When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"
36 comments
·September 18, 2025linsomniac
Sleaker
I saw these spam mails start showing up a few months ago, and I was like WOW how is google infra just letting nefarious actors use their own domain to bounce spam/fishing emails?
hollow-moe
This has been going for months already, it will most likely never be fixed.
throw-the-towel
s/months/years
Benlights
I've been having the same issue
pricechild
I've been receiving this also. Rather annoying!! I wonder if abuse@ or postmaster@ would be able to help... /s
Glyptodon
This is pretty much the case for non-abortion, non-political situations, too. For example, MMI, a small watch company out of Singapore, had their Facebook page removed in the middle of one of their Kickstarter campaigns earlier this year.
To anyone on the outside, it's not clear at all if (a) there really was some kind of issue that consumers would want to know about, or (b) their page shouldn't have been removed to begin with.
It's not only (I'm sure) annoying to the company, which, being small, has responded in a relatively circumspect way, but annoying as a consumer because it's not very easy to interpret the signal.
In the same ballpark, but reverse, my news feed always has one or two posts from maybe fake groups that have seemingly AI-written stories that carefully mention the Tedoo app, and FB is all too happy to let that slide no matter how many times I report it as spam...
_-_-__-_-_-
I lost my facebook account about five years ago--total outright account ban. No recourse at all. It happened to a group of about 10 people that had been administrators of a local non-profit's facebook page and who had managed groups for the organization in the past. Our non-profit was non-denominational and helped local teens with after school type programs. We never knew why our personal accounts were banned. Best we could figure was that we used a tagline in the past in some facebook comments and posts that later got co-opted and spread by a "white power" group in the USA. We were located in Canada.
At the time, some people recommended buying an Occulus device and calling their support because they were able to recover accounts and they had human support. We tried appealing to the company on social media, but we didn't have any luck.
I had to rebuild my social media profile and our organizations profiles and I lost 14 years of Messenger conversations, posts, and photos. These memories were just gone. It sucked. For the non-profit, it meant lost donations and lost connections for our alumni. Keep your own content off-platform.
stult
The internet has been like this forever. In the 90s I was banned from hotmail for having an inappropriate email address because my last name is Cummings. No recourse for some idiotic regex filter.
ToucanLoucan
I registered an instagram account to share my art, and was banned entirely, immediately, before I could even upload an avatar, with zero explanation. I emailed several times, did the license scan thing, and even messaged support from my personal account, and I still have never gotten any sort of explanation.
shrug This and that other thread today about Slack just seems to be what happens when you're determined to remove as many humans from your processes as possible.
j45
Makes a good case to have separate brand accounts for nearly everything and to do little from your own personal identity accounts
diebeforei485
It's important to have your own website, so you can post updates there. Use Meta to let people know that there is an update on the site.
CM30
100%. These large social media companies are very capricious about what counts as breaking their rules, will kill your reach at the drop of a hat and will fold under the slightest bit of pressure from someone richer/better connected than you if the latter has any issue with your work or existence at all.
Gotta own your own platform to make sure you have a backup when that happens, and have at least some control over your own audience.
dylan604
Having your own site on someone else's corporate service is no less of a risk of being shut out of your account. Free speech is only as free as the service you are using thinks it is.
bigbadfeline
There's risk and then there's RISK. A corporate service in the form of a simple VPS is cheap and can be had from a 1000 providers anywhere in the world. Very simple to change providers too. Nothing like the quasi-monopoly of FB/X/YT.
j45
VPS providers are many orders of magnitude simpler and smaller corporate services than social media companies.
Remotely trying to correlate or compare them defies any reasonable semblance of comparability.
You can mail your own server to a co-location service if you want to host the metal yourself.
If you need to go a step further and not rely on one host, it's inexpensive enough to get multiple hosts.
Zak
Web hosting is, or can be a commodity. An organization that gets dropped by its web host can just get another.
bestouff
Sure, but as long as you own you domain name you're a DNS update away of moving it elsewhere.
stronglikedan
I think there's only that risk if you're using a website building service like Wix. If you build your own site and then send it up to a dumb host, you can just send it up to another dumb host when the first one pisses you off. Hopefully, you're at least managing your own DNS records too, and like that service.
andyjohnson0
If you have your own§ domain and are reasonably diligent in keeping a local backup of your site then it is trivial to move the site to a new host. As others have aaid, web hosting is a commodity business.
§ yes, I know...
j45
Web hosting is much, much, much more independent that posting on social media.
Social media is a web app and mobile app.
A website is just a website. Somehow being shut out of your own hosting is something else entirely.
electric_muse
Content is one thing. But it gets me really concerned about these kind of appeal processes when it comes to more critical things like your identity or proof of personhood.
It is not hard to imagine getting a black mark in some invisible proprietary profile that determines if you can access Uber Eats, LinkedIn, etc. and have no recourse to fix it or get another chance.
j45
The online "sign in with X/Y/Z" services are a digital identity provider.
We are citizens of private corporations that are social networks.
There are not many laws there for recourse or communication.
throwawaysleep
You don’t need to imagine. It happens frequently.
ceejayoz
And not just for stuff like Uber.
You can get locked out of the IRS, Social Security, etc. in the same way.
jonbiggums22
I'm thinking of people who bought an Occulus Rift, which Meta then purchased and then forced people to associate a facebook account with it which they could then ban causing you to lose access to the hardware (and any games you purchased). A strong incentive to use the facebook account as little as possible since making a throwaway facebook account is now such a PITA. Infuriating since it was a bait and switch on an expensive piece of hardware. I guess the only winning move was to sell the device to some other sucker the moment the facebook purchase of Occulus was announced.
Don't worry this requirement was removed. Now you just need a Meta account which is totally different!
pavlov
The Facebook acquisition of Oculus was in March 2014. The hardware that Oculus sold before that was a developer prototype.
There was no bait and switch because there was no consumer product.
There’s a lot to dislike about Meta, but this complaint doesn’t make sense. If anything, Meta has put millions more of VR devices into consumers’ hands by selling the Quest at a loss. Nobody has to buy it.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2
It is not fun at all when the automated systems misfire. I am actually 'banned' from one of the 'services' and I am genuinely unsure what happened there, because I use it for stuff it is actually designed for ( local bots ), but clearly I set off an alarm somewhere. And now all I can do is wait for support to respond somehow.
I would be more annoyed if I relied on it in any serious way, but it does not change the fact that it has been a problem for a while. It is a shame, because telegram is (was?) otherwise pretty reliable for semi random mini projects.
ruralfam
I had a Youtube video account with I think two videos. Got a notice it was suspended for content violations (these were self-created videos with no copyright content). Asked for reinstatement. Nada. This was years ago. On a lark recently decided to ask again. Got approved. Have no idea why/how/what/who/etc.
dev_l1x_be
Not opening a Facebook account for your organization is how you can avoid these.
fajmccain
Great article. Another problem with Meta’s moderation on political topics is they block content worldwide rather than in the united states only
mschuster91
It's not just Meta. All big tech companies (including Amazon, if you are a vendor) have gotten infamous for basically only getting a human to intervene with automated moderation or outsourced lowest-effort moderation if one raises a big-enough stink on social media or manages to secure a court judgement, but even that isn't foolproof these days. Twitter has recently gotten under fire for ignoring German court orders.
CM30
Yep. It's why the only way most people get their hacked YouTube channels back is by begging the Team YouTube account on Twitter for help, and hoping enough people bother the staff there that something actually gets fixed.
If you're a popular creator that doesn't have much of a social media following, friends at Google or lots of lawyer money, RIP any chance of getting your channel back before/after it gets banned due to the hackers.
EGreg
Don't y'all see?
Every other day a story comes out about a centralized platform either:
1) Extorting for money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887
2) Canceling accounts: https://www.eff.org/pages/when-knowing-someone-meta-only-way...
3) Has their algorithms choose what you see and hear: https://x.com/i/grok/share/NwPcWVxZiHQytvGs8MONRdpCi
4) Deplatforms you anytime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deplatforming
5) Demonetizes you, after taking over half to begin with: https://podcastle.ai/blog/how-much-money-do-youtubers-make-p...
6) Allows governments easy surveillance and even hacking your account: https://natlawreview.com/article/even-hacking-field-governme...
7) Sends your information to advertisers, etc. etc.
8) Makes everyone increasingly depressed, angry and distrustful of others https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
Now I ask you, why do people put up with this, especially content creators with large audiences?
Because they have no viable open alternative that they can host easily themselves.
And why is that? Here is what it would look like if they did: https://qbix.com/community.pdf
I think it's because just like in Web3, the incentives of Web2 are to make a lot of money for your early stage investors, the VCs, and very few choose not to sell out after they hit the critical mass and get massive centralized power and network effects. I've seen "indieweb" come and go, "decentralizedweb.net" is down but they used to have TimBL speaking at it. I've seen Diaspora come out 13 years ago and sadly one of the founders killed himself. I've seen Mastodon, which Trump's team forked to make Truth Social (one of the few deplatformed guys who actually got his own platform, had to spend millions on it).
Why do you think there is no good alternative to Big Tech, the way that, say, at least the Incredible Burger is an alternative for people who want to opt of meat?
cwmoore
Now do match.com
Google, especially Google Corp, is very much that way too. One of my users is currently getting a fair bit of spam because a spammer figured out that if they send a message with envelope sender @google.com, rcpt @gmail.com, google.com MX will accept it, then bounce it with NoSuchUser and gmail will accept it. I spent an hour yesterday looking for a way to contact Google about it, but couldn't find anything. Made harder because most things assume you are talking about gmail or youtube, not google.com itself.
It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them.