Lessons Learned from My Facebook Personal Account Being Disabled
F***ing follow this advice will you? It will save you my f***ing pain and suffering.
1. Don’t start a Facebook personal account that you can not verify with a driver’s license, passport, school ID, City ID, etc. If you write under a professional name, make sure your IDs have that name on them. If they don’t, do not use that pen name on your personal Facebook account.
2. For your official business pages on Facebook, have your behind-the-scenes website or company personnel sign up as mods and admins. This will cover you if your personal account gets disabled and will keep your official business pages on Facebook up and running.
3. Assign mods and admins to all of your Facebook groups. People that you can trust and see eye-to-eye with on how the group should be run. Every group should have at least two admins. Don’t go it alone. This will cover you and your time investment if your account gets disabled. The remaining admin can make you admin again when you get your disabled personal account back online or create a new account.
4. Collect and store the email addresses and contact information for any mods and admins that you assign to your Facebook pages and groups. If your account gets disabled, you’ll lose your Facebook means of communication. Having their email addresses and contact information means that if your account does get disabled, you can remain in full and continuous contact with your mods and admins.
5. Don’t sign-in to Facebook from different entry points. Use only one. I signed in at work, at home, on different computers, and via a VPN. Because of this, Facebook may have gotten the wrong idea about me, like I was a Russian hacker or something (I’m not by the way), which triggered some of the log-in challenges that I received.
Facebook Customer Services Changes That Need to be Instituted
1. Create a Customer Service Live Chat.
This needs to be instituted immediately at Facebook. Amazon has live chat. T-Mobile has live chat. GoDaddy has live chat. Why not Facebook?
2. Create a Customer Service Phone Number.
Being able to talk to a live person about account issues would be invaluable. You would be able to explain the nuisances of a unique situation to a person and get back a form-fitting response, not the copy-and-paste, one-size-fits-all responses that are normally dispensed in Facebook’s forum.
3. Create a Customer Service Division that handles Walk-ins & Scheduled Appointments.
This option will save many people, like myself, pain and suffering (remember my New York trip?) The ability to present your problem and supporting documents to a live person and get the problem taken care of on-the-spot would not only make Facebook users’ lives easier, it would positively increase how they feel about Facebook and its business practices.
Example: Amazon’s customer service is phenomenal. I have never encountered better customer service than Amazon, though Kohls does come to mind. Amazon always puts their customers first. They make sure that you leave the conversation (Do you hear that Facebook? Conversation.) satisfied and content.
Live meetings would benefit the honest users of Facebook who are having a legitimate issue with Facebook. It would not benefit dishonest users of Facebook who are using it for a malicious purpose. A ne’er-do-well is not going to prance into a live meeting at Facebook to complain that their account has been disabled. The live person would simply check their disabled account in real time to see exactly what the person was posting and why their account was disabled. The reality of a live evaluation would get around pretty quickly throughout the Facebook ecosphere.
4. Create a Customer Service Email and Mail Box.
Self-explanatory. This should not just be available for paying customers (advertisers) but should be available for ordinary, non-paying users as well.
5. Clean Out the Forum of Spam. Insert People that can have a Dialogue with People.
The Help portion of Facebook’s forum is a joke. You receive the same sterile response from the mods for your question. No one looks into your specific situation, evaluates it, and gives you back a situation-unique response. In the forum, it’s always the same canned response, word-for-word.
And then there are the fake customer service numbers that Facebook allows people to post in their forum that links to a scam customer service racket. I actually called one of those numbers out of desperation. When the guy said that he thought that my computer may be infected by a virus, hence why my account was disabled, and that I should speak to one of their debug specialists, I hung up.
Facebook should monitor and regular clean out these scammers from their forum (they are everywhere there).
Those are the people that should have their accounts disabled on Facebook.
Continuing Struggle
Since the disabling of my account, I have tried to create a Facebook account under my real name. When I do, I eventually receive a “We’ve noticed some unusual activity on your account” message, and then I am asked to prove my identity. Even-though I provide them with my actual id that completely matches the name and picture on the account that I have created, my account get disabled. This has happened three times now.
I continue to reach out to Facebook via mail, email, and their forum to remedy this situation.
As of writing this article, none of my websites have Facebook pages but I have adjusted to it and the new reality ushered in by a lack of Facebook.
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