Social Wasteland

Let me begin by saying that I did not think my second post in the reincarnation of this blog would be about social media, but here we are in an absolute wasteland of problematic platforms.

A few months ago, I would have said that X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) was the most hellish of the social hellscapes, but recent events have led me to understand that Meta is, in fact, the absolute worst of the worst.

To understand why, you need to first understand that Meta owns and operates three of the platforms most likely to be used by the average person: Facebook, Instagram, and the fairly new Threads. Millions of people use these platforms, and furthermore, a large number of those people also manage business/professional profiles on these platforms, which is where things get particularly bad.

I have been one of these people. I joined Facebook fifteen years ago, when it was a fun, easy way to keep in touch with friends and family members who lived far away. We shared jokes and photos, played games together and poked each other from time to time (if you’re old enough to get what I mean, I see you). Then when I began blogging, I created a professional Facebook page and linked it to my profile, because that’s what Facebook told me I should do. When I created Facebook pages for my book catalog Adoptee Reading and for my small press Raised Voice Press, I also linked those to my profile, because Facebook wanted me to have one and only one personal profile from which I was to manage any and all of my professional pages.

Meanwhile, off in another corner of the internet, Instagram gained popularity as a place to share photographs that focused on the images themselves, with very little text and without any links to external websites. Those were peaceful times. My oldest child wanted to join—all the kids were doing it—and I wanted to monitor his activity there, so I created a private account that I shared only with close family members.

Most people probably know that Instagram today is quite different. Now it is overrun with accounts trying to sell something, and peaceful photo streams have been overtaken by obnoxious reels and those fleeting stories made popular by the platform Snapchat. Instagram has become The Place that any professional seeking an audience for any reason needs to be. And so, eventually, I also created Instagram accounts to match my three professional Facebook pages.

By this time, Instagram had been purchased by Facebook. The company then rebranded itself as Meta. And Meta wants everything under its umbrella to be linked together under a master Meta control account. An upside to this is that you can link your Instagram accounts and your professional Facebook pages to your Meta Business Suite via your personal Facebook account. (This sounds confusing because it is.) The Meta Business Suite then allows you to create and schedule posts to your professional Facebook pages and your Instagram accounts via a centralized dashboard. This is something I once subscribed to another service to do, so I happily switched over to Meta for this free functionality.

Meta Business Suite is also the place where you can purchase ads to run on Facebook or Instagram, and I did this exactly one time. The ad was quite expensive and didn’t generate any sales, so I decided not to purchase ads on Meta again and I removed my credit card from the site, just in case. Thankfully I did so.

A few weeks ago, that decision to purchase an ad several years ago bit me in the ass. A nefarious someone on Instagram created a profile there that they somehow managed to link to one of my public Instagram accounts and to my personal Facebook account via that Instagram profile. The nefarious account then deliberately posted something that got it banned and, likewise, got my personal Facebook account banned, because per Meta’s rules, the personal Facebook account that controls an Instagram account is responsible for its content.

I learned about this when I tried to use my personal Facebook account and got a popup message saying I had violated community standards with no explanation of what that violation was. For a brief period of literally a few minutes, I was able to sign in and get to my Meta dashboard to try to figure out what had violated the standards. I thought perhaps it was a post I’d recently made on my professional page about a book I was reading, so I interacted with the warning dialogue from that page. But that interaction somehow got my entire Facebook account locked down and deactivated, including the professional page from which I’d tried to verify my identity. A new popup then told me that I would need to sign into the linked Instagram account that had violated standards in order to appeal the decision. But the Instagram account listed was not my account. It was only after this when I tried to locate the unknown Instagram account that I discovered it had been linked to my legitimate professional Instagram account and my personal Facebook account without my knowledge. By then it was too late.

Which brings me to why Meta is the worst of the worst. Meta can only be contacted via a Meta account. To recap, my personal Facebook account is locked because a nefarious Instagram account linked to it somehow, it seems through one of my legitimate Instagram accounts. Since I don’t have access to the nefarious Instagram account and since I can no longer sign in to my locked Facebook account, I cannot contact Meta directly about this situation to get help. Meta has no customer service number or email address or physical address by which you can contact them without being logged into your account. I have tried contacting them via my still active Instagram accounts with no success. I have tried contacting them via a form I was able to find online to report problems with Meta Business Suite with no success. Crazily, my other two Facebook pages are still live online, but I have no way any longer to access them. I can still access my Instagram accounts, which I’m both thankful for and astonished by, since this is one more example of how ridiculous Meta’s setup is.

Me being me, I of course dug in to research how and why this happened as well as what I can do about it. I discovered several Reddit threads where other victims of this scam tried to figure out a way to resolve the issue and regain control of their accounts without much success. I also found two articles published about this scam: the first article, published in May 2023 (!) perfectly describes my situation, and the second article, published in June 2024, tells of business owners turning to state attorneys general and taking Meta to small claims court to try to get their locked accounts back. So, the scam has been going on for over a year, Meta is aware of the scam because they’ve been sued over it, yet Meta has done nothing in that time to improve their response to victims of the scam.

I suspect that the scammer was looking to steal my credit card info from my Meta profile and thus targeted my ad account. I want to emphasize here that due to the nature of how accounts are created on Facebook vs. Instagram, the two accounts that were targeted—my personal Facebook account and a professional Instagram account—don’t even share the same email address, so that was probably not how the scammer gained access. I will note also that when I investigated my Instagram account further, I noticed in the associated Meta dashboard that there was an option for Meta Horizon that I’d never seen before; this appears to be a gaming platform, and I’m not a gamer. It seems to me that there is a loophole somewhere in the Metaverse that’s allowing scammers into Meta ad accounts through some back door, and that victims such as myself are losing access to their accounts due to the convoluted way Meta requires accounts to be connected without implementing adequate security measures against hacking or adequate remediation avenues for those victimized.

That’s the kindest take I can muster. A less kind supposition is that Meta itself may be creating these situations in order to entice people to pay to become Meta verified. This is a conspiracy theory I’ve seen on some message boards that I wish I could entirely discount, however just the other day I received a solicitation on Instagram to become Meta verified, so I can understand how a suspicious mind might make that connection.

This new “pay to become verified” thing began at X and seems to have now spread to the Meta properties. Meta verification requires a monthly payment and uploading identification documents. Searching for reviews of the Meta verification experience returns both pros and cons, but I’m not sold. If Meta and its many algorithms couldn’t tell that a scammer was not the same person who quietly posted on my personal Facebook account for fifteen years without issue, then why in the world would I trust Meta at all? Why would I turn over personal documents to a company I don’t trust?

So, no, Meta, I won’t be using my Instagram account to join Threads (one can only join Threads by linking an Instagram account). I laughed so hard at that suggestion!

A lot of people have joined Threads, though, as an alternative to the musky X. These days I prefer the Fediverse, which is a network of social internet sites (aka, “instances”) that are each independently owned and managed and run one of a handful of software protocols that can communicate with each other. It’s similar to how email works, where you can choose your email home (for example, gmail.com) but can communicate with people at other email homes (for example, outlook.com). My address in the Fediverse is @karen_pickell@mstdn.social (mstdn.social is a Mastodon instance; Mastodon functions similarly to Twitter), and from there I can communicate with people at many other addresses, including recently at threads.net; Threads has joined the Fediverse (though it remains to be seen how open they will be), so I can now follow and see posts from people on Threads via my Mastodon account, though people on Threads cannot follow accounts outside of Threads at this time. While it’s true that there aren’t as many people active on Mastodon as there were on the old Twitter or probably on the new Threads, I’m not governed by Meta at my home on Mastodon, and I think it’s wise to maintain a presence outside of Meta control. Besides, at Mastodon I was able to get “verified” by simply pasting code into the website that I link to there so that it would be connected to my Mastodon profile. Easy peasy and free.

I have ventured back onto Facebook, though, via a new account there. I still want to regain access to my former personal account; there is history there in messages and photographs, and in conversations I’ve had in private groups, all of which I’ve lost access to. It’s one thing to decide to leave a platform, but it’s quite another to be suddenly cut off from people you were connected to for a very long time. I’m slowly coming to terms with the reality that I might never get that account or its associated professional pages back. I intend to use the new account differently. No linking to pages (or creating new pages, for that matter) or to Instagram accounts, and less posting of personal things that could be taken from me without warning at any time. I’ll be more picky at the new account about accepting friend requests but I’ll also open it to followers of my public posts so that I can use it as a replacement for the professional page I lost.

One of the main reasons I’ve been anxious to get back on Facebook is because there are many useful genealogy groups there from which I’ve already learned so much. I hope one day someone will create a viable alternative to the private groups on Facebook, but that can only happen if enough people migrate to the new alternative. For now, like or not, we’re stuck with trying to wring usefulness out of a sketchy service without sacrificing too much of our privacy or sanity.

My new profile on Facebook is here for those interested in following me there. Or find me on Mastodon or Instagram. Thanks for sticking with me if you’ve made it all the way here to the end. I hope this (very long, probably too long) missive helps you stay safe on social!