Digital Exile: How Meta Erases People Overnight
It was 8 PM on October 18, a normal Saturday night. I was playing Fortnite with Orion, just laughing and unwinding after a long week. We were deep in the game for over two hours, completely focused on the match and not paying a bit of attention to my phone or social media. When we finished, I glanced at my phone and saw I had been logged out of Instagram and Facebook.
My first thought was, "That's weird, my session must have expired."
I didn't think much of it until I tried to log back in. And failed. Then I tried my photography page. Blocked. My gaming page. Blocked. My personal Instagram. Blocked. My two photography Instagram accounts. Blocked.
In the span of two hours, while I was completely preoccupied with a video game, all six of my accounts, representing my personal life, my creative portfolio, and my business, had been simultaneously erased.
Then I checked my email. What I found was a nightmare.
At 8:37 PM, while I was deep in that Fortnite match, I received this email. It's a notification of suspension for "Child Sexual Exploitation" (CSE), a disgusting and horrific accusation. It states I have 180 days to appeal.
I was never given that chance.
Because at 8:41 PM, just four minutes later, this email came in. It's a permanent ban. It states that my "review was unsuccessful."
Look at that time gap. How can a review be "unsuccessful" when I wasn't even at my computer to request one?
This is the entire story. There was no 180-day window. There was no appeal. There was no human review. It was a single, automated AI, acting as judge, jury, and executioner, that flagged my account, found me "guilty," and executed the permanent ban in four minutes. All while I was verifiably doing something else.
To be clear: My Facebook account is 20 years old. It is a living archive of my life. It is filled with nothing but daily life photos of me and my son, our travels, my photography, and family check-ins. The idea that it contains anything remotely related to the vile accusation Meta has leveled against me is not just false; it's an insult.
One look. One single look by a human being would clear this up in ten seconds.
But that's the point. You can't get one.
I've spent the last week in a digital black hole. Every "support" link leads to an automated form. Every form leads to a "Community Guidelines" page. There is no email. There is no chat support. There is no person. You are simply, and completely, erased.
I felt like a digital ghost. All my connections, my business contacts, my creative portfolios, and two decades of my personal memories, all gone overnight without due process.
At first, I was just angry. Then I started digging. And what I found is that I am not an isolated case. This is a widespread, systemic problem. Meta has built a faulty, over-aggressive AI moderation system and has apparently fired all the humans who used to oversee it.
This isn't just a glitch; it's a pattern.
I found a Change.org petition with over 40,000 signatures from people in the exact same boat.
I found a recent BBC article detailing how Meta's new AI is "wrongfully flagging" accounts, and another one about the devastating impact it has on people's lives.
I found a Forbes article that discusses these massive purges.
I found an entire, very active Subreddit, /r/MetaLawsuits, where over 10,000 people are actively discussing how to sue Meta, not for money, but because it is the only channel available to get a human being to look at their case.
This is a complete, systemic failure. Meta has decided that the cost of "erasing" thousands of innocent users like me is an acceptable price to pay for their automated system.
This podcast episode, which is based on a deep-dive investigation into this exact problem, explains it perfectly. It details how Meta has created an "illusion of recourse" where the appeal process is a lie, and how the only way people are getting their accounts back is by filing lawsuits or contacting their State Attorney General.
I'm writing this for two reasons. First, to vent. Second, to help. If this has happened to you, you are not crazy, and you are not alone. This is real, and it is happening to thousands of us (almost daily).
So, if you've been trying to find me on Facebook or Instagram, I'm not missing. I've just been digitally exiled by a faulty algorithm. It's a strange, frustrating place to be.
Has this, or anything like it, happened to you? I need to hear your stories.
And more importantly, what are you all using as an alternative? Where are you building your communities and sharing your work now? I'm genuinely asking. Let me know in the comments.
UPDATE: November 13, 2025
My personal instagram account (ionic_sr) mysteriously reappeared. Everything else is still disabled though. The first thing I did was unlink all the disabled accounts. A few things that are really weird:
There’s a Meta Horizon account with an odd username in my accounts center. The thing is, I don’t own a Meta Quest (which is what this account would’ve been for). And I definitely won’t be having “dgdfgdggfd” as my username if I did. I doubt that I was hacked because none of my accounts showed any signs of it. My guess is that this just terrible software engineering and extremely poor testing. They are rolling out unified accounts management (ie. Accounts Center as shown in the screenshot below) where you’re supposed to be able to manage all your meta accounts across all their products (FB, IG, Threads, WhatsApp), and even configure cross-posting. It may have been that this weird account got linked to mine because they allowed creation of the account using an email without proper verification.
These bots keep adding restrictions to my account. And from the notifications, it looks like it started while the account is disabled. I click on the “request review” button and within 2-3 minutes, the restrictions go away. Then after a few days, it comes back. This happened multiple times. This entire automated moderation system is complete garbage. After every single review it says “We found that our technology made a mistake adding restrictions to your account. Thank you for taking the time to request a review and helping us improve our systems. Our priority is keeping the community safe and respectful, so sometimes we have to take precautions.”
For the past couple of days since I noticed this account’s back, I’ve been trying to subscribe to Meta Verified. I read that some people manages to reach actual humans in Meta if you have that blue checkmark (makes me cringe, but it is what it is). However, no mater what payment method I tried, it won’t go through. It says I’m qualified to get verified (duh) but their automated systems seem to keep flagging my account over and over and it won’t allow me to pay. No proper error message in any of these, just “payment failed”. So I guess I’m back to square one. I will, never again, be dependent on these big tech companies to store my data. If they are not selling you anything, then you are the product. They make money off of you from ads and selling your data for decades (Meta just settled a class action lawsuit on this very thing) and then they deploy a half-baked AI moderation system and closes all your accounts. Just like that. Gone.
If I ever get these accounts back, I will treat these as just a way to message friends or to broadcast my work. But it will never again be the main place to hold photos or videos of my work or the memories and records of my adventures with Orion.
UPDATE: December 3, 2025
Everything but my personal IG account were still disabled and unsearchable, but I felt like checking if I can login to my Facebook account and see if I can finally download my data. To my surprise, it let me log in and a big notification front and center said “you may have been hacked, follow the steps to secure your account”.
This was only half-surprising because in my previous update I mentioned finding an account linked in my account center that I never created. I went on to investigate and I’ve come to this conclusion:
There is a backdoor that allowed these malicious individuals to gain access to my account, despite having 2FA on. I believe it is done by adding a “Meta Horizon” account to your account center. They were able to do this without any email notifications or request for permission in my end. Once that account is in, you can then switch between any “connected” accounts. This is how you can login in one account in Facebook and switch to another without having to re-login, same with Instagram. These assholes then posted whatever offensive/inappropriate content using my account (I don’t know exactly what since those probably got taken down within minutes). And instead of blocking these hackers, Meta’s bots just flagged my account, disabled my Facebook profile then crawled its way to all my other Meta accounts/pages and disabled them all, without any way to reach a human for support. It just completely locked me out.
You already know the rest of the story. But here are some of the things I found out that led me to the conclusion above (Meta doesn’t tell you jack when it comes to this).
I downloaded my IG data for ionic_photos and FB data for my personal account and found logins from devices that are not mine. Even worse, it was from Vietnam.
The dates align when these jerks got access, changed my logins, then got all my accounts banned. My account were briefly reactivated on November 5 but only for an hour before Meta’s automated bots flagged it and banned it again.
I checked those IP addresses and they are in Vietnam.
Finally, when I got my FB profile back, I noticed I became “friends” with this guy who I do not know nor do I remember adding. I removed him immediately.
If this is the guy who managed to hack my account, eat shit. What goes around comes around. You can use those skills somewhere that actually do you good.
I’m just glad these accounts are back, even if they all have some sort of restrictions. I paid for LegalShield with the intention of hiring a lawyer to send Meta a demand letter (as a lot of people in Reddit seems to get a good outcome with that) but I am glad I didn’t have to actually go through that trouble. Now I can cancel that subscription. I also paid for Meta Verified to be able to talk to an actual human to get my photography IG account back. I was finally able to get a hold of actual human support at Meta because of this. But lo and behold, they were useless. They just pointed me to help pages I’ve already seen. What a joke. But anyway, I can just ignore all that as we can finally call family and friends again, look at updates/stories without having to be in the same timezone, etc.
Some hard lessons I learned with this experience:
I’m way too dependent on this one giant company and I have to lessen this dependency
There is almost no way to download all your data (photos, videos) for an account that is 2 decades old
Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp. Linking all your accounts across these platforms is a bad idea. It may be easier to login, but if one gets compromised, everything gets compromised. And worse, you will not have a way to complain or reach a person unless you’re subscribed to Meta verified (which may also be useless as I stated above).
It is best to use these platforms to just keep in touch with family and friends and not as a hub for all your photos/videos (or anything you create, really). So from now on, I’m hosting my stuff here and will just broadcast there.
2FA is not secure enough, at least not for these platforms. The whole account center thing is poorly implemented. If a hacker can add an account there and bypass all logins, then any 2FA is useless.
If a company is not selling you a product and lets you use everything for free, then you are the product.
