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Facebook needs to quit with its thuggish attitude

50 points by stats101 ↗ HN
My Facebook profile was disabled for the second, and what seems the last time ("We will not be able to reactivate your account, nor will you be able to recover any content within the account. This decision is final.") on Sunday. The reason, too much "activity"?!?! Over the year and a half I have had my profile, I had amassed hundreds of pictures, hundreds of personal messages, many links/bookmarks, and hundreds of useful personal contacts; and all have now been lost due to Facebook egregious and bull doggish attitude.

The first time my account was disabled, I was doing something as simple as thanking all my contacts individually for their birthday wishes. Not been given the specifics to why I was banned this time around, but I’m sure it was a combination of adding friends, mass emailing (sent out a group email to my Facebook group!).

The ridiculous rules to use Facebook within limitations, and limit ones networking on a networking website are absolutely absurd. Furthermore, these "limitations" aren’t even published, so one is working in the dark, without any knowledge of whether they are going to break a rule of not.

With no way to back up any of the Facebook content, losing all that data is akin to losing data on ones own personal computer. And not only do they delete your account, they remove all pictures you uploaded to groups, delete all the wall posts you ever made on anyone’s profile, remove the tags off all the pictures you were in, remove you off all your contacts friends list, de-admin you from the group you created… essentially, making it such that "you don’t exist, and you never existed" ('1984' anyone?). of Facebook.

A quick search on Google shows that banning users is more common than fish and chips (I’m from England). The comments on the following blog make for an interesting read:

http://prez.wordpress.com/2006/10/16/facebook-has-a-post-limit

"facebook disabled my account for adding too many people. i dont understand…if the point of facebook is to add friends, why is there now a limit on how many people you add."

"I was just disabled for not being verified with my school network."

"I just got disabled for posting too many comments on group walls!"

"I have been disabled twice… and this is my second time… I do nothing! Just post on walls.. I don’t abuse anyone… I don’t even make fun of other people… I mean what the heck?"

"Facebook just disabled my account. I started a group for people with the same last name as me and i started sending messages to people with the same name to join."

"I added a number of friends from my College because of the mere fact that people in the same school should know one another."

"They said I wall posted too much"

"I made a charity event and sent out over 100 invites.. as people started requesting information, i was mailing people back."

"Yea so like i was Poking some friends last night right and it said slow down or ELES! your Account will be Disabled."

"Facebook, in their infinite wisdom, has decided to disable me. They claim that I do not go to Plum Senior High School."

"My Facebook account was disabled because Facebook felt my name was fake. My name is of Indian background."

"My account was disabled a few hours ago.. because I was friending too many people."

Has anyone else encountered this? And if so, how did they deal with it? Are you a Facebook employee? Can I have my account back?

37 comments

[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 90.8 ms ] thread
stats101
...oh, and should anyone wish to re-enable my account, it was registered under: miahs101[at]hotmail.com (yes, it's a desperate attempt, but I might aswell).
jonknee
Why would you even want your account back? Facebook doesn't deserve your page views.
steveplace
He detailed that in his post. They have control over his personal information and he wants it back.

Is there a FB app that would backup your list of contacts and other information you'd like to have? Is it against the ToS?

Husafan
Ya, this would be against the ToS.
LogicHoleFlaw
This sort of data proprietarianism is just evil. For exactly the reasons that were discussing this topic today. Holding people hostage for their data is a slimy and vile way to treat your customers.
jonknee
The only data he really lost is messages and what not, which isn't too bad (I doubt many people store life critical data in their Facebook messages). Photos he should already have on his computer. It sounded to me that he wanted his Facebook account back so he could continue to use the site, not capture posts he made so they could be saved.

Anyway, I'd treat it as a lesson learned. You have no recourse with a free service. Don't count on it as always being there. Especially for services like Facebook that are burning through crazy amounts of cash. Facebook could go away entirely tomorrow and the world wouldn't grind to a halt.

jonny_noog
Agreed. I knew there was a good reason why I have never put anything of any real value on FaceBook... Or any social networking site for that matter.

The only reason I even joined up on FaceBook to begin with is that a friend invited me, and I thought being in the web industry, I should see what all the fuss was about. I joined, clicked around for a bit, found no value, left and never really looked back.

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danielrhodes
Bummer. All those reasons above sound like they are either related to false accounts or spam protection.
streety
Either that or poking. Lets face it if you're going around poking people you deserve to get banned.
aggieben
I always chuckle when looking at the profile of a female friend, and there's the link that says "Poke her".
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babul
Sorry to hear this, especially as it sounds like you do not have a backup. What you may consider a false positive are common problems with FB/eBay/PayPal and the like who try to act in the best interest of the masses.

If you are unable to resolve this, I can ask my friends who work there to see what they can do.

TrevorJ
That's why I like this community-what a nice thing to offer. .
prakash
Why don't you email Mark Z directly? That will probably help you much more than dealing with customer service.

Also keep us posted on how it goes. Good luck.

jonknee
Yea, he seems like a reasonable guy. Just make sure to not mention any business ideas in your email.
ctingom
Also, don't mention that interview at SXSW.
edw519
A customer of mine was unhappy with Amazon's service and couldn't get help. So he emailed Jeff Bezos. The next day, 4 reps called back.

It's worth a try.

stats101
Well, a number of messages later, and a very stern message from them (see quotation in article), I've not got anywhere. If you can push a few buttons on my behalf, then I would be highly grateful.
jrockway
Over the year and a half I have had my profile, I had amassed hundreds of pictures, hundreds of personal messages, many links/bookmarks, and hundreds of useful personal contacts; and all have now been lost due to Facebook egregious and bull doggish attitude.

It's their site, and you didn't pay to use it. I'm not sure why you'd expect them to care what you think.

But anyway, consider it a gift. Instead of wasting your time ammassing photos, you could do something useful instead. If you don't have any friends or social network without having a social networking profile, you're doing it wrong.

dgabriel
You have a point as far as ownership of the site goes, but I'm going to strenuously disagree with your second paragraph.

You may not be a picture person, but many of my friends are. We have hundreds of pictures of us doing silly things in silly places, at parties, at weddings, graduations, traveling, etc. This is what we look like as we move through life, and all of them are valuable keepsakes of our time together, and various stages of our lives. Amassing photos is useful and wonderful.

It's also not fair to imply the poster doesn't have friends or a network outside of facebook. He or she may have a great network, but facebook makes communicating with that network easier & more fun. I mean, that's the point, right? There's nothing wrong with that at all.

axod
That assumes he wasn't doing anything wrong, and they blocked him in error.

If he was spamming, trying to amass 'friends', I'd say that is doing things the wrong way, and concentrating on real friends is a better plan.

dgabriel
We don't know that any spamming was involved. While concentrating on "real friends" is certainly a fine thing to do, if he were, say, a musician in an urban area, he could easily have 1000+ useful contacts, including fellow musicians, promoters, fans, his old college buddies, immediate and extended family, coworkers, and, of course, the "real friends."

Different people use facebook for different purposes. I completely agree that spamming strangers is not so good. However, simply having many contacts/friends doesn't seem so bad.

axod
It's all in your definitions. I define "friend" to be someone you know properly. You can't know 1,000 people. Sorry, but that just doesn't happen. Apart from on social networks of course, where 1,000 friends is nothing.
jrockway
Yeah, people on social networks have an interesting definition of "friend". To me, a friend is someone who I interact with regularly. To users of social networks, it's anyone that you have perhaps maybe heard of or seen in the hallway. I used to use Facebook, and people I didn't know added me as a friend. I reciprocated ("yay, I have a new friend") but still never interacted with that person.

Now I don't bother with social networks. I have contacts that I keep in touch with regularly (mostly on IRC), and if I need a drinking buddy or a job I have no trouble finding it.

dgabriel
That's fine for you, and I tend to agree with you and refuse requests from people I don't really know, but it strikes me as the height of arrogance to define how others should use a social network based on your own preferences and preconceptions.
axod
If you're using a social network to build an email list, or to amass as many people as possible for some purpose, that's probably what Facebook objected to. There are other ways to build email/contact lists.

I didn't say it was not the way they should use it, it just seems like this is probably the issue...

jrockway
I like pictures. However, I keep them in ~/Photos (which is backed up nightly to my Bingodisk). That way they're mine... and nobody can take them from me if I spam facebook.

If I want to share them, I use iWeb to make a nice-looking page.

chaostheory
Your profile being disabled may have been unfair. However some of the examples you cite from Google make sense:

"Facebook just disabled my account. I started a group for people with the same last name as me and i started sending messages to people with the same name to join."

"I added a number of friends from my College because of the mere fact that people in the same school should know one another."

"My account was disabled a few hours ago.. because I was friending too many people."

I do not want to be friends on facebook with people I've never met in person. It sounds like Facebook is trying to prevent the same problem I had on Linkedin. Just because you worked for Big Company X or used to go to X school, it doesn't mean I want to add everyone from those places on my friend list, nor do I want constant emails or notices from Facebook of these people trying to add me. I don't want 'friend request' spam. This is the reason I killed my Linkedin account. In general I don't want tons of people I don't know, messaging me on Facebook unless I actually met them face to face in the past.

xirium
> nor do I want constant emails or notices

Is Facebook unaware of Nagle's algorithm? It is trivial to reduce bandwidth by batching notices. You could even set the maximum frequency yourself. Or is this not implemented because it would make the service less addictive and less viral?

xirium
> I started a group for people with the same last name as me

This is blatant discrimination against people with common names and common surnames! They obviously wouldn't like the Lloyd Woods' Newsletter: http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/others/newsletter...

(If you're wondering how hundreds of people called Lloyd Wood refer to each other then the convention is to use middle name and/or location.)

mynameishere
Why don't they just disable whatever was causing the problem? Too many friends? Okay, disable the ability to add more friends. Too many emails? Okay, limit the number of emails. Stupid.
lolb
For real. If software is supposed to operate within a set of hard limits, and its trivial to detected the attempted breaching of those limits, it's stupid as all hell not to have the software account for that without gratuitously throwing away all of the user's data.
aikiai
Finally! A way to get all my information taken off Facebook without painstakingly deleting each entry I've ever made!

Sorry you got steamrolled. Best of luck getting your info back. I'm sure they didn't delete it, they love their precious data way too much.