Meta Is Draining My Will to Live
From the editor's desk
By now, if you’re following the chronicle at all, you’ve probably pieced together that we’re doing a regionally-focused “fake news” newsletter like The Onion or, more recently, The Needling. It’s been great fun. Everyone has been very welcoming and open to a new outlet in the space, which helps because doing something like this well is a whole lot of work.
So it would be awesome if I could do that work without another battle for the ages with Meta.
None of this particular post is satire, by the way.
First, a short bit of context about me personally. I came from the software development world, then I got into writing about software (especially games). I worked on my own projects, interviewed other developers about theirs, and built out a blog and podcast that led to a fairly popular companion book. It was a whole thing.
That whole thing came screeching to a halt for a while five years ago when my Meta accounts got hacked. I had linked an old Instagram account to Facebook, the former of which probably went out in some data breach, and I think that’s how the attacker went around my Facebook two-factor authentication. In my defense, I don’t even think Facebook owned Instagram yet when I created that account. It was the last thing on my mind.
Anyway, Facebook is where he got to my payment information that I used to run occasional ads. He was able to add himself as an authorized agent for my business, take out his own ads at my expense, then send users to a scam link where he did untold additional harm. That’s pretty damn clever, as unauthorized access goes.
But he also had a trick for keeping me from fixing it: He uploaded literal terrorist propaganda to my account which he seemed to know would get me automatically locked out with absolutely no recourse whatsoever. He knew that Facebook, now Meta, did virtually no customer support whatsoever, making it more or less the perfect crime.
To make matters more personal, it was like, one day before my 36th birthday. Do you know what your birthday feels like when a hacker just locked up about a terabyte of photos of your kid and wiped your account so Facebook doesn’t remind your family to tell you happy birthday?
There was a bit of a silver lining when I wrote at length about the situation and posted it on my blog which quickly went hyper-viral. Of course, reading can be difficult, so a lot of people tagged me to let me know I must be a bigot of some kind if Facebook would ban my account. Others wanted to know why I had never looked into two-factor authentication.
A buddy from my brief games journalism days had actually gone to work for Meta since. He reached out privately to tell me he had basically no influence over the situation, but did pass along a super-secret email address journalists can reach out to when something like this happens. I was still journaling, so I felt comfortable trying it. As far as I can tell, it didn’t work.
Reddit discussed my situation. HackerNews discussed my situation. Yahoo! Entertainment and Engadget both linked to my writing. I had inadvertently started an important dialog about security and deplatforming without representation. I mentioned in my writing that I would consider kicking off whatever arbitration process I’m bound to in an effort to at least force them to stop the hacker and fully shut down my accounts (if not provide me with my own data or restore my account). There was a growing call for me to do it.
Secretly, this was the last thing in the world I wanted. I wanted the situation to go away. I wanted to write my stupid blog and trade memes and send photos of the family to Grandma. I was barely earning anything from the whole blog/pod/book empire. It damn sure wasn’t enough to take on Facebook. But alas, a debate that was admittedly important in these modern times was renewed and raging.
That’s probably why I soon received a Twitter DM from a Facebook VP hoping to smooth things over. My memory is that this was Guy Rosen, now Chief Info Security Officer, but I’m having trouble finding that screenshot to confirm, and I’ve long since shut down that Twitter account. He was pleasant, even apologetic, and told me he’d personally mobilized the right people to get me back into my accounts. I thanked him and I meant it. He didn’t really have to do that. He also revealed his team was working on a solution to This Type of Thing (TM) and hoped to have it in place soon.
Great, I thought. I’d learned it was one thing to have a healthy distrust of Meta, but it was something else entirely to make a clean break and never participate in their ecosystem again. If enough people did it, this would be a better world overnight. But if they haven’t been pushed to that point yet, they never will. Maybe I did blow just a small puff of air in the sails toward a better life for everyone else who feels stuck.
Something like a year and a half later, Meta revealed the “Meta Verified” subscription service. Sure, the checkmarks would be meaningless for the rest of time and paid customer service is an egregious concept heaped atop the infinite data factory they built around us, but…actually I forgot where I was going with that. Anyway, I had a good laugh at my own expense for thinking I’d created positive change on Meta’s watch and sort of drifted away from their world entirely.
Until I started this newsletter!
That may not be entirely true. I launched a public-facing page for myself when I started writing for more outlets, doing the occasional stage reading, etc. but this newsletter is when the second shit hit the fan.
I started dedicated Instagram, Facebook, and Threads profiles for the chronicle. The Facebook page was fine. Instagram started fine. Threads was locked out right away for some unspecified infraction (I literally hadn’t used it at all yet). I appealed it. Denied. I found myself with a useable Instagram account connected to a banned Threads account. I started a new Instagram account that would remain dormant and connected it to a replacement Threads account that was apparently fine. No problem. It’s a little extra account switching, but I can live with that. I moved on and added Bluesky and X accounts. I don’t want to be on X, but my peers and presumably some number of potential readers are there. Fine.
This worked great for about one week of posting.
Last night at 8:01 PM, every one of my Meta profiles and pages locked simultaneously: My private Instagram and Facebook profiles, my public ones, the chronicle on all three sites went into some state that required further verification. Its original Instagram account was banned. One by one I started going through the notification emails, clicking to verify, change passwords, upload selfies and IDs, literally anything it wanted. Some popped back up. Some made me change passwords and double verify my 2FA codes. I couldn’t shake the feeling that with each password and confirmation code, the automated system became more convinced I was deeply, thoroughly compromised by some malicious actor. I reviewed every login, post, comment, device, it was all me, top to bottom. Ironically the time it was a hacker, they handed him my accounts in a matter of minutes while I slept. They’ve never stepped up to protect a user with the same tenacity they’ve shown in protecting my accounts from me.
“Maybe get the checkmark and get support, right?” my wife asked.
The idea didn’t exist in my mind prior to that moment. Something stupid had taken place automatically, and there was a world-class mess to untangle. If it was going to happen at all, they were going to have to do it. I hated the thought, but she was right.
I got to a point where everything was back except for two accounts: my public Threads account where I promote my writing and the newsletter Instagram which was doing okay, but at some point I figured out I could just use the Instagram account connected to the replacement Threads account for the chronicle. I would sleep, and try it in the morning (today).
This morning I accepted the mark of the beast. You have to choose an account or profile to be the Verified one, and if it’s an Instagram account, the connected Threads account seems to get the checkmark, too. I truly look at it as a mark of defeat, but I also recognize it would be insane to waste it on a private account, it does come with some reach benefits, so I chose my writing Instagram/Threads account. From there I could ask for help with anything connected to my Account Center.
Kind of.
I answered a few questions to hit the support chat, and after a few moments, “Sylvia” joined. I assume Sylvia is an AI agent, but I’m not entirely sure, and that is the furthest thing from a compliment. After spoon-feeding her (her?) the problem, she swore the standard customer support oath to not rest until we had solved my problem unless it was something they just didn’t want to fix or whatever. You know the one.
After a short time, Sylvia asked to call me on the phone.
“Odd,” I thought. Was this a person after all? Are they going to try to goad me into verbally abusing a robot so they can justify not helping me? Anybody’s guess.
It didn’t matter, because Sylvia was unable to make my phone ring at two different phone numbers I offered.
I still don’t know what to make of this. She said my main number went straight to voicemail. My Google Voice number definitely did, because the call didn’t disconnect in time and I have a little tiny voicemail from her. The most likely answer is that Verizon and Google robo-call filters both caught her and kicked her over to voicemail. Inconvenient in that moment, but a real triumph for irony. How’s it feel to be accused of misuse while you’re just trying to do your job?
But again, there’s a pretty good chance Sylvia doesn’t feel feelings at all.
Well, none of that mattered because after some back and forth to confirm which account was the problem, Sylvia suggested I contact Threads support directly. This was very upsetting after I’d paid for support from my Instagram account, but I kept my cool and asked “How can I contact Threads support?”
“Allow me 3 to 5 minutes to look into this,” she said.
“Okay. Thank you.”
“Thank you for waiting. Upon checking, Threads does not have a direct customer support.”
Something snapped in my brain in that moment. I hope it wasn’t important.
On a whim I tried logging in from my mobile browser outside the app. This fired off some kind of warning that I’d been hacked which Sylvia said in the chat in exactly the way a notification would normally come through. I’m up to 95% certain Sylvia does not exist.
Sylvia then suggests opening Threads from another account, clicking around in their Help and Support section, and “choosing one of the options” there. None apply to a locked account and none will connect you with a person or even a Threads AI agent. These apparently don’t exist.
I brought this up immediately, but Sylvia said it’s the only option we have right now.
This is when I noticed from another account that my Threads account IS active. It’s fine. It even shows the checkmark. How embarrassing! All my friends are over there probably just thinking I’m silently working on a grand announcement that I’m Verified now.
At random, Sylvia says something like “Can I confirm that your account is disabled?”
Sylvia knows something.
I said “Actually, it’s doing something different now.” This was true. It asked for a six-digit confirmation code (weird because I have 2FA on) but nothing came to my email.
I said this.
“Maybe you can try to log in again after some time. For now, let the app cool down first.”
Cool down first?
“How long do you suggest waiting?”
“We do not have a specific timeframe on how long will it take because it is according to the app. You can try to log in again after some time.”
This has no real-world meaning. An AI agent who existed solely for this task was trying to get me out of her DMs. I agreed and left a review with pretty low marks.
Reader, would you believe time hasn’t healed all wounds after all? The saying is really never true, now that I think of it. But this is no different.
For laughs, I posted the “Reach out to Threads support / Actually there is no Threads support” bit from Instagram where it successfully cross-posted to Facebook and, sure enough, Threads also. I checked the comments from the chronicle’s account some time later and, because reading can be difficult, someone commented “You appear to be posting this from threads so there’s that!”
Tomorrow I’ll go back to trying to make you laugh, trying to grow these precarious new accounts, and trying to retire my longsuffering wife. It will be a lot easier if I can ever convince the powers that be to simply step aside and let me do the work.
As always, follow The Southern Illinois Chronicle, share your thoughts, or share something we did with a friend. It’s all a lot less fun alone.