I was just kicked off Facebook... again

The last time, they banned me for 4 years for asking questions about the current narrative. I have no idea why this time. Facebook was the main driver for subscribers to my YouTube, so being kicked off is a setback. If you haven't, please subscribe to my YouTube and share it. I give everything away for free, but I still have to make a living.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzuBq5NsNkT5lVceFchZTtg

Facebook jail, huh?
They put you in Facebook jail for any reason at all.
Liz has been in several times. But only for a few months at a time.
I stay off of it, I have no profile, so they cannot put me in jail, just her.

I'm sorry, they're messing with you.
I did subscribe (as Liz) to your channel.

Good Luck
I hope the Facebook parole board releases you soon.

Awesome, thanks - no FB jail this time, jut plain removed

Just did the subscribe thingy for you on the tube.  You're only the second one I've done.  I'll do what I can for you!

Peace

Sorry to hear Judson!

Not to give them any excuses, but I moderate a few channels and something is off with facebooks auto-moderation. It is severly malfunctioning to the point that it either took down or renamed several groups I am a part of. Last I heard it is being investigated but it has been a few days.

I hope they restore things to the way they used to be.

I did subscribe to your you tube. I don’t think I have a FB account.  I qualify because maybe 10 years ago an employee told me she set up an account for me. I never did find it .. but I didn’t look too hard.

I've been subscribed for a long time. FB sux....

I read their terms of service, privacy policy, and all the text from "i agree".

It took 4 days.

I decided not to get an account.

I use FB extensively for business and sidecar racing.
I dont engage with rat packs just the people I enjoy.
I dont use it for news etc.
I dont understand why people have trouble with it.
I did get a problem years ago that was hard to fix, but it sorted itself out later so that was weird.

I like some others here on the forum are not facebook fans.  

I made a page to please a granddaughter so we could talk.  

Got kicked off for asking questions?  Then I would not ask any more questions if I really wanted to stay on facebook.

If your account is to help your business then I would use it only for that and avoid controversial subjects.

Politics in the US is too charged for any discussion on fb to be of any use...any real discussion (or disagreement and questioning) is banned and stupid memes are the norm.

I still have an account and have narrowed my friends list to family and very close friends and I only check in once a month or so...works for me.

I've never been completely thrown off, but I did get kicked out of a group for the people with autistic partners. I hadn't realised that it was actually a group for neurotypical women to complain about their autistic male partners and I made the mistake of responding to yet another complaint about how their partners simply never understand that when they tell them for the fiftieth time that the tap is dripping, they don't rush over and fix it. Being autistic myself I had the audacity to suggest that maybe they either fix it themselves or, you know, actually ask their partners to fix it instead of just commenting that it dripped.

Apparently that was really rude of me and wasn't what members of that group wanted to hear. They wanted a place to let of steam, while I'm very much solution focussed.

Ooops. Bad Burra...

I closed my FB account 9 years ago? Something like that. I had 500 friends, many of them writers. Being writers, they wrote, copiously, about their political beliefs... it became a disaster for me and eventually the drama leaned on my PTSD, so I closed the account.

It wasn't quite as freeing as tossing the TV, which we'd done years prior, but close.

I wonder what accounts for the difference in experiences there?

I've used FB almost every day for fifteen years. I discuss politics and ethics and culture (along with all the trite family-focused normal stuff). We have protracted and emotionally heated conversations. Sometimes people even change their mind. I've been put in Facebook jail once for a week and once for a month, but it took actually advocating for violence on a public post. I didn't love being punished but I understood their stance.

I do wish there was an option to pay for the service so that I could be the customer instead of the product.

Christopher Weeks wrote:I do wish there was an option to pay for the service so that I could be the customer instead of the product.

Definitely that! I was active on the original 43things.com and loved it. When they couldn't make enough money through "super cheers" or other products, they sold the domain. I would have paid to have a private forum, way to make my posts private, but apparently that never entered their brains. The follow on sites that bought the domain made money from the posts, which considering some of them were highly emotional was a deal breaker for me, as I had no control over what they extracted. I bailed.

Consider installing an extension to your Firefox browser called 'No Script'.
Once you see how invasive, pervasive and relentless F.B. and Google are at following you everywhere you go on the internet, you may reconsider the point of giving your life away to them in the first place.
Once they have completed their surveillance of the phone! and computer you so eagerly gave them access to, connected all your dots, scanned all your emails, read all your messages, evaluated your income, education, interests, associations, banking and home, found you potentially lacking, then what further use are you?

Tommy Bolin wrote:then what further use are you?

I guess I have two points to that. 1) Once that's all done, what more harm can they do? They can't affect my real life any more than that. So the worst they could do is cancel my account. 2) They won't do that because they need to maintain a social *network* for their plans to have any hope. If it drops below a certain carrying capacity, the whole thing implodes. So even if they've extracted from you all the data they can, you're still providing them ecosystem services.

I actually like using Facebook.

I'm a hermit, I live thousands of miles away from most of my old friends and I hate socialising or using the phone. So I post all my news on facebook, visible to anyone I consider enough of a friend to not make me feel vulnerable if I share stuff with them, and any of them can follow me as much as they want without me having to reach out privately. I post all sorts of stuff about my life, my hopes, my dreams, my chaos, my garden, my ideals, anything. If any facebook staff member wants to read it, I sincerely hope it will inspire them!

Maybe they'll copy me and build a rocket mass heater, or create a GAMCOD garden, or learn to live crazy frugally, or do any of the other weird shit I tend to get up to.

Sometimes the comments section gets a bit deep and meaningful, but hey, who cares?

And if any of the friends ever make me feel uncomfortable or get snarky towards me, they either get pushed onto the dreaded 'acquaintances' list where they can only see public posts, or if it was bad enough that my stomach gets into a knot when I see their name I block them.

My page is set so that there are precious few friends' posts shown to me unless I actively go and look for them, so I don't get overloaded. There are a few local groups I go to read sometimes which can be a bit stressful but I've also made good friends that way. Nice, hermity friends who might follow my adventures or ask advice or compare notes, or we might help each other out when the shit hits the fan. There are good tools and controls so I don't have to be subjected to anyone or anything I don't like. And I love the facebook marketplace for finding local stuff for sale, or finding homes for stuff I've decided to let go of. Or the local groups for trading plants when I discover, say, that my latest prickly pear plant gives pretty red fruit instead of the usual orange ones and also needs pruning so I have pads available. Or all my almond seeds grew when I didn't expect them to and I have surplus baby almond trees. Or the dog ran off during a thunderstorm in terror when he nearly got struck by lightning and I want all the locals to keep an eye out for him. Or I can respond to a 'Please, please, please. I'm stuck in hospital and need someone to milk my goat urgently until I'm let out again' call. Or find a home for the old roof tiles we took down. Or snap up a load of free stuff that someone else wants cleared out of the way.

Facebook is a tool. I've found ways to use it that suit me. And if I pay for it by letting them read my stuff, well, good luck to them! I hope they learn something and do some good with it.

I subscribed.

Christopher Weeks wrote:

Tommy Bolin wrote:then what further use are you?

I guess I have two points to that. 1) Once that's all done, what more harm can they do? They can't affect my real life any more than that. So the worst they could do is cancel my account. 2) They won't do that because they need to maintain a social *network* for their plans to have any hope. If it drops below a certain carrying capacity, the whole thing implodes. So even if they've extracted from you all the data they can, you're still providing them ecosystem services.

Yes, this. People's data is dynamic/changing, so just because a company collects and sells your data in year 1 doesn't mean they can't recollect and sell it again in year 2.

Also, although Facebook is big into data collection their main source of income is ads, so keeping you engaged on the site is how they tell advertisers "buy an ad and it will be seen by X number of people for Y amount of time". The surest way to keep people engaged, it seems, is to show them controversial content and invite them to participate in it. Which it seems the OP was doing (unwisely in my opinion).

By the way, whenever I say something that people disagree with sharply (and I do get a rise out of doing that, for sure!), I try to stop and interrogate my own idea, breaking it down into its components to see where's the thing people really disagree with. Sometimes it turns out I'm saying something non-controversial but in a way people aren't used to or in a way that is unclear; other times (most often really) it turns out I'm wrong about something; and then every once in a while it turns out there's just a different thing I think is important that most other people don't or vice versa. But my point is that when someone is offended that is a good reminder to stop and conduct this process.

Ok, "first world problem" here, but I wanna cry!! I've been on Facebook since 2007, and I now feel like I'm being "forced off", or maybe forced to put the app on my phone, which I will not do. I get on FB on a browser on my laptop. I don't want it on my phone for 2 reasons:
1 - It will spy on me
2 - It would be too easy for me to use it
I want to use it intentionally, when I'm home and I have to sit at my laptop.

So here's what it's doing to me (sometimes):
1 - Telling me I can't post my reply because I've posted too much and I appear to be spam. This is ridiculous because sometimes it's my first post of the day and there is no way I posted too much.
2 - Telling me "try again later" when I post replies, and then it will never post, even if I posted elsewhere (so it's not my connection or anything).
3 - When I click the title of a group to go to it, I get "page cannot be loaded right now", preventing me from going to it.
4 - Sometimes I go back to find a comment I wrote, and I can't find it.

It is sad and frustrating when I take the time and thought to help people, or encourage them, and I write something of substance only for it never to get to the person I want it to. I've wasted time, energy, and my thoughts and my caring.

5 - And NOW, today, it started telling me (once in a while) to verify my identity using my phone (via their app, which I do not have on my phone). I think the previous things didn't frustrate me enough so now it's being obvious: "PUT ME ON YOUR PHONE OR YOU CAN'T USE ME".

I am really mad right now, and really sad. I did not post inflammatory things. I did not talk about politics. I was in groups with similar interests & issues that I have. I gave great advice, I was always encouraging to others, and I asked real questions and thanked people when they tried to give me advice. Oh, I was in a homesteading group there which is starting to keep repeating the same dumb posts yet it wouldn't approve my legitimate question about a hand pump well (and a few others). Their repeated questions seem suspicious like they might even be Ai, and it's often questions about prepping, which makes me wonder if they are information-gathering questions and the whole group is a sham, or turning into one.
Is that crazy of me to think?

I feel like Facebook is morphing into a robot, with its tentacles separating me from my family and friends on there, and now interjecting blockades here & there.
I just realized I wrote in the past tense about it, I guess because I fear I will be forced all the way off any day now.

It's how I keep in touch with family and some friends, so it's actually quite emotional and I will feel cut off.

I'm sorry that's happened.  

I don't really have an answer for how to get around what they're trying to make you do.  If you really do need to use facebook, you could install their app briefly to confirm your identity, and then immediately uninstall it.  You could perhaps do this on some old phone you don't use anymore.  

If you're concerned more with "It would be too easy for me to use it" than "it will spy on me", you could install their messenger app, which lets you do direct messaging but doesn't have the feeds etc.

Better would be to open direct text chats or group chats with the people you want to stay in contact with.  My family all use a few group chats to stay in touch, we never interact with each other through social media.  This is definitely superior, because the big tech company doesn't get to decide who sees what and when - we all see everything that gets said or shared in there, and don't have to see any distractions or ads.

I think everyone would be well served to move toward group chats.  I am in local community group chats too on Signal which are superior to facebook groups for all the same reasons.  

I imagine some governments can still get all our messages from Signal if they want to through someone's compromised phone or through hardware backdoors, but at least the tech companies theoretically don't get to mine them for data.

Also related, I recommend adblock plus and/or ublock origin, and the socialfocus browser extensions that can hide ads and feeds and short videos etc from your internet experience.

I just shifted everything over to X (Twitter). I miss the groups feature, but it certainly has been easier to get followers than it was when my account was re-instated on FB.  I think that even though they let me back on, I was shadow banned.  Since i posted this topic, I've gained 13,000 organic subscribers on X! Over the weekend, they started an auto-translate feature beginning with Japanese to English and I've literally spent hours each day chatting with Japanese folks about gardening, herbal medicine and recipes.  It has been a lot of fun! Since it is a holiday weekend, I'll probably spend some time goofing off on there because as of last night, they did the same for French, Spanish, Portugese and German and suddenly my page is flooded with millions of new people who share the same interests but have different perspectives and new ideas.