I, Robot?
Two weeks ago, Facebook accused me of something I've never been accused of before: automated behavior. And they warned me that they might temporarily restrict my account or even permanently disable it if I didn't knock it off.
In recent years I haven't actually used Facebook for anything other than the Jamie Samoyed's Pack private group, where I post silly photos and videos of our dogs every day. So the warning seemed rather silly, but I checked my account and discovered I had linked up a chess app at some point in the past, so I deleted that. And I also changed my password, in an abundance of caution. Then I went back to posting silly dog photos and videos.
Typical examples of content I've posted to Facebook in the last few days.
Today, I got the same warning again, and then they added teeth to it: they temporarily restricted my account to a single login! I was on my laptop computer when I got the warning, and when I checked on my phone, it was logged out of Facebook and couldn't log back in.
Today's stern warnings from Facebook. Apparently posting a photo of a dog holding a chew toy can be construed as "encouraging someone to give away their password or username." Who knew?
I followed their helpful links to the full text of Meta's Cybersecurity policy that they believed I had violated. No example was provided, so I can only guess at what set them off. Dogs in the snow? Dogs in the kitchen? Dogs with toys? There was no way to tell.
Then I saw that they had an option to request a review. So I tried that.
Within a minute of requesting a review, I got a message saying that they had reviewed my account and decided it shouldn't have been restricted, so the restriction would be lifted. Sure enough, I could log back into Facebook on my phone. Crisis averted.
So I guess I'm back in business! Time to get back to my robotic ways ...
Engaging in automated behavior at OSCON 2014.
ADDED LATER: eventually, with some debugging help from my friend Chris, we figured out what was going on. I had a VPN installed on my phone but not on my laptop, and so my phone appeared to be connecting from a different location about 1000 miles away from my laptop. When I posted from those two devices shortly after one another, that looked like "automated behavior" because it wouldn't be physically possible for me to travel between those locations so quickly. I disabled the VPN, and that seems to be the end of this issue.