- Barbora Müllerová
Facebook and its callous lockdown
Aktualizováno: 14. 9. 2020
It has been almost two weeks since I found out that my Facebook account
was hacked by someone who presented themselves as an ISIS supporter. Within
a few minutes, Facebook decided to permanently disable my Facebook and
Instagram accounts, with apparently no possibility of a proper review, because the activity of my profile did not follow the Terms of Use. As you can imagine, this can result in quite a few complications not only in one's social life, but, in my case, it very much affected my work life, as I am the admin of several companies' social media accounts.

I have now spent days trying to get the access to my accounts back. I
sent Facebook everything they asked for, pictures of my ID's (yes, I do
regret doing that now), a picture of me holding a special hand-written
code etc. I went through all of the Help Center possibilities and kept
trying to explain to Facebook that whoever did something inappropriate
from these accounts was not me, but the person that hacked the account.
At this point, I still don't have access or even any useful feedback from Facebook (and Facebook can't receive money for my clients' potential paid ads,
because they aren't letting me do my job.)
Similar things have happened in the last months to a number of public
people and businesses (and even influencers!) that I personally know.
For some it took months to get their accounts back, some are still in Facebook’s lockdown. Others have had to give up and build everything up again
completely from scratch. How come Facebook is still so unprepared for
issues like this? People that use Facebook and Instagram honestly create
a huge amount of income for the company. Why would they so ruthlessly
cut people out like this, without any logical and simple review procedure? Being violated by the hackers is already uncomfortable enough…
I would be grateful if you could share this message around,
with the hope that it will get to somebody in Facebook. Somebody,
who actually wants the company to continue being successful and
appreciated by users. Hopefully it will also help others, who might be
having their accounts hacked just now. I may have to give up on getting
my accounts back, but I am not prepared to do it just yet.