suddenly and inexplicably un-accessible about 6 months ago. Despite very many emails to Facebook (pretty much every imaginable address) I've received no attention from them at all.
So, I'm no longer on Facebook. Actually, it's a relief.
(I put "my" in quotation marks because obviously it wasn't mine enough for me to keep it, control it, or re-access it, and by now it isn't 'mine' in any sense at all.)
change your IP and use a different name.
@Heather Russell: While Facebook is subject to an annoying big brother method of moderation, the alternative is something like LinkedIn where they don't bother moderating at all. If 3 people report your account you get disabled, no questions and no appeals. I know people who have had to change the name they registered with because some people had grudges against them.
Note to editor: Article title says "Re-Basns Guy." I think that should have been "Re-Basns Guy."
I have a friend on FB who is very prolific, and FB suddenly banned her from commenting on anyone else's posts. She can post to her own wall as much as she likes, and she can comment on her own posts. But she can't post to anyone else's wall, or leave comments for them. She's also the most inoffensive person I can imagine, so we can't figure out what the deal is.
I just got posting privileges to walls and comments back after a 13 day suspension.
My internet went down for about 10 seconds while I was trying to make a comment, and I made the mistake of hitting the comment button 10-15 times not realizing the problem was on my end. Obviously the comment got through because my internet came back up halfway through, and the I got the warning that my rights were disabled for a few hours or a few days.
13 days later I got posting rights back and I never recieved an email from a CSR with an explanation as to why or what happened.
Facebook rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars, and they can't afford any CSR's? I sent off a lot of emails to a bunch of addresses for an explanation of what happened and I never received a response.
So, I've come out of this experience jaded against Facebook.
@kshusker: It just takes a little due dilligence on the user side to make sure everything is backed up. I have very little information online that has any relative value that isn't backed up somewhere else.
I use IMAP to access my gmail, and my computer does an incremental backup of all my email accounts every night at midnight (IMAPsize). Facebook photos are on my computer (and all my photos are backed up every 3 months to an external drive), links and bookmarks are synced between 3 of my computers (Xmarks), and most of my important documents and work are hosted at the university where they are backed up nightly.
Did you not read or something? 22>20. Stick to 20 and you shouldn't have any problems. If you want to do more and risk a ban, then go ahead but stop whining about it.
@Skaperen: My post wasn't intended to diminish the problem; just to point out that, according to Facebook, the description that TheWraithL98 gave didn't sound likely.
The solution depends on where the OP is located. If I found myself in this position, I'd probably drive about 45 minutes south on 101 and walk into the headquarters in Palo Alto... but I'm in San Francisco, so that may or may not be feasible for the OP. If not, I'd try calling them. If I still didn't get anywhere, the standard EECB is a good start.
I'm certain that he will eventually be able to reach someone, especially given that they've already admitted it isn't his fault. But when he does, I'd recommend that he clarifies the second part of the problem (the fact that it's recurring, and that he had quite a bit of trouble reaching someone the second time), and therefore ask for a direct contact that he can use if the problem happens a third time. There's clearly precedent to support this need.
@henwy:
Oh and for all the other people who have been banned from mafia wars 'for no reason', go through this checklist. If you answer yes to any of this, it's a good start to figuring out why you were banned
Ever sent out more than 20 friend requests a day (especially multiple days in a row)?
Ever made the exact same comment (add me! add me!) repeatedly for any comment board?
Ever posted any other person's mafia link on your status trying to get your friends to attack them?
Ever exploited any bug (the multiple skill help bug, the free godfather point bug, etc)?
Bonus points if you did exploit the bug and then claimed that it wasn't your fault because it was their code that was broken.
Oh, and I thought this was going to be something important.
@Makrel: I beg to differ. In this day and age, employers regularly Google their prospective employees. Both having and keeping a clean online profile is a must, for several reasons:
First, there has been story after story after story of people losing their jobs because of what they've posted on Facebook or other online profiles. It should be painfully obvious to everyone that what you post is NOT going to remain private, regardless of whether or not it has a "friends-only" status. Friends sometimes re-post things, and sometimes a friend of a friend can get wind of something and then mention it to a co-worker, who mentions it to your boss, and there goes your job. If you're going to post a photo or write a post, consider how it would affect you if you left that same post up on your monitor at work. If it wouldn't be positive, don't post it.
Second, when a potential employer Googles you (and they will), they may wonder why you don't seem to have many results. That may signify to them that you're a technophobe, or perhaps simply not very industrious. Neither quality is seen as positive in a prospective employee. Strike one. Perhaps they will ignore this, then ask you in an interview. What will you say? "I don't like to waste time online" sounds great, until you realize that it sounds like an excuse. Then they wonder why you're not willing to spend the time it takes to network, which is considered essential in today's business world. Strike two. Speaking of which:
Third, there is NO BETTER WAY to find a new job, client or business partner than networking. Searching job postings and firing off resumes is all fine and good, but the BEST way to get your foot in the door is to know someone on the other side of it. For example, merely changing my status on LinkedIn to reflect that a 3-month contract was going to be ending in a month resulted in four different recruiters sending me job descriptions and asking me if I would be interested. If you don't know this already, your employers do, and may also wonder why you haven't figured it out. Strike three... and you're out of the running for that position.
So, yeah: Facebook is kind of critical.
@Alpine75: There's a real world out there - populated with real people who really talk and interact and do stuff. You might wanna try it.....
So, out of curiosity, how come this took another month to hit the consumerist after he sent it in? Not a criticism, I actually am interested in why it takes x time for some things and y for others
@Tzepish: I think he's talking about getting "off the grid" not quitting. Everyone knows you can't get off the grid. Your stuff is out there forever. The deed's done now. Once you're on the grid, you can never turn back. It's like losing your virginity.
Did OP happen to pick on any computer geeks in high school? Maybe they work at facebook now.