Meta permanently banned this harmless woman across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads for a single Trump meme, erasing 17 years of photos, her memories, and her only means of reaching some international friends.
Simplified Privacy interviewed “Dog Mother”. While at first reluctant, she agreed in order to warn others about trusting Big Tech, and to switch to Nostr, before it’s too late,
Thank you for taking the time to chat with me today. I understand you’ve experienced a painful loss of all of your beloved social media accounts. What happened ?
Dog Mother: I was on a call with a good friend and I see a notification that my Instagram account was suspended. While on the phone, I immediately panicked and quickly opened Instagram and read the notification that my account was suspended and I had 180 days to make an appeal. I didn’t want to wait 180 days. I had no idea what had gone wrong. So, I made the appeal within minutes of receiving that notification.
In the meantime, my friend is on the phone with me and she’s telling me to calm down and that everything will be fine. That just made matters worse. Don’t you just love when everything is going haywire and you have a friend telling you to relax. Practically insufferable.
About (5) minutes later I received an email that said my appeal was denied and my account was deactivated and all of my content was deleted. I then immediately clicked over to Facebook and was unable to access the account. There was a message telling me that my account was suspended due to my having violated Instagram’s Community Standards. It didn’t tell me anything else. When I clicked back over to Instagram, the account was closed. It appears that the bot that disabled my account was then reviewed by another bot to see if that was ok as a result of my appeal. The secondary bot apparently agreed with the primary bot and the rest is history.
I’ve been on Facebook for over (17) years and never had a single violation. And I was on Instagram for (13) years and never had a violation. My track record was squeaky clean. There were no “priors” to speak of… and I didn’t do anything wrong.
And yes, my friend was still on the phone telling me that, “they can’t do this… it’s illegal… blah blah blah.”
SP: Let me make sure I understand, you were suspended on Instagram and that triggered all of this ?
DM: Apparently, yes. It also impacted my access to the entire suite of Meta applications.
SP: What do you mean ?
DM: After my Instagram and Facebook were suspended, my Threads and my Facebook Messenger applications were also simultaneously deactivated. I mean, there was NOTHING. Threads requires login using Instagram. Because Instagram was dead, there was no way to access Threads. The whole thing crumbled like a house of cards in one fell swoop.
SP: This sounds awful. So you’re saying you don’t know how this happened ?
DM: The only thing I could think of is that someone reported me for something I posted regarding Donald Trump becoming a Bible Salesman. But that’s not grounds for cross-platform deactivation!
SP: Did you try to appeal the decision you already appealed?
DM: It doesn’t work like that. This isn’t a democratic application. Once you “appeal” the action, and your appeal is denied, it’s game over. You don’t get to appeal to a higher court. In fact, I don’t even think a human looked at my appeal. It was some robot bot or whatever that decided I must go. Meta doesn’t have any customer service
SP: I thought they had a toll free number or some way of contacting Customer Support through chat?
DM: The 800 number doesn’t work. I tried it. Nothing. And once you’re suspended from the application suite, you have no more access to chat. And there’s no external way of reaching anyone about this either.
SP: What’s happened to your content?
DM: I’ve now lost access to THOUSANDS of photos and videos on the application. This was my personal Intellectual Property (IP). Have you ever been robbed at gunpoint or had your home burglarized ? It feels the same – I was victimized.
SP: No, but I can relate to what you’re saying. What would you tell Mr. Zuckerberg if he were sitting next to you right now ?
DM: Honestly, I don’t think he cares. Who sets up a suite of multi-billion dollar platforms without any customer service !?! This was such an incredible loss for me. We’re talking almost 20 years of activity and being disabled at the blink of an eye. It makes me very emotional to even talk about it. Until it happens to you and you lose everything, it’s hard to really relate to the situation.
SP: It’s been a few days since this happened. How are you feeling right now?
DM: Are you familiar with the (5) stages of grief?
SP: Not really, tell me about it.
DM: Well, first there’s denial, followed by anger, followed by bargaining, followed by depression, followed by acceptance.
SP: And what stage are you in now?
DM: I seem to be vacillating between anger and depression. I completely skipped over bargaining. I don’t ever believe that’s a stage I’ll ever be in. Should be the (4) stages of grief… really.
SP: I’m glad you can laugh about it. Is that one of the stages?
DM: Ha ha. Seriously, I’m not being sarcastic. But I appreciate your attempt at trying to make me laugh. You always want someone like you around when your entire life is collapsing.
SP: Oh, I’m happy to help. Anytime. So tell me, how are you planning to get through this?
DM: Well, first, I want everyone to know that if this can happen to me, it can happen to you. I’m trying to tell everyone I know about it. But that’s one of the problems. I was so reliant on Facebook Messenger that I actually don’t have some of my friend’s numbers. So, now I’m scrambling trying to figure out how to contact my friends.
SP: There’s no way for them to contact you?
DM: I’m not even sure that some of them know what happened. A lot of my friends aren’t as active as they used to be. It would be at least helpful if Meta allowed the suspended users to have a forwarding message. I wouldn’t put my telephone number on it, but I would create an email address for people to contact and maybe even refer them to reach out to me on Signal. But those are all competing applications, so I can see why they wouldn’t allow it.
SP: Will you ever go back to using those apps?
DM: Well, it appears that Facebook won’t allow me to create a new account. So, that’s not looking good. The loss is too recent for me to say that I will never go back … because I need to reconnect with my friends somehow. So, never say never. But I am HERE to share my experience and encourage people to move to an environment where they won’t have their speech and thoughts censored. Yes, there may be a lot of spam, however, on Facebook there are tons of imposter accounts that aren’t getting shut down. The censorship is really bad on Facebook and Instagram. I believe that the slightest infraction can get your account disabled. Again, I’m not sure exactly what even happened with my accounts. The jury is still out.
SP: Based on what you experienced, what advice would you give to other people in a similar situation?
DM: The VERY first thing you ought to do when you receive the notification of the suspension is NOT to appeal it right away like I did. That resulted in an immediate suspension of all of my accounts simultaneously. What you need to do is log in to Facebook and copy ALL of your content. Granted, that may take a while, but it’s your only opportunity to get your IP. The link they sent me only provided my profile photo. They misrepresent what they are going to provide upon suspension.
SP: Well, I hope you’re able to get your content back in the days to come. It may seem too soon to say this, but I’ll say it anyway, you probably learned a good lesson here. This could’ve happened later and you would’ve lost even more information. Hopefully you’ll find a way to reach your friends to let them know what happened to you.
DM: Yes, I suppose this is a wake-up call of sorts. This is an absolute case where the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. I was probably spending too much time on these Meta apps to begin with…. It just sucks you in and you don’t even realize how much time and effort you spend on the application until it’s gone.
SP: Thank you for your time and I’m really sorry for your loss.
Meta’s loss is Nostr’s gain. Let’s give DogMother a warm welcome,
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