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.

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.

Apple's "iCloud Keychain" API lets Facebook and other apps track you across multiple devices and even device resets, because it's tied to your iCloud account. There's no way for a user to see or delete that secret data, except asking and trusting those apps to delete it.

This "exploit" has been there for years.

I only ever used throwaway accounts on Facebook, just to access some services that were only accessible via FB. At some point FB banned my account. I created a new one on the browser. Worked fine. When I signed into that account on my iPhone: instant ban. Delete FB app on iPhone, reinstall FB, try new account, same thing. Try a new iPhone, same iCloud account, new FB account: instant ban again.

They can not only track you across app reinstalls, device resets, but also across multiple devices. And Apple facilitates it.

Unrelated to reproductive rights, but my private Instagram account got suspended for community guidelines violations out of the blue & I lost all access to my old photos, my friends, contacts, years of DMs. I don't have the slightest idea what triggered it (and of course they won't tell you), nor is there apparently any way I'm aware of to appeal. Interestingly, I still have access to meta[.]ai for whatever reason, so I'm wondering if there is some way to talk to it to get out of InstaJail, or finding a prompt to get it to give you more info on who to contact or ANYTHING at all.

However, after hunting around on reddit for solutions, I was quickly made aware of underground groups of individuals (hackers? I'm not sure what you'd call them) who offer account recovery for up to 1 to 2 grand per instance. These aren't just the people who send you phishing messages claiming to get your account back, but offer full services such as promotion, getting unbanned, having other users banned and etc.

We've seen news reports in the past where individuals or groups get backend access into Meta and then offer these sorts of features. [1]

But who else has access to these sorts of tools & features? I wouldn't be surprised at all if Meta moderators or employees are making a very nice side hustle for themselves doing this, as they'd have not only the access, but presumably know how to hide their tracks.

Just a theory. Anyway, if anyone has any ideas on getting an Instagram account back or filing an appeal or whatever, any info would be appreciated.

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-instagram-fac...

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.

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...

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.

I had a weird and painful experience like that with Reddit, where my account and 10+ years of content all vanished one morning for no reason... but its "appeals" webpage insists that my account is in good-standing, so therefore I can't submit any kind of request for help.

A real hard wake-up call on the importance of owning your own online identity and content.

I feel like this is a cultural value pretty common among modern companies, where the "proper channels" is a broken system and we have to work around it. We've seen it often, where the only way someone will get support requests looked at is by commenting here, on Twitter, etc. Once a furniture company wasn't really taking action on my warranty claim until I commented about it on a promotional Facebook post.

The big LLM players are getting in on the act now, too. In May 2025, out of the blue my account with Anthropic was auto-banned. Your recourse? Fill out a Google form to appeal and wait. Over 4 months in, I’m still waiting. Early on, I did manage to correspond with a human called “Destiny at Anthropic” but now they’ve put up some AI chatbot. The answer is always “wait.”

At scale, the value of individual users approaches zero.

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.

I got a panicked call from my parents when Facebook deleted my brother's profile, probably 5 or 6 years after he passed away. After looking into just trying to get the profile restored, I came to the same conclusion as the title essentially. The "memories" feature frequently shuffled posts and pictures of him and had become a comfort for them. They bring it up every now and then, maybe some day I'll find a way to sort it out.

Not opening a Facebook account for your organization is how you can avoid these.

Oh boy isn’t this the truth.

Firstly - Hah! this is the easier situation! This is Americans talking about reaching out to Americans. It’s even more fun when you are in another country, and need to go through your network to get attention to an issue.

Secondly - Everyone I know, who is in a T&S team or does content moderation hates this situation, and is glad that this is being highlighted. it’s considered unfair and absurd. Getting recourse because people know someone who know someone to get it to the right team, is NOT how things should work. Let alone at global levels.

I can give maybe a smaller firm or platform a pass. But at FAANG scales? Cmon.

——

This is also a reason why I think that Reddit dug its own grave, back when it found the testicular fortitude to oust moderators during the API black outs.

If a firm has the willingness to remove mods and craft new philosophies of engagement when the bottom line at risk - does it magically lose that capability during the remainder of the financial year?

Great article. Another problem with Meta’s moderation on political topics is they block content worldwide rather than in the united states only

Interesting this is on front page the same day Hack Club got their costs reduced by Slack by complaining on here about the bait and switch.

Same with bugs. Reporting bugs rarely seems effective anymore. Maybe my use-cases are more unique, but sometimes I stumble upon things where there the bug I encounter is 2 years old with 0 responses from the company, but I don't know how many comments from customers.

And it's already a hassle to report, so actual amount of people encountering the issue is probably higher.

One example comes to mind... I can't ask my Google Mini anymore to ping my remote. Many reports. Nothing from Google.

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.

Another case was some fellow selling Python & Pandas educational content on FB and was completely banned from advertising because AI flagged it as promoting animal cruelty and then AI reviewed itself and said it has done nothing wrong.

Your life is infinitely better without Instagram or Facebook anyway.

I've been banned for over a decade from leaving reviews on Amazon. I have no idea why.

Meta has repeatedly demonstrated its disregard for free speech and privacy. Within the span of a year, it has utterly cowed to the demands of the current U.S. administration. I don’t think it’s going to be a place for promoting progressive causes such as reproductive rights.

We all need to get off of centralized platforms quickly.

I bet they have a team of people whose job is to keep employees in a kind of trance. Part of that would involve responding swiftly to employee concerns so that the employees maintain the illusion that the company cares and that it was just a mistake. From the perspective of the employees, they must think their employers are extra nice.

They must think it reflects the broader reality of how they treat everyone else.

There's a post on HN about someone being banned from Facebook because they violated (supposedly; who knows what violated even means) Whatsapp TOS from 3 years prior (possibly even before FB acquisition)

Someone needs to tell Zuckerberg about this thing called "antitrust" and not being a dick and that you can't run your company(ies????) like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122

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?

Now do match.com