Ask HN: My girlfriend is “permanently” locked out of her Facebook account

32 points by iansinke 5 years ago | 20 comments

Facebook has locked my girlfriend out of her account for supposed violations of their Community Standards. They state that the decision “cannot be reversed”. This is very confusing because she very seldom even posts to Facebook and had not posted recently. She is not involved in anything controversial or off-colour either. She has some photos and posts in her account which she would like to recover. Also, it’s very frustrating that she can’t communicate with certain friends.

Has anyone dealt with this before? Any suggestions?

gus_massa 5 years ago |

The good new is that "permanently" only means "until you make enough fuss to convince us to take a look". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24950097

The bad new is that perhaps you can't make enough fuss.

gkoberger 5 years ago | |

I think you're witnessing an attempt at fuss!

bonoboTP 5 years ago | |

Same thing happened to Bret Weinstein, made a fuss, got unblocked.

PopeDotNinja 5 years ago |

Any company that wants to be as ubiquitous in connecting people as Facebook is should not have the power to delete one's social life like this. It's inhumane.

kylebenzle 5 years ago | |

If 20 years ago you asked someone to give their "social life" to a private company who could and would lock you out if they didn't like you I doubt anyone would have agreed to it. Nothing has changed expect social norms.

Maybe we need to re-teach out kids that corporations DO NOT have their best interest at heart. Why anyone thinks FB is beneficent is beyond me.

8bitsrule 5 years ago |

A 'community' is far more than a collection overseen by a collector. For one thing, it's a place where members value and help one another. Facebook has no idea about community, and will never have 'community' standards. It's too bad anyone trusts it with their valuables.

bryan_w 5 years ago |

1. Buy a oculus or portal product 2. Use the online help to unlock the account

Sad to say, that's the only way other than knowing someone who works for these companies :(

iansinke 5 years ago | |

UPDATE: Thank you for this advice. My girlfriend was able to recover her account by telling Oculus support that she wanted to buy a product, but wouldn’t commit to it unless she knew her account would be usable.

dane-pgp 5 years ago | |

If you bought one of those products, could you then return it for a full refund after getting the account unlocked? You might still have to pay for shipping costs, but I imagine that checking and repackaging a product costs Facebook money too.

Perhaps Facebook would lock the account again after processing the returned product, but that should give the user enough time to export any useful data from the account, and to provide alternative contact details to any Facebook-only friends.

mroche 5 years ago |

I’m in a fun boat where I got my Facebook account completely disabled last July 30 minutes after creating it (made to communicate with fellow interns for a job I just started). I didn’t provide a phone number, and I turned off/toned down every single tracking/anti-security preference they had. I then signed in on my phone’s browser (no way am I installing the app) and that flagged it for suspicious activity, which when I (admittedly very very stupidly) used the same picture as my profile pic for their request, disabled the account.

I have submitted for account recover 7 times by this point with a picture of my license to no success of hearing from the company. And I can’t request for them to delete my license from their servers because lo and behold, you need to sign in to do that!

The best part is that if I trying making a new account/signing in with the same email, it says I can’t do that because the address is associated with an account that is disabled. If I go to the recovery site to submit a request, they claim an account with that email doesn’t exist to be recovered.

At least my Messenger account is separate, but they still have my phone number.

troydavis 5 years ago | |

I had the same thing occur except that the account was disabled immediately after signing up. The post-signup “Welcome!” page was instead a “Your account has been disabled for..” page.

I’m the only user on the IP I signed up from and I’m the only user on the email domain I used.

ylee 5 years ago |

I would also appreciate suggestions on how to regain my Facebook account, shut down without explanation last year. Despite its age (15 years) I barely used it, let alone for anything "controversial", but did regularly log into it. I repeatedly tried to verify my identity by submitting an image of my driver's license, without any response.

I don't want to create a fake new Facebook account. I want my own back.

MrDresden 5 years ago |

I would just embrace the situation and use the opportunity get out of the Facebook ecosystem.

I did so more than a year ago, and couldn't be happier

010101010101 5 years ago |

I have a Facebook account that dates back to thefacebook.com and needing a .edu email address to register. About three years ago I decided to use a pseudonym on Facebook. Last year my account was disabled for violating community standards, and when I contacted Facebook, the form letter I got back was that Facebook was unable to verify who the account belongs to, and to reply with a picture of a valid ID. No amount of sending an ID, nor explaining I was using a pseudonym without realizing in it was against ToS, nor asking anyone to look at the 15 years of data associated with the account led to anything other than receiving the same form letter, over and over. On the bright side, it turns out I don’t miss Facebook in the end.

alphabettsy 5 years ago |

Maybe her account was taken over and that caused the violations. I’ve seen that many times, a bunch of spam and weird messages from someone I’m “friends” with.

unexaminedlife 5 years ago |

I'd be interested to know exactly what internal procedures Facebook goes through before they decide to "permanently" lock someone out of their account. It's probably not a trivial process. A lot of thought and consideration (especially in today's world) is likely going into these decisions. There almost certainly had to be emails sent warning of such violations. I am not on Facebook but would imagine there'd be quite an uproar if there was no notice BEFORE being cut off.

So my hunch would be that either (a) your girlfriend is actually doing things that violate Facebook's community standards, or (b) her account has been hacked, but even that would probably be obvious based on IP addresses, etc, Finally (c) it's possible her computer/phone was hacked, which means there's probably no way for Facebook to determine whether or not she's the culprit or the hacker is.

ben509 5 years ago |

> This is very confusing because she very seldom even posts to Facebook

They probably think it's a fake account.

adnanh 5 years ago |

IANAL but have her email them and ask for all the data they have on her. They should be obliged to comply according to GDPR laws?

jhart99 5 years ago | |

If in California, you can use CCPA to do this as well. But I've found about 25% of companies just delete your info when requesting access and another 25% just don't respond . I'm sure Facebook will respond, but I have no idea how it would work if you can't log in.

ficiek 5 years ago | |

This doesn't work with those companies. I once tried to create a Twitter account but unless you provide them your phone number the account just gets blocked straight away. You then have to give them your phone number anyway to unblock it. Since I didn't want to give a random company my phone number I wanted to go to settings and remove the account completely since it was useless and I couldn't even follow people using it. Long story short - the website will not allow you to do that despite GDPR laws. I even filed support tickets to have the account removed and the requests were denied "because the account is inactive", in violation of my laws granted by the GDPR.