I joined Facebook way, way back in the day, and have happily participated with good grace, good manners, and good behaviour.

Suddenly, out of the blue and when I was in hospital, my account was deactivated due to violating their community standards.

So, I agree to appealing the decision. The appeal is simply a video selfie where you have to turn your head in all directions. You submit this and within an hour they respond with… nope, you are still guilty of violating our community standards.

There is no explanation and no given reasons other than that stock standard reason.

Despair…

I admit, my first reaction was complete despair! I felt the rug had been pulled from under me. The thing is that I was working for an American site and maintaining their Facebook page… well, that was it for that job! As it was, the job was coming to an end and my health was poor, so it wasn’t the end of my world, it just felt like it at the time!

Why?

So, why was my account so brutally deactivated without even receiving a warning or a specific reason?

I have just one possible conclusion, and that is my use of a VPN.

For the job I was doing I needed to be able to see some US websites that are not available to view in Spain, such as local government natural resources sites to find out information about parks, trails, wildlife, etc. It is not illegal to use a VPN for geo-location purposes.

I believe the issue was that sometimes my internet connection dropped and kicked me off the VPN, so I could be showing that I am in America at noon, in Spain at 12.15, and back in America at 12.30… obviously impossible, so this could be construed as trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the community. One look at my content and activity would prove this to not be the case, but they don’t look, it is all administered by bots.

Finally…

So beware dear reader… unless you have a paid-for account with Facebook/Meta, you will never be able to speak to an actual person and the bots simply stand by their decision.

It is also not so easy as ‘just open a new account‘ nowadays either. Use whatever different email address you want, they somehow know it’s you… maybe unless you use a VPN 😉