Meta has just announced the reinstatement of Trumpâs Facebook account.
FFS!
So a few days ago my Facebook ad account was disabled because my personal account, which I use to control it, has apparently been flagged as having broken Facebook standards. You can click to have the decision reviewed, which I did and for which I had to send a picture of my driverâs license (!) to Meta. The review was rejected and now there is absolutely no recourse or even way to contact Facebook to find out what it even is I allegedly did.
There are two interesting things about this affair:
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I have to the best of my knowledge never done anything that breaks Facebook rules, neither on my personal account nor on the business accounts. The only thing I can even imagine being anything out of the ordinary is that I often report and call out obvious Nazis etc. when I see them on public posts. Those reports are almost universally rejected
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I have never in my life posted or paid for an ad on Facebook. I donât need an ad account, nor do I care that it is deactivated. The only reason I administrate two business accounts is because I manage the public facing accounts of a research project I am in and of a series of academic talks I co-organise. Neither of these pages needs to or wants to pay for ads to drive traffic. Theyâre for a tightly networked niche audience anyway.
So my reaction to this is mild amusement, although if I were a small business owner this could absolutely devastate my entire livelihood and it is so interesting to me to see first hand how I have absolutely no recourse against this company 's decision, and not even a right to know what it is I allegedly did wrong, nor any way of reaching a customer representative. My only recourse was the one button in the business centre for requesting a review. When the review came back negative (without any further comments as to why) the button disappeared and thatâs that. Apparently Iâm permanently banned from posting ads on Facebook now.
Sounds like you werenât making them enough money.
Meta Platforms has sued an Israel-based web scraping firm called Bright Data for scraping data from its Facebook and Instagram websites â even though Meta paid Bright Data to scrape data from other websites.
This legal battle kicked off earlier last month when the two companies in fact sued each other. Meta two months prior had sent a cease-and-desist letter to Bright Data demanding that it stop collecting what the scraping firm characterizes as public data.
Bright Data disagreed with Metaâs interpretation of its data collection rights and the two then headed to court â Meta seeking to halt Bright Dataâs data harvesting, and Bright Data seeking declaratory judgment from the court that gathering publicly accessible data from Facebookâs website is lawful.
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This is why my phone runs vanilla Android. There is no way I was going to allow the Facebook and Messenger apps on my phone, knowing the fuckery that Meta engages in. (They come bundled in most Android distros, and canât be removed, only disabled). Itâs bad enough that I have to have Google apps (though I suppose I could also purge those, for reasons it isnât practical for me.)
Technically a very cool feature. I look forward to the avalanche of injuries and broken furniture to come - most people barely have enough room for 1 player, much less two or more!
Meta has never seen a bad idea that they didnât want to copy
Slight correction
Meta to add verification to Facebook and Insta under scheme that should avoid Twitterâs Musk-stakes
I really thought that was a spoof when I first saw it.
