On 16 October 2022, when I was having breakfast, I got an email saying my Facebook account was disabled. To retrieve it, I would need to submit my ID, and I did so without much thinking.
Something didn’t feel right.
I immediately checked my Instagram. Just like what I thought—gone.
To my surprise, Facebook and Instagram (both under Meta) don’t have any sort of customer support or live chat, except for a not-very-helpful help center. After some research, I realized a lot of victims would spam comments below their official posts just to get their attention. It is bizarre to know that a big company takes forever to get back to its users.
I followed every method I saw on YouTube, but none of them worked.
There was an appeal form that you could submit once your account was wrongfully disabled. However, it would require you to log into your account before doing so. How was I supposed to log in if I had already been locked out of Facebook? I thought this was the problem in the first place!
The other thing I did was reach out to Meta Portal. They got back to me within a few hours. Unfortunately, they couldn’t help me either.
I waited for days for Facebook and Instagram to get back to me, and still no word from them.
No Instagram, no Facebook, who am I then?
Years of memories and friendships I have on both platforms vanished with just one action on the company’s end.
It struck me how much we rely on social media to build our identity. If we don’t have one, how can we prove our existence?
What’s even more disturbing is these big corporations are more centralized than ever. If there’s an information breach, users will lose access to all other associated accounts, being punished for something they didn’t commit. Things can be more problematic when their problems only lead to one place, which tends to be unresponsive.
Come to think of it, the world we live in today is no different than a dystopian future. Social network presence has become our new identity. We cease to exist if money-grubbing companies wipe our profile from the centralized system; sadly, this is not metaphorically speaking.
Essentially, the only way to get problems solved is by having a large following and creating a lot of noise. It’s all about fame, face, and profit. Why would they care about a random nobody’s voice? This is uncomfortably true. They realize how much impact they have on us, so they can easily manipulate our lives.
Hopping off social media
Over the last few days, I had been preoccupied with this, which put me under immense stress.
So I decided to take some time off social media. Surprisingly, it didn’t affect me that much. I don’t really need them to keep my life going.
If there’s one positive thing I learned from this incident is that I have total control over my life, and my existence cannot be erased from history by some ignorant companies.
