We created the account from an Apple device, registering from her home cable modem IP, giving FB her cellphone number and ISP issued email address — all strong signals of consumer authenticity. But after she added five of her relatives within half an hour, her account was locked for suspicious activity.
There was an appeal button; she was asked to take a picture of her face from many angles and upload ID. She gave them everything they asked for, but when Facebook reviewed the appeal, they closed her account permanently.
I can't speak for every company, but I know with Facebook and Paypal, these requests generally are from automated systems and the chances of successfully reopening the account is well under 1%. The info you submit is not viewed by a human and the systems are mostly treated as a way to lighten the load on human support staff. They don't care if your account is reopened, they just want you to feel like you had a chance, did all you could, and then just give up.
I discovered this about 20 years ago dealing with Paypal. I happened to know someone who worked in Paypal engineering at the time. I had a well established account, a Paypal debit card, linked accounts, etc., everything you could need to feel good about an account.
Out of the blue it was suspended and I was sent into this system to send in verification documents. I gave everything it wanted. First it was ID, then a "utility bill" so I sent over my phone bill. That wasn't acceptable because it didn't prove I lived at my address for some reason, so I sent a natural gas bill. Even though that did have to be tied to a physical address (you can't deliver gas wirelessly!) I was asked for an electric bill. Then the lease. Then a bank statement. Every time I gave it pretty quickly. Then I was asked for a passport. I didn't have one. Suddenly that was the only thing that could unlock my account and as soon as they had the passport my account would be reopened. Nothing further would be done without a passport, not even communication.
I asked my friend to look into it. She said, "that's on purpose, that's the NoBot. It gets people out of support's hair." Turns out if you let unhappy customers complain to humans on the phone they will, so some exec decided to improve call center metrics by forcing customers into a system designed to keep them occupied until they gave up. You funneled people into it, and it would continue to reject their submissions with new reasons infinitely. It just went through a list of things to ask for, and when it found one you couldn't provide, suddenly that was the key and without it you were screwed.
Companies still do this today.
Paypal and many other companies that trade in valuables have to put up protections because there are almost no reprecussions for perpetrators in certain foreign countries.
Sometimes it works with the front camera on one smartphone but doesn’t with another (iPhone 17’s distortion), sometimes it recognizes your face on one day, but desperately fails to recognize you on another. I had to repeatedly record videos for it only to fail over and over again. Anything their system flags as suspicious, anything, will trigger the same video identification flow again, which effectively blocks your money in the account.
I’m closing my accounts with a couple of banks with these video id flows. Simply because it’s way too easy to lose access to my money in the account with them. If their QA is not good enough for this vital requirement, I don’t want to know how they treat other requirements. They simply outsourced the id verification to some third parties that are way too unreliable.
Another banking app has failed to identify me a couple of times (I attribute it to iPhone 17’s front camera distortion) and fell back to the snail mail id code as a 2nd factor. It arrived only several business days later. Instead of just letting me use my own 2nd factor such as a TOTP device or a physical security key. But maybe there are some legal requirements for that flow, I’m out of the loop.
So there’s a whole range between passkey-is-enough on one end and outsourced video id or snail mail for 2nd factor on the other. The latter can of course be misused to siphon as much personal information as possible out of you, even linking and scraping your other banking accounts for consumer profiling - designed as a requisite part of the authentication/authorization flow.
At least Facebook tells you that you are banned.
I could still tell because their profiles were sterile and had few normal comments or likes etc. Also a high school class has a very narrow age range. We recently landed a fatal blow by disallowing joins by "pages" and adding a few questions. A trickle continued but stopped recently.
The hamfisted false positive response you described is probably a result of the above.
That is exactly example that parent posted about. Not every fb user is addicted to it, and has used it for long time.
So I tried to sign up (and I already HAVE an active facebook account from high school, with hundreds of friends) and it wanted me to scan my face. I did it, which I regret, only to be told five days later that I am too suspicious. So here I am, still locked out of all this information lmao
I feel very badly for your friend. Unfortunately, those completely benign actions look identical to a common identity theft pattern.
Perhaps these constant restrictions will finally spur us to create our own spaces again Our own little groups that exist independent of the corpo-sphere.
The only reason ‘the way things used to be’ went away was because the new thing was convenient. Well, now it isn’t anymore. So let’s just go back to the old thing.
The normies already did this. They just did it on centralized platforms like Discord. Until their backs get broken we're not getting anywhere. (Although I may be being a little too cynical.)
On the other hand: It was kind of awful when even my dialup access would get screwed up because someone's IRC server got DDoS'd -- again -- and clogged up the pipes.
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These days, the local ISPs are mostly gone. But the pipes are bigger -- it's easy for many of us to get gigabit+ connections at home. Unfortunately, the botnets are also bigger.
How do we get back to what we had?
Piggy back off of an existing community that has already built trust -- for instance, build a forum for a local activity that often attracts 10+ years of participation and involves equipment. Your board will become the best place for users (who already trust one another) to swap used gear, discuss local venue closures, etc. Adopt moderation metrics that sustain your community (don't let bullies and spammers spoil everyone's experience.)
In 10 years, you can completely replace larger platforms as the community of choice.
And by then you have to worry about money to upkeep the platform. You sell off or sell out your users, and the cycle repeats. Even for the most well meaning people, it comes down to the fact that scaling such communication isn't free.
We hear all these stories of eccentric billionaires going all out on their hobbies. Why do we have no eccentric FOSS people who donate to keep such stuff FOSS?
So don't scale. There is a sweet spot where a few $2 classifieds (e.g, for motor vehicles) will sustain your operating costs, and the high-trust environment keeps moderation efforts/costs low, while the total target audience is too small for most bad actors to bother with.
Going back a bit further yet, I also miss local BBSs. Some were popular while many others were not. Almost all of them regardless of popularity were a labor of love: Very few BBS sysops ever recovered what was spent to start the thing up and keep it going and it was not, broadly speaking, an inexpensive hobby. It was a mosey-losing operation.
But since long-distance telephone calls were billed by the minute, the systems were geographically-bound by the financial disincentives of far-away users. This made for tight, local communities (often with small dozens of semi-active users, and sometimes even hundreds!) and pretty effectively kept the idea of global domination-style growth off of the table.
So, again: The constraints shaped it to be how it was.
What kinds of constraints might form a path towards to this kind of small success today, in 2026, while there are giants like Meta stomping around?
Very possible. I'm on Tildes and its invite only structure prevents the infamous Eternal September effect. It also means that it's nearing a decade and is very much not going to compete with other forums as a platform.
I'm perfectly fine with that. But that doesn't seem to be what people en masse want. They want to connect with all their friends and family, and discover new ones through specialized communities. On a scale of a billion people, that's hard to manage. And if no one principled fills that void, the unprincipled will.
>What kinds of constraints might form a path towards to this kind of small success today, in 2026, while there are giants like Meta stomping around?
Plenty of methods for that, centralized or decentralized. It's less a matter of "do we have the technology/ingenuity" and more "can it defeat the massive network effects?"
Having everyone pay in is one strategy. But we have 30 years of people used to free and open mass communication. How many will give that up for proper freedoms and protection from state actors?
Heck, it almost always seems like people give up freedoms whenever push comes to shove, no matter the industry or timeline.
But leaving is never free. There's a lot of gaming communities (especially niche subcommunities like emulation, speedrunning, modding, etc) that are mostly on Discord and not anywhere else. Many probably won't move. A lot of tribal knowledge will be lost as it's locked in these communities.
Heck, even some FOSS communities communicate mostly on Discord. I have more faith they will move. But not all.
And they have always organized society to make sure this is the case. It's not a wacky conspiracy theory. These are just the interests of the people who create and have most influence over tech, and these interests are shared in common amongst most elements of that class. So, this class, the capitalist class, will just plan (conspire) to make it necessary for you to participate.
Viewing tech in this way makes one see that the historic development of tech is not happenstance occurrence, just tech skipping along, unconsciously, into authoritarianism, but as tech being influenced by the interests of the people who have the most influence on its development: those who own it, who are often the same people who determine standards.
The internet was never a free form idea upon which everybody could sway, its a technology owned, controlled and influenced by those who produce it.
They WILL absolutely try to place social/state/labor functions behind this wall of authoritarianism. As they already have, and are currently doing with the growing ban on VPN usage, anti phone rooting measures, anti-"side loading", etc.
It should not be absurd to suggest that the people in power have used, are using, and will use power in their favor.
I don't know ... around these parts (Santa Fe/ABQ) while Marketplace is very popular, Craigslist continues to be widely used for this, especially since an ever growing number of younger people are not on Facebook (either at all, or not regularly).
However, “think of the children” will always result in more restriction in western countries, not less. We are watching countries prove that it works to isolate from each other. Europe is not isolating from America in exactly the same way, but is isolating business processes from American services.
We are not on the cusp of the end of the internet, but the cliff sure seems in view to me.
I hope for it to happen in my country, with local companies and developers competing to create the new social networks. The current arrangement fine foreign entities too much power.
That would hurt billionaires in America, so I'm not too worried about that gaining traction in my country. Even if it ultimately becomes the next superpower regime.
More relevantly, I wonder of such restrictions would impede the First Amendment even if they did want to try.
But instead of paying Instagram for reach, consider taking the same budget and spending it delivering samples and coupons to other local businesses mid/late morning. Bonus points if you make the coupons unique for each delivery so you can track which local businesses are your biggest fans. Office managers are generally receptive to this kind of cold call and you can leave a catering menu. Catering gigs can keep your kitchen busy during the off hours.
Bit of a stretch to correlate this with Instagram suspending some guy
A family member had been sharing some photos they were taking, but only on Instagram.
So I signed up an account, verified via email and phone number. I wasn't initially able to find the family member's account. A week later after I got the spelling of their username right, Instagram popped up "Your account has been suspended". They then sent me an email saying I needed to take a photo of myself holding government ID, and a piece of paper with a hand-written code they supplied, plus a close-up photo of said government ID. No way was I supplying all that just to be able to browse some photos.
Discord tried to do it to me a few months ago but I refused, contacted support instead. Eventually they made it work but it took forever. Lucky for me I hate Discord so tried to avoid it anyway.
I’ve had friends coordinate for me in the past for a couple things but honestly eBay is still my go to.
I don't see it as the journey's end. But it's gonna be a much quieter road if most people don't walk away from this stuff. Maybe that's for the best.