F*ck Facebook

Happy Monday morning! Ever since I retired, Mondays aren't much different from any other day for me, but today I awoke to an experience reminiscent of starting the work week with an annoying email – the first thing I saw online this morning was Facebook notifying me that my account has been disabled for inappropriate behavior.

I had a similar experience last spring (which I wrote about here), when Facebook kept telling me that they suspected me of "automated behavior." In that case, my friend Chris helped me figure out that the problem was a VPN I had installed for our trip to Kenya, and I deleted that VPN and the problem never occurred again.

But this time Facebook is being much harder on me. Those "automated behavior" warnings led to them restricting me to a single login (on either my phone or my laptop), which was just an inconvenience. But as of this morning, they deleted all of the thousands of photos of our dogs that I've posted on the Jamie Samoyed's Pack group, and permanently disabled my account so that I can't log in on any device.

By the way, for anyone reading this who isn't familiar: the Jamie Samoyed's Pack private Facebook group is a group of a few hundred people who follow the day-to-day activities of our dogs. And it's the only thing I've used Facebook for in recent years. I never post to my own timeline – 100% of what I post to Facebook is photos of our dogs in the Jamie Samoyed's Pack group.

Coincidentally, a friend who is a member of the Jamie Samoyed's Pack group contacted me yesterday (via her husband's Facebook account) to let me know that her account had been suddenly and mysteriously disabled. And I've seen other messages on other social media platforms about accounts being disabled – there seems to be a spike in such problems in the last few days.

So the best case scenario may be that Facebook has rolled out some sort of fancy new AI algorithm to identify accounts that need to be disabled, and – like so much of the code Meta ships these days – that algorithm is full of bugs and is disabling all sorts of accounts inappropriately. If so, there's a chance that they may roll back that change. I'm not holding my breath, but that may be the only solution here.

Fighting with Facebook over the years

I've had a variety of problems with Facebook over the years. Twice in the past, they disabled my account and I was never able to get them to restore it, and both times I created a new account. So I'm currently on my third Facebook account.

In 2025, the frequency of these sorts of problems has increased. I mentioned above the VPN problem I was running into in March (see I, Robot?), and then in June I was having a problem where Facebook would delete the first post I did each day, so I had to post them twice. That problem went away on its own, and I have this Disabled Account problem.

The need to keep creating new accounts leads to other, additional problems. Because there are now multiple Doug Mahugh accounts on Facebook, I sometimes get warnings that I appear to be impersonating another person. I've asked Facebook (via their automated support system) to delete those old accounts, but they never reply or do anything.

The inability to contact an actual human being for tech support is a pervasive problem these days, across all sorts of organizations. A few years ago, the first time my Facebook account was suddenly disabled, I contacted a developer I knew at Facebook, and he put me in touch with another person who quickly helped restore my account. But that sort of customer service is no longer available. You have to interact with their AI chatbots, and when they don't respond or can't be reached, there is no phone number or email address you can contact. They're free to just ignore you, and in my experience they usually do.

Why me?

After spending an hour or so reading through complaints about disabled Facebook accounts (as posted on other social media platforms), I found it interesting to see that many of those complaints seemed to fit a consistent profile: a person who manages a Facebook group and only posts content there, and rarely or never posts any content on their own timeline. Given that pattern, I have a theory about what may be happening.

Facebook, like all online services that offer a free tier, has a constant need to identify unused accounts so that they can be deleted. The presence of all those old unused accounts just clutters things up and makes features run slower.

So it's easy to see how a Facebook employee might write some code to identify "unused" accounts and only look at whether they've been posting on their own timeline, failing to account for those of us who are active every day but never post on our own timelines. And then, having identified a bunch of "unused" accounts, the next step would be to disable them.

That's pure speculation, but I suspect it's exactly what has happened in the last few days. If so, will Facebook realize this mistake and restore all of the accounts they've disabled in error? Perhaps, although given their track record I'm not holding my breath.

What now?

I'm currently unable to ask for my account to be reviewed or restored, because the options for doing so all take me back to an Account Disabled error message. And the clock is ticking – if I can't file a request for review within 30 days, my account will be permanently deleted.

The other people I've seen complaining about disabled accounts lately all seem to share this experience: they are unable to request a review. So unless there is a wide-scale fix rolled out, I suspect all of us will be having our accounts permanently deleted soon.

If that happens, I don't plan to create a fourth Facebook account. Life's too short to be spending my time repeatedly starting over on Facebook – if they don't want people like me on their platform, I'll take the hint.

Instead, if they permanently delete my account, I'll start posting occasional dog photos and stories here, or perhaps on a similar blog I create. I haven't decided on all the details of exactly how that would work, but I have complete control of this blog, and nobody can disable my account or delete my content here.

Meanwhile, I'll keep trying to get Facebook to review or restore my account, and we'll see how it goes. I'll post an update if anything changes.