No Charges, No Trial
I open my email and Facebook has suspended my account again. They’re very polite about it. The message reads like a form letter—calm, professional, impersonal. Effective immediately, I’m locked out. My profile, my pages, my contacts. All gone. But don’t blame them. They’re just the tech team, just doing their job.
What gets me isn’t that it happens. What gets me is how. Someone saw something I posted and decided it wasn’t acceptable. Maybe they thought it was funny and reported it anyway. Maybe they were having a bad day. Maybe they didn’t get the joke. They clicked a button. That was enough.
An administrator looked at whatever it was—a photo, a text, a comment—and decided I’d crossed a line so far over that I didn’t even deserve a warning. No explanation of what I did wrong. No chance to fix it or defend myself. Just judgment rendered in silence.
Even the worst legal systems give you that much. An accusation. A judge. A trial. Some record of what you’re supposed to have done. But Facebook doesn’t work that way. You get a verdict with no trial. No crime specified. No appeal process that actually works. You’re just out.
The first time it happened, I was careful. Genuinely careful. No explicit images. I even went through and censored anything remotely questionable—bent over backward to stay on the right side of their rules. And here we are again. Which somehow makes it worse.
And look, I could tell myself it doesn’t matter. I can reach people other ways. Messenger, email, phone, whatever. I could dust off the old habit of writing actual letters. But that’s mostly bullshit, and I know it.
For me, for anyone running anything on Facebook, that account isn’t just for memes and inside jokes. It’s infrastructure. It’s work. Getting banned without warning is like someone coming into your office, locking you out, and walking away. Except they also take your Rolodex, your calendar, and every client relationship you built there. The pages you run, the groups you manage, the events you promote—all inaccessible. The deals that were coming, the readers you were growing, the administrative access you need to keep things running. Gone.
So now I’m waiting. Three to nine weeks for Facebook to maybe, possibly respond to an appeal they won’t necessarily explain. In the meantime, I’m doing nothing with the biggest network on earth, and hoping the intern who pulled the trigger on this one figures out that this job isn’t for them. Preferably before he gets bored and bans someone important.
Here’s what I’ve learned: don’t build your business on systems you don’t control and can’t predict. Don’t rely on platforms that can destroy your access without explanation or recourse. The irony is that Facebook needs you to believe they’re fair and reasonable and that you can trust them with your livelihood. But they’re about as predictable as a bouncer with a chip on his shoulder. Worse, actually. At least the bouncer will throw you out to your face.