No Charges, No Trial, No Explanation
It’s not the first time. You open the email, read it, and there it is: account suspended. Delivered in that politely bloodless corporate tone, as if this were just an inevitable administrative event—your access to your profile, your pages, your friends, revoked effective immediately. The tech team is merely the messenger. Nothing personal. Have a great day.
What actually makes me angry isn’t that it happened. It’s how. Somewhere out there, someone saw something I posted and clicked a report button—because they hate me, or because they’ve assigned themselves a cosmic duty to flag things, or because they simply didn’t get the joke. And then some administrator decided whatever I’d done was so heinous, so utterly beyond the pale, that even a warning would be a courtesy too far. No charges. No judge. No trial. Just a verdict.
Was it a photo? A text? A like? Did I offend someone, write something off-color to someone’s friend, have the wrong language setting? Did they decide my name was made up?
Even the most uncivilized of institutions—the ones where losing your head is a literal outcome—at least tell you what you did wrong before they do it. Facebook doesn’t bother. The decision exists before you know there was ever a question.
After my first suspension, I was meticulous. Obsessively so. No exposed nipples, no genitals, nothing even adjacent to the line. I even added black bars to preview images from this blog—jumped through genuinely tedious technical hoops to make sure I was on the right side of whatever arbitrary boundary they’d drawn. That’s what makes the second one hit harder.
I could tell myself it’s fine. Friends are reachable through other channels. I could call people. I could write letters—imagine that. And for networking there’s always Google+, or Xing, or… (pause here for the appropriate silence). Okay. None of that was even slightly true.
An account isn’t just for party invites and dumb memes. For me it’s work. Losing access to the world’s largest network without warning is like having someone raid half your office and then leave a parting gift on the desk on their way out. Pages you can’t update. Business contacts you can’t reach. Internal groups, upcoming events, future deals—inaccessible. Infrastructure you’d stopped thinking of as optional.
So here I am, staring at my inbox, waiting somewhere between three and nine weeks for any coherent response, praying with genuine intensity that whoever’s responsible is suffering in some minor but meaningful way. The lesson is obvious and I already knew it: you shouldn’t build your professional life around a platform whose moderation operates as arbitrarily and opaquely as a Berghain bouncer. Or me, making comparisons that don’t quite hold.