My disabled Facebook account appears to be enabled again. There was no notification, I just happened to notice. I’m looking it over to see if everything’s there and if there is any indication of what happened.

It may have been restored naturally. Or maybe some emails I sent to suggested Facebook addresses, or a tweet to a known Facebook employee suggested to me helped. Or maybe my email to Mark Zuckerberg helped. It remains a mystery.

I looked things over though, and tried, without success, to find a way to inquire about what happened.

Support Inbox

In the Support Inbox there is no information about what happened. There is a dialog from April 2017 where they took down a post of mine. I objected, they apologized and said it was a mistake and restored the post. It was a link to a Washington Post article about Trump.

There was another post of mine from October 2020 where I made a joke about different election days for Democrats and Republicans. They asked me to take it down. I did at the time, but entered an objection. They just said thank you for your feedback. It was basically the same joke I posted in 2016 and 2012 about Republicans voting the day after Democrats to avoid crowds.

This is the entirety of my listed violations in over 10 years of being a member.

On the Support Inbox page it says I’m temporarily restricted from creating Pages until May 3 at 2:03 am. But it doesn’t say why except, “Our security systems are currently blocking you from doing something on Facebook, such as posting or sharing. This block is temporary. The length of a block depends on the severity of the violation and your history on Facebook.”

There is a link to appeal if I feel like it. I hadn’t planned on adding any new pages any time soon so I don’t know if it’s worth the trouble. I clicked the link to appeal out of curiosity though and it just said they could not process it at this time.

Groups I Manage

All the groups I manage are still there.

Pages I Manage

The pages I manage all appear to be there via the Desktop. However via the Facebook app on my iPhone is saying that United News Reports (my news page linked to a blog I post to) and Elliptics Domains (my company is a GoDaddy Reseller so I apparently created a page for that once, but forgot about it) are not visible.

If I look at the Elliptics Domains page it is just asking me to add more information, but not giving me any warnings. I must have not finished completing that page.

If I look at United News Reports reports it says it has been unpublished because it goes against their Community Standards. That happened the day before I got blocked.

If I look at the Community Standards all it mentions are graphic violence, hate speech, harassment, bullying, nudity, sexual activity and sexual exploitation. None of those were any part of that Page. If anything, it was the mildest Page of all. It just reported news I thought was interesting. I have a blog linked to it at https://unitednewsreports.com and I was wondering whether to continue it now that the election is over.

I clicked on Disagree with Decision but apparently all that will do is “use my feedback to make improvements on future decisions.”

I can still see the contents, and it really is quite harmless. The last entry is just an auto-post from my blog congratulating Biden.

My Trump Fact Book and my company Elliptics, Ltd. pages are there as usual. In fact just one minute ago I received a $5 offer towards boosting a post on Trump Fact Book. Weird.

I think it must be all bots doing this.

What to do going forward

I’m not going to up and quit Facebook. But I feel very different about it now. I don’t feel good about it. I don’t feel like sharing jokes and cute articles much. I probably will post more on my blog at https://lerner.net and maybe link those posts to my feed.

I’m also hesitant about using Instagram (owned by Facebook) any more. I think I’ll just post photos and videos to my blog. People who subscribe can see them, and I’ll post links to Facebook sometime. The point here is controlling my content and not having it suddenly taken away from me. I don’t want to be held hostage by Facebook again.

I’m also fixing up a social network I actually own, that my company created and hosts. It’s typically used by organizations like schools, non-profits, educational services, and private companies who want a private-labeled social network, where they completely control the membership and content and privacy, and can customize appearance and script it to add more features as they like. I have a demo site for it, and just renamed it lifemind.com today. Feel free to visit it and sign up if you like. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Facebook, but it has some features that Facebook doesn’t, including personal blogs. You can create and join groups there, and make friend connections as well. I know very few people are going to bother joining yet another general social network though.

As for Messenger, I am not going to use that anymore. It would be too risky to suddenly lose contact with people again, and have them wonder what happened to me. I will take this chance I have to reach out to my contacts there and give them alternate ways of contacting me.

I want to thank everybody who was concerned about me going missing and making attempts to contact me during this time.