This is probably gonna be a huge long shot
But does anyone here know of anyone at Meta that can hit the re-enable account button?
Neighbor/small biz owner/ friend woke up this morning & immediately on trying to comment in our local town Facebook group was instantly deactivated, his profile is gone, his business page & 5 years of business social media is entirely gone.
The entire situation is a little odd as well
1/?
2/?
He currently cannot appeal the disablement at all
The little checkpoint after login directs him to appeal the disablement to "his" linked Instagram account which via the account center is the account that received the ban.
The thing is this man doesn't have Instagram, doesn't want Instagram, and Instagram community probably wouldn't care for the hunting photos he would post.
The Instagram account name also heavily suggests heavily of someone in Asia creating it, which is on the other side
3/? Of the world from us. We've never heard of that persons name before, looking up the specific account name mentioned, returns zero results, removing the number at the end of the name returns hundreds of not thousands of zero follower, zero following, zero post accounts likely unknowingly tied to other Facebook users.
Looking through the little user data download provided by #facebook it's only been him in the account on his cell phone or laptop.
Oddly enough the data download
4/?
Doesn't appear to be a fully complete data take out as it was only 8megs and was more contextual data like session tracking, account security information, the actual "post" data was just profile pictures.
Having looked at some of the files in the data download itself the only thing I can think of is this Instagram account was linked shortly after #meta made the account center live and was dormant until they Instagram account creator decided to pull the switch and get the account banned
5/?
The ips, geoip data, browser fingerprinting, timestamps provided in the data download for the last two weeks we looked at
All line up with it being him on either an app on his phone, his laptop or mobile browser.
Everything we've tried to do to get passed this checkpoint screen to ask for a review or just a general re-enablement of his account has failed. We can't even attempt meta verified to contact a human being
6/?
I also looked at all the emails sent to him by Facebook and only the two this morning said anything about him being disabled.
You'd think if this was some kind of trend towards disablement or rule breaking there'd be emails, you'd think if there was suspicious logons or account activity there would be emails.
But no it was a bunch of receipts and messages about his ads on Facebook
7/
Since I'm a data engineer by daytime I'm a little confused about this as well, why didn't this raise any kind of automated flags for review considering an #meta account center contained an account on the east coast (utc-5)
And an Instagram account at or around UTC +7
Where the two accounts were always used in vastly different geographical places, timezones, and IP address space, which I highly doubt ever overlapped and maybe that's the root of the problem
@rpardee oooh that's a possibility, still no clear way to resolve but at least he's not the only one having this issue. Hopefully Facebook gets it shit together
Interestingly when we try forgot password on the Instagram account username we receive a no users found message