Meta just suspended the Facebook account of Neal Stephenson
86 comments
·August 25, 2025jdlshore
Animats
I was really hoping for a Snow Crash movie. That project has been in development hell for years. Instead, we got Ready Player One, which is like Snow Crash for dummies. There's a trailer for a low-budget version of Snow Crash.[1] It's awful.
I don't hold out much hope for that project. Snow Crash is about a conspiracy between a media baron and a televangelist to take over the world. That would upset a lot more people now than in 1992.
brightball
I'm still waiting for a Spawn reboot and universe now that Dune finally got a big budget version. Apparently Voltron too.
Don't give up hope.
perihelions
What an ironic error to happen to a creator of cyberpunk dystopia. And also to Mr. Stephenson.
epgui
I believe I have accumulated two moderation strikes on my Facebook account for (relatively politely) calling out posts for being racist/xenophobic.
Both cases my comments were flagged as promoting hate, ironically. The appeal mechanism is a joke: you press a button, and two seconds later you get a notification saying your appeal was reviewed and denied.
AceJohnny2
Was this within the last couple years? How much you wanna bet the appeal is handled by an AI.
dragonwriter
Its probably just a variant on a placebo button.
analognoise
Where if you have the temerity to complain, you’re immediately labelled a rebellious non-conformer and banned forever.
pesus
I got a week long ban for calling someone out for being a Nazi. The person openly praising Hitler did not get banned at all. At the time I thought it was mere incompetence, but in hindsight, it seems more like intentional malice.
bachmeier
Are you implying that being banned from Facebook is a bad thing?
qualeed
I'm pretty sure they are implying that it might be a bad policy to not ban nazis.
bryanrasmussen
even if you would think people should be happy about being banned, they always get annoyed
https://medium.com/luminasticity/facebook-deleted-my-account...
vkou
It's not intentional malice, it's just 2025 - an age where calling someone a fascist or a racist is worse than being one.
If that doesn't make a lick of sense to you - it's simple. The latter is an offense against a nebulous, undefined outgroup of people, while the former offends a particular person.
It's the same reason why someone can steal a dollar from a million people, but why you'd go to jail for punching the thief in the face.
rl3
>The person openly praising Hitler did not get banned at all.
Content moderation at Meta is a joke now. I reported an account multiple times for hate speech. The account's photos were comprised entirely of racist caricatures of black people. Like absolutely vile, hateful shit.
Each time, I received a notification along the lines of: [paraphrasing] "We found that the account in question did not violate our community standards. Therefore, we did not take any action. Thanks for the report."
Yeah, OK. Gross.
AceJohnny2
"Shoot the messenger!"
brianmurphy
[flagged]
diego
Meta has extremely opaque account policies. For example, I bought the Meta Raybans a month ago. It kept telling me the AI features were not available in my region, even though I am in San Francisco. I joined Facebook in 2006, and I have used my account for the Oculus headset without a problem. But no matter what I did, the AI function of the Raybans wouldn't work.
I ended up creating a brand new account just for that, and it worked fine. No idea why it would work with a brand new account and not with my old account in good standing, never suspended or warned about anything.
michalpleban
I have recently had a need to create an Instagram account. I logged in from my home IP and it was recognized as coming from Vietnam (my home IP has been the same since 2016, always with the same ISP). Everything was in Vietnamese and I had to spend half an hour figuring out how to switch it back to English. But in the home feed I still got only Vietnamese influencers, and there was nothing in the settings to change that. I got assigned to Vietnam for life.
Well, I did nothing with the account except setting up the profile and following some people. Then I logged in to the account on my phone, which of course is not from Vietnam. Bam, account suspended for violating the TOS. I appealed, after one day got a message that the ban was upheld because I did violate the TOS.
I guess no Instagram for me. That's probably for the better.
anal_reactor
There's a mid-sized international bus company over here and once I bought a ticket for the wrong day, realized only after payment. I simply called the phone number, the lady spoke my language, reissued the ticket for a different day, that's it.
I was shocked that customer support can work like that.
hnuser123456
Is it possible your FB account has been compromised for a while? Is your ISP's RIR whois information correct?
uz3snolc3t6fnrq
my best guess is, you could've connected from a different ip once 10 years ago and it improperly geolocated that ip as being in a tiny country and now it thinks you're secretly from that country even though you've been accessing the site from a US ip forever. it's the only plausible reason i can really think of. unless they set up a "country estimation" ai or a similar newfangled system and it's convinced for some reason you're actually not american. it's too out there but you never know
lazide
Some GEOIP databases are rotting, near as I can tell.
I’ve got a proxy on random machine in a OVH DC in Oregon. Always properly geo-located to Oregon - until a few months ago.
Now YouTube insists I’m in France. Which is quite entertaining, ads wise.
VincentEvans
Last time meta blocked my account was because I gave away free framing lumber after demolishing my poorly framed basement. Somehow it got flagged and that was that. Thankfully I don’t give a damn, and now never will.
Ps: some couple happily picked up 100 or so 2x4 studs of various lengths to build a greenhouse for their garden with.
viraptor
I got blocked for sending a post asking if anyone wants to grab a lunch when I'm back in (location).
bbarnett
Tangential, but a decade ago I lost my original Amazon account, because I bought bandages. Yes bandages.
I'd had it for 5 years, no excess returns, no issues. I click add and go to checkout... banned.
Some reasons about religious icons flashed on my screen. It was red cross bandages ffs!
And why ban me, and not the seller?!?
Calls, emails resulted in confused but unhelpful people.
SLHamlet
This is not an anomaly, by the way. I've interviewed many multiple Meta staffers (including senior leaders), and can find little evidence that leadership actually read "Snow Crash" and/or even cared about virtual worlds. Even after spending tens of billions claiming they were building the Metaverse.
Some background: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2025/05/horizon-worlds-meta-horizo...
bsenftner
They are still quoting Fountainhead and thinking they are intellectuals.
SlowTao
A few years back Chris Hedges did a showshow/podcast or something and he was forced to finally read in depth a lot more Rand.
I love his defeated responded of "It is amazing just how pedestrian those books are. There is nothing interesting in them.".
Hedges is always worth listening to even if you won't always agree but he does make doomers look like utopian optimists.
mchusma
I think anyone who says there is nothing interesting in Rand either didn’t read it or is acting in bad faith. Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead are uniquely fascinating even if you don’t agree with her stance.
Chris Hedges is a self reported socialist. So makes sense they would not like books negative on socialism. But you can be a socialist and still engage with competing thoughts. Just like a capitalist can review Marx and admit the ideas are important/interesting.
wmf
Meta's recent strategy is more reminiscent of Rainbows End.
KaiserPro
I dunno who you were talking to, but the RL research areas I worked in had some definite Neil Stevenson fans.
but then we weren't the pricks who thought you could make up for a shit lighting setup with polygon count cough any screenshot from horizon worlds cough
lenerdenator
There's precious little value for those types to read stuff like "Snow Crash".
It's like the people saying "It's obvious these STEM people didn't take humanities courses". Well, yeah. The dream for the incoming freshman at Stanford's CS program isn't to graduate with a degree. The dream is to have some VC come onto campus, see some BS project the freshman cooked up, tell the freshman "You're literally Jesus Christ, and I want to fund your startup" and drop out with access to millions in funding and a network of people who can give more funding when the original round dries up.
Humanities courses and reading humanistic conceptions of how tech could go wrong doesn't get you millions of dollars. Reckless abandon does.
nirav72
Who has time to read when it's about 'Move fast and break things..." /s
saltysalt
If they suspend everyones accounts, the Internet will be a better place.
“Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.” - Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
copacopab
I have been locked out of my account for 5+ months -- and customer support has been a Kafkaesque nightmare. I am still locked out. (Oh, and I've spent $1M+ in paid META ads...)
ralphington
You seem to have funded your own demise
copacopab
Haha... it's crazy. And I have friends at META who've been trying to help, and they themselves get in a customer support hell as well. It's wild. $1.9T company.
SlowTao
Not surprising. The larger the company the more complex it typically gets at all levels. Probably take 7 months of paperwork to swap a light globe.
simpaticoder
On one level this is amusing. But what if both accounts are owned by the same person impersonating Neal Stephenson? My understanding was that he was not on any social media. Did that change at some point?
gpm
Assuming https://nealstephenson.com/social-media.html is real, he has social media accounts (linked from that page).
That domain has been registered since 2000, it's probably real.
It links to a google plus account, it's probably not updated promptly.
SLHamlet
That Facebook page is the one managed by his publisher.
He also has (had?) a personal one he used that just got suspended.
null
SLHamlet
Update, 3:03pm PT:
Stephenson's Facebook account has been restored within the last 1-2 hours. (I've been checking since the morning.)
But the irony goes on forever.
Thoreandan
Huh. Posting a screenshot of the tweet just got my FB account suspended.
For people missing the irony here, the term “metaverse,” that Meta is named after, was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 book “Snow Crash.”
In the book, the metaverse is a VR version of the internet with an emphasis on accurate sword fights and realistic facial expressions.