Meta accounts being disabled for unclear reasons

The Meta logo is seen at the Vivatech show in Paris, France, June 14, 2023. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)

For many Canadians, social media has become a major part of their life. But imagine waking up one day and seeing that your account has been deleted from the digital world.

There’s been a growing pattern of accounts on Facebook and Instagram, both platforms owned by Meta, being disabled seemingly without reason.

The single link between different cases reported by media from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean is the bans are related to supposed violations of the platforms’ rules. For the users a particular accusation have made the bans especially concerning, that they are involved in child sexual exploitation.

John Kosich, a reporter for ABC News 5 in Cleveland , Ohio, reported that people who use social media in relation to their business are at a heightened risk from these bans. Kosich wrote that affected users had “reached out multiple times to Meta in an effort to get the matter resolved and their pages restored, all to no avail.”

Otherwise, Kosich found in his own experience that paying for a premium feature, Meta Verified, was the best way to get his account restored. But his account was disabled by Meta again a few days later.

That account was disabled, reactivated in a cycle that took place over two weeks before Meta told Kosich that there was “nothing more they could do to keep it from happening again.”

Kosich reports that his 16-year-old account now remains permanently disabled.

BBC technology reporter Graham Fraser found that accounts that are impacted are “often for being wrongly accused by parent company Meta of breaching the platform’s child sex abuse rules.”

Fraser reported that more than 500 people have contacted the BBC as “they have lost cherished photos and seen businesses upended,” with fears of potential police involvement.

“I put all of my trust in social media, and social media helped me grow, but it has let me down,” Yassmine Boussihmed, a Dutch 26-year-old told the British news agency.

She lost her account in April, including the more than 5,000 followers on an account dedicated to her boutique dress shop.

A 21-year-old from Austin, Texas told the BBC her account was banned for breaching Meta’s child sexual exploitation policy. Meta did not tell her which post breached the rules.

The BBC is keeping her identity anonymous due to privacy concerns.

According to the BBC, she thinks photos she took with another 21-year-old in bikinis might have triggered the platform’s AI moderator.

Besides that, she sends reels to her sister, who is a minor.

“It is deeply troubling to have an accusation as disgusting as this one,” she told the BBC.

Both of the people BBC reported on had their accounts reinstated only after BBC inquired with the Meta press office.

In Canada, CTV News reported on Felicia Chalikias, who ran a spray tanning business. On June 20, Chalikias woke up to find her accounts, business and personal, disabled.

“My Instagram page was basically the storefront of my business — it’s where I did my marketing, it’s how clients found me, where I did bookings, all of it,” she told CTV News.

Again, Meta pointed to its child exploitation policy, but Chalikias said no children had ever appeared on her accounts. She told CTV she had never been flagged once and the account had been up for ten years.

“If someone looks at my business pages now, they don’t see all the years of work I’ve done,” she told CTV. “For people who don’t know me, I don’t look like a credible source anymore.”

Chalikias said her client base has been halved since the suspension.

Have you had your account banned for seemingly random reasons on a Meta platform? If so, were you able to have it restored, and how long did it took? Did the experience make you quit social media altogether?

Share your story by emailing us at [e-mail] with your name, general location and phone number, in case we want to follow up. Your comments may be used in a CTVNews.ca story.