The Battle for Realness in an Artificial Intelligence-Ruled World
A Privileged True Account of Expulsion and Redemption
by Maresa Thompson
Back Up Your Social Media Now!
Links to Instructions ↓
Go Back Up Your Social Media Right Now!
Read on to find out why you need to Back Up Your Social Media accounts right now before you do anything else.
That is if you care about your own data.
Instructions:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/help/212802592074644
Instagram: https://help.instagram.com/181231772500920
LinkedIn: https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/export-linkedin-contacts
Twitter: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/how-to-download-your-twitter-archive
These links were current as of January 4th, but they frequently change, so please notify me if they aren’t working at info@constllationcreative.com
Back Up Your Social Media Now!
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This story is about my primary social media jam, the channel I have invested thousands of hours in the past 14 years, the platform that I give advertising dollars to for my clients, and the platform that most royally screwed me over.
None other than the 900-pound Gorilla of Social Media: Facebook
But First, Stop Reading and Go Backup Your Social Media Right Now!
I am not kidding; this story demonstrates how all your data, including your profile, photos, videos, posts, friends, groups, messages, and pages access, can be deleted immediately. This happened to me on a summer night in 2022.
My primary mission is to inform everyone on social media that your data truly is not yours. Back up your content, so you have a record of your data saved on your own computer. Let my privileged nightmare story serve to inform you that you, too, can become a victim of Artificial Intelligence (AI) anytime.
The Unthinkable Happens (aka WTF)
Spring 2022 – Background
In Spring 2022, my time spent on social media was mainly used for work on my clients’ digital marketing. I didn’t want my mind cluttered with the noise social media makes in my brain. In addition, I had been working on breaking a social media addiction, like other addictions, that peaked during the pandemic, and I just wasn’t enjoying Facebook (my drug of choice) as much as I used to. As a result, I have hardly posted and certainly didn’t post anything that would violate community standards and call for an immediate ban and expulsion without review.
When I logged in to Facebook before my expulsion, I received no notices, warnings, or emails that any of my content violated community standards, and I was in danger of immediate expulsion.
June 21, 2021, at 2:19 AM, I get the following email from Facebook:
I didn’t see this email from Facebook until the morning. The notice that my Facebook account had been suspended shocked me. So I immediately clicked the button labeled “Disagree with the decision”, and from that moment forward, my Facebook login screen looked like this for one month:
I never received any emails or contact from Facebook during these 30 days.
Back Up Your Social Media Now!
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Feeling Embarrassed and All Alone
At first, I was humiliated and embarrassed by losing my FB access. I am a seasoned marketing professional, and created my account in 2008. I learned that shame and questioning are a big part of this process, and I believe that this is a significant reason why more people who get falsely banned don’t come forward. Running a website design business, I have a healthy paranoia for internet security, so I have many security features on all my devices.
When I was first banned, I was obsessed with what actions I could have taken that could possibly warrant an immediate ban without any warnings or notices. I’ve seen friends on both sides of extreme politics get frequently banned, and they always show that they get notifications before the expulsion. This never happened to me. All I got was one email, one click of one button, and I was un-personed for good.
Then I started talking to friends, and I actually found a few accounts of this very same thing happening. A close friend said this happened to his sister and several friends. All of them had to restart their accounts from scratch (a prospect that made me nauseated). He said the benefit of starting fresh was the ability to curate their profile and friends list carefully, and he admitted jealousy over pristine new profiles but didn’t want to invest the time to start from scratch. Another friend said this happened to a friend of hers, and she was able to recover her account. But only because her ex worked at Meta. She had a direct connection at the source.
Back Up Your Social Media Now!
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Reaching Out for Help in Desperation
After August 21, 2022, my Facebook account looked like this, and I could not log in at all.
I scoured the internet for articles that may shine a light on what happened to my account and found that this appears to be a known and documented issue for many around the world.
I researched this issue extensively and found these legitimate media articles demonstrating that there is a known hack or bug that is likely impacting thousands of people and businesses around the globe:
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Real-World Small-Business Impacts
From those articles and accounts from friends, I felt much less alone and realized that Facebook expulsions were impacting many businesses around the globe. My Albuquerque, New Mexico-based small business, Constellation Creative LLC, manages websites and digital marketing strategies for more than 25 businesses and non-profit organizations in New Mexico and nationally.
Because Facebook forces you to manage business pages from your personal page, my Facebook account suspension directly impacts my and my clients’ businesses. I went through significant time and personal expense to find workarounds, which were not ideal. I also lost some new business pages I created for a client opening later that year and had no way of recovering those business pages with the brand names.
If I did something wrong that got my account immediately suspended and never reviewed, I would, at the very least, like to know exactly what action caused this ban. But Facebook’s automated system does not afford me that dignity.
I am glad that Facebook has community standards and stricter restrictions, and I believe that some accounts, like that of the former president, should be banned and removed. The January 6th hearings demonstrate just how destructive and deadly social media platforms can have on our democracy and society.
The issue is that the tech giants are the only game in town. As an advertiser, I am forced to use Facebook, Google, Expedia, Amazon, and others because they dominate any competitors and are the only way to grow business digitally. But the real-world impacts on small businesses like mine when something goes this horribly wrong with absolutely no way of any resolution are unfair and destructive.
I am trying and succeeding in helping many small businesses and non-profits navigate and develop strategies to utilize digital channels to grow. Despite my account being disabled, I continue advertising for my clients on Facebook. However, I wish Facebook would realize and create better tools and means for this well-documented hack to be resolved.
Since Facebook has been before congress many times, my final last-ditch effort was to reach out to my U.S. Senator’s office and see if they could do anything to intervene and help.
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Rescue from Senator Heinrich’s Team
I know there is a ridiculous term of service agreement for Facebook. And at one point, I clicked on a button that said Agree without reading it. Due to this, I am well aware that I had absolutely no way to fight this legally, so I decided to document my experience and reach out to Senator Martin Heinrich’s team for assistance.
(Much of this post was included in the original letter to Senator Heinrich’s office.)
My main ask was that my Facebook account, founded in 2008 with 1500 friends and countless messages, groups, memories, and most importantly, access to my clients’ pages, be restored and access granted again. I would also like the ability to download my account as my previous backup was in September 2020, so two years of data are missing.
At the very least, I wanted to know what happened to cause this ban if it wasn’t a hack or a bug.
Fortunately, the awesome team at Senator Heinrich’s office had a direct connection high enough at Meta to make a difference. As a result, they were able to get my FB profile completely restored on Monday, September 12th.
If you live in New Mexico, remember that we are fortunate to have a fantastic advocate in the team at Senator Heinrich’s office. Their behind-the-scenes work helps hundreds of fellow New Mexicans work with the federal government, from passport and visa issues to veterans affairs. They were able to pull off a miracle and get my wrongfully suspended account back from one of the world’s largest corporations.
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Another Victim of Artificial Intelligence
The explanation that Meta gave to Senator Heinrich’s office was that my account had a “False Positive.” Talking to some programmer friends, I learned that a false positive is basically a mistake by the artificial intelligence algorithm. According to Google: “A false positive is an outcome where the model incorrectly predicts the positive class.”
I frequently feel like the victim of artificial intelligence (AI), with this account ban and deletion as the most extreme example. Still, I have many others, including ads being classified for prohibited substances or other outrageous things that have nothing to do with what we are advertising.
With the dawn of the internet, artificial intelligence was truly birthed into our lives in a much more tangible way with Google. It further engulfed us with the rise of social media. This has created new addictions and spanned a host of mental health conditions and social dysfunction.
Yet these AI-dominated tech giants are really the only way to do business today, so I utilize them on behalf of my clients to increase sales and revenue in ways traditional media can’t quantify (although direct mail is making a comeback).
Now that I have lost the compulsion to check social media constantly. I have a better awareness of what my actual emotions are in relation to real life. The self-broadcast ego-generated stories we tell others on social media are always only part of the truth. It’s also made me revert to more human forms of communication, like phone calls and seeing people in real life. These are steps to making AI a less prominent feature in my personal life, but I sure do love it from a business standpoint. This is the paradox of our time.
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Sooooo Many Ads
I was officially banned from FB for 84 days, and I’m aware that it would have been forever without the intervention of a U.S. senator’s office.
When I could log back in and start the familiar motions of scrolling, I noticed a real yo-yo of emotions: happy-sad, jealous-wistful, neglectful-helpful, anxious-relaxed. I was all over the place until I felt emotionally drained.
Returning to FB, I also found it so chock-full of ads that it really isn’t worth my time. When I only see friends’ posts about 20% of the time, why would I deliberately pay attention to so many ads? This is increasingly an issue for my clients as well; with so many ads, their ads are less impactful, resulting in less engagement.
Social media is not worth my attention in the attention economy.
Back Up Your Social Media Now!
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Backing Up + Friend Curation
Upon getting my access back, the first thing I did was back up my Facebook since my last backup was more than two years ago. The thing you will notice when you back up your social media is how much data they store about you; it’s truly remarkable and makes me realize that you truly are the product of these social media giants.
If you still haven’t backed up your social media, please stop reading and go do this now.
At one time in my life, I was a serial-friender, so I wanted to audit and filter my friends list to eliminate potential robots or nefarious fake profiles. My goal was to remove people if I couldn’t remember how I knew them and had no mutual friends to give me a clue.
I can often tell how I am associated with someone by the mutual friends from the various communities I’ve been a part of (high school, college, poetry slam, artists, advertising and tourism industries, work, etc.) Fortunately, my friend count went down to 1300 when my profile was restored, and I began this process.
But perhaps the most annoying and invasive thing FB has done to date is to remove the feature to sort friends alphabetically. I have spent many hours trying to scroll through 1300 people manually, and every time I re-login, the list reorders itself into another random sorting, so I end up seeing people I’ve already cleared and not seeing the comprehensive list of friends in an easy-to-filter way. This is maddening. I’m still chipping away at the process and have now figured out that one way to filter is to look at people I only somewhat know and see our mutual friends, but that is still not an efficient way of filtering.
I was also not too surprised to see many friend’s accounts deactivated with no profile photo and this notice:
I wonder how many of these friends could have also been the victim of Facebook’s AI False Positive results. Or maybe people are just over Facebook and have moved on to other platforms.
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Never Again
Congratulations on making it to the end of this journey. If there’s one thing I hope you take away is to back up your files frequently. Also, remember that if you aren’t paying for a service in money, you are paying in other ways.
After this ordeal, I vow never again will Facebook or any social media platform occupy so much of my time on ads and people I never interact with.
Thank you to the friends who supported me and to the team at Senator Heinrich’s office. To the many clients who endured this episode, I am genuinely sorry. I hope this article helps you understand what happened and that you Back Up Your Social Media right now!
Back Up Your Social Media Now!
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Constellation Creative provides affordable websites, SEO/AEO, digital marketing, and advertising with a data-driven strategy.
Contact us today to learn how we can help your business or organization meet your growth goals.
Notice: AI was not used in writing this blog.
This blog article was written entirely by a real human being, Maresa Thompson, the old-fashioned way, with research and writing skills. AI was only used for spelling and grammar (so if you find any errors, blame the computer).