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Lawyers
Facebook Banned Me! Worst. Week. Ever.
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Lawyers
Last week was my worst week ever. Okay, maybe not ever, but definitely my worst week in 2008.
The trouble started on a Tuesday night. Shortly before I entered a bar to meet a friend for drinks, I updated my Facebook status on my BlackBerry, with an opinion about the upcoming Clinton-Obama debate.
As soon as my friend and I parted ways, I immediately whipped out my BlackBerry to check Facebook again. (Yes, I’m one of those people.)
My BlackBerry informed me that my account had been “disabled.” Disabled? I had never heard of such a thing. Perhaps it was a problem with my BlackBerry? I rushed home in a panic.
Alas, when I tried to log in on my computer, I was denied once again. This time I received a slightly more detailed message: “Your account has been disabled by an administrator.” I was referred to an FAQ informing me that accounts can be disabled for violations of Facebook’s Terms and Conditions, which prohibit such things as spamming or harassing other users.
I shot off a message to Facebook: “I do not believe I did anything in violation of Facebook’s terms of use. I am a loyal user with over 1,200 friends. I spend literally hours each day on the site. How can I appeal the disabling of my account?”
Then, I waited. And waited. To devotees of Facebook like myself—the type of people who use “Facebook” as a verb—life without the popular social networking site is unimaginable. If it’s not on Facebook, it didn’t happen.
With each passing day, I sank deeper and deeper into my Facebook-deprivation-induced depression. What to do? First, overeat! I inhaled massive quantities of saag paneer and gained about five pounds. I slept constantly, racking up a disturbing total of 16 hours of sleep on Saturday. It was only when I was asleep that my troubles vanished. I still had access to Facebook—in my dreams.
I COULD NOT figure out what I had done to deserve banishment. At the very least, my expulsion violated my due process rights. I was not given any advance warning before my account was suspended, I did not know the nature of the allegations made against me and I was never given the chance to confront my accusers. Okay, so the Bill of Rights has not been held applicable to Facebook, yet. But I still felt I was the victim of fundamental unfairness.
Also, being kicked off Facebook has all sorts of unfortunate consequences. Most were personal: Friends thought I had de-friended them. One wrote, “Was it something I said?” But the site is also essential to my job as a legal blogger. Readers of my blog, Above The Law, regularly submit tips to me via Facebook, which is often safer than e-mailing, since e-mail can be tracked. When I need sources for a story, I can post a note on Facebook and have a dozen sources within a matter of hours.
Losing Facebook was a significant professional blow, especially since I had spent so much time building up a network of contacts there. I even stopped updating my Microsoft Outlook contacts, since I figured Facebook would always be there for me. Next Page >
- Poll
- Obama (D)
- McCain(R)
- Spread
- RCP Average
- 46.0
- 42.0
- Obama +4.0
- Candidate
- Favorable
- Unfavorable
- Spread
- Obama
- 55.7
- 33.0
- +22.7
- McCain
- 52.7
- 34.1
- +18.6
Forget Google. Facebook is taking over the world. There have been so many incidents like this. At least you were let back in. Consider yourself lucky.
at least it wasn't an email account suspended because of a spam bot error..and causing bounce backs to important contact on the friday before a three day weekend of the email server office.
Glad you got your access back. I don't think Facebook realizes how important they are to some people's professional lives. They view themselves as a social networking site, not as a business resource. They will probably have to make their banning process a little more user friendly - for example, sending an e-mail that says "You have 48 hours to remove the plagiarized content from your profile or we will ban you." of course, then they would need to break down their list of bannable offenses into immediate bannable offenses and issue a warning and check back later bannable offenses. . .
By the way, how did the beauty queen/kidnapper case turn out? I remember reading about it some time ago (perhaps on The Smoking Gun?).
[[FACEBOOK UNION]]
I’ve heard this idea before. Who thinks there should be some sort of Facebook Union?
Essentially, it’s just like any other type of union. If one of us gets banned unfairly, we all stop using the site. They have to listen to the masses…
Many of us here are highly influential individuals, and we should all agree on the following:
1) Convicted individuals need a way to plead for their innocence and individuals who are not in violation of any rules should have restored accounts.
2) All rules should be stated clearly on the site, and non-damaging first-time violations of rules that are not made clear should be dealt with through a warning.
I’m going to be creating a Gmail account and all who are interested in becoming part of the Facebook Union can email me at facebookunion@gmail.com
All will be valued here.
Sigh. Your story is where I am now finding myself.
See here:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=12635696455
A *NEW* CALL FOR HELP !!:
But this time, it's not for me, Will Bower.
It's for a whole group of Hillary supporters here on FaceBook.
I've just written and sent the following to FaceBook, and am posting it for you to read here now:
Thank you, Will Bower
To:
disabled@facebook.com
privacy@facebook.com
webmaster@facebook-developer.net
info+m4qyrsar@facebookmail.com
appeals+ngasvbq@facebook.com
Dear FaceBook.
I am a member of the FaceBook group "Hillary Clinton for President - One Million STRONG".
Our administator (Candy Elizabeth) has -begged- FaceBook (for some time now) to fix a glitch in our group that has left us *powerless* to regulate trolling. (I'll include her letter below.)
Just take a moment to look at what has become of our FaceBook "home":
http://www.facebook.com/board.php?uid=2230418813
I can't tell you how disheartening this is. And, as you'll read in the afore mentioned letter, we've learned that the largest Obama group has consistently had their "glitch-needs" met, as even the head of that group acknowledges.
PLEASE, Facebook. HELP us !!
Will Bower
Here's the letter from Candy Elizabeth to Dori:
Dear Dori,
I am deeply disappointed that Facebook has made no progess and has not even provided a timeline for action regarding the glitch in the "Hillary Clinton For President – One Million Strong" Facebook Group. You have been aware of this problem since February and have done nothing.
As you recall, Mitchell Meyle explained to you that the search feature was not working for our group leaving us unable to add moderators, to ban members, or remove bans on members. Your explanation, so far, has been that there is a glitch 'due to the size of the group."
You will also recall that we explained to you that we contacted Ken Stokes, administrator from the "One Million Strong for Barack Obama" Facebook Group. Mr. Stokes has informed us that he is not experiencing this "glitch." For reference, the Barack Obama group has twenty times as many members as ours.
In the time since we first informed you of this problem, Facebook programmers have added the Facebook Chat feature, the Online Friends Feature, and a lovely feature that provides Facebook Users with advertisements for pornography websites and dating services. We are dumbfounded that you cannot find the time to solve what seems to us to be a minor problem. We are dumbfounded still that you cannot even provide us with a timeline despite numerous requests.
The group's primary purpose is to encourage political activism and the exchange of political ideas. Since Facebook admins have taken no action on the numerous reports of abuses of Facebooks' terms of use made by unwanted members in our group; we must be able to put more moderators in place in order to maintain the group's integrity and civility. Spam and offensive messages on our boards and discussion threads run rampant. The Obama group is able to swiftly and efficiently remove them since they have numerous moderators and are able to ban members. We expect equal treatment.
Since we believe that an unacceptable amount of time has passed since we first brought this issue to your attention, we have now CC'd numerous members of the national press as well as both presidential campaigns.
Very Unhappily,
Candy Elizabeth
wow gold
ͨ
It's not just your group; I am having problem with mines as well. Any group with over 2000+ members would not have any control to ban or remove members. I was just googling and came across this post. Indeed it's sad facebook has done nothing to fix this problem.
Yeah facebook is annoying.
On June 27, 2008, I started a 3 weeks backpacking travel visiting Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany and Sweden. In all these countries I was going to visit friends staying at their home for several days.
As member of Couchsurfing.com we are use to contact people in the cities we visit to hang out with them, drink a coffee, make new friends and have the opportunity to know the place visited from the perspective from the locals.
Following the Couchsurfing.com principle I decided to use the Search option available in Facebook to contact people in the cities I was going to visit. Facebook has that option to be used to contact new friends including a filter to find people using different options; few days later I found I was not able to access my account any more being accused of spam.
After several emails the administrators of Facebook started to falsely accuse me also of harassment and I feel the only one person being harassed here is me because I am being victim of harassing from Facebook pseudo-administrators.
This terrible and narrow-minded attitude from Facebook administrators created complications on my travel and I was not able to access the addresses and phone numbers of the people I was going to stay with in other cities and countries I was going to visit.
I activated another account adding many of my old friends. The ones I have in my MSN and in my Plaxo account but it is important to say I stopped adding people to Plaxo since I started using more Facebook. Big mistake I am not going to make anymore. Since this problem happened I started using Plaxo again, also because you can sync all your contacts with your address books in Outlook, Outlook Express and different email services.
Not wanting to spend time updating this new account created in Facebook nor uploading pictures I put messages on my profile saying that was a temporary account because my real account was disabled for all the reasons I am mentioning here. Also I created a group asking to my friends and colleagues to send messages to Facebook administrators asking them to restore my account.
On July 22, 2008 I arrived to my office and trying to check my new account I found this message:
“Your account has been disabled by an administrator. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page here.”
What kind of game is this? What are those people playing? What is their objective?
I have been inviting many people to join Facebook, I created several groups with a lot of members and also I published an article in a newspaper in Panama inviting people to participate in environmental groups in Facebook? Here is the article: http://mensual.prensa.com/mensual/contenido/2008/06/23/hoy/opinion/14142...
Is this how Facebook pay back?
After all this I am really not interested in using Facebook anymore, I just want my original profile online to restore all my posts and recover the contact with all my friends I have no other way of contact because I did not wrote down their email addresses not thinking I was going to be victim of this kind of harassment and abuse. Now I am using Plaxo but to recover my Facebook account is a question of justice.
Please help with on this sending a message to Facebook asking them to restore my TWO accounts NOW. The message should be sent to:
disabled@facebook.com ; appeals@facebook.com ; appeals+nl15jag@facebook.com ; appeals+nlyv1b1@facebook.com
Thanks,
Ricardo