Facebook Disabled My Account

February 12, 2009 9:06 AM

Facebook disabled my account, and I can see no reason as to why. How can I fix this? Who can I contact?

I am a moderate Facebook user. I use my real name, I have approx. only 100 friends of people that I actually know, I don't harass anyone, I logon a couple of times a week, and as far as I can tell from their terms page, I am a model user.

Last week my Facebook account was "disabled by an administrator." I received no warning, no reason, or even a notification that my account was disabled. I have contacted the [e-mail] email now 3 times. Needless to say, I have yet to receive any response. Is there a real email address I can send an inquiry to?

I have read on Get Satisfaction and some questions posted here about disabled accounts. But they all assume you have done something wrong, which I don't feel that I have. (Honestly, I can't even think of a minor offense.)

The only thing I can think of is that someone obtained my password and began doing malicious things on my behalf. However, I have asked my friends and they didn't notice any unusual behavior coming from my account before it was disabled.

What is my recourse? Does Facebook have a phone number? I would really like to talk to someone about this. I guess I could create a new account, but that violates the terms and conditions and I would have to re-add everything in my account from friends to photos.

Furthermore, I am all for getting rid of spammers and other shady denizens of the Social Web, but isn't this a little ridiculous?

posted by blueplasticfish to computers & internet (5 comments total)

You may have a virus. There have been a couple FB virii that send spam from your FB account to all your friends. Happened to a friend of mine and their account was disabled. Not sure how she got it re-enabled again, but probably just used the normal channels like you.
posted by poppo at 9:11 AM on February 12

This old question might have some useful info.
posted by inigo2 at 9:43 AM on February 12

Facebook is horrible at responding to any contact. Even if you are a developer and pay them thousands in advertising, bring millions of hits to their site, you are lucky if you receive any response to any inquiry. So you aren't alone or being selectively ignored - they hate everyone.

Just keep emailing them and maybe you'll get a response.
posted by zephyr_words at 9:51 AM on February 12 [1 favorite]

I have a killer headache, so I'm sorry if this is totally incoherent:

I know you said it's been disabled for a week that you know of, but how long have you waited since you sent the first email to [e-mail]?

My account was disabled a little while ago and it took them about 6 days and 22 hours to get back to me (I looked at the timestamp, I'm not crazy -- really). I sent the email to the suggested "disabled" handle, and I only sent the email once. The contents of my email basically stated that I was a real human and I'd been using the service since it was made available to my college.

The "wrong" thing that I did was changing my last name before I got married (and apparently the Facebook robots don't believe it's a real name, I guess I can understand). Anyway, apparently this is against the TOS because it's not the name on my birth certificate and ruins the spirit of the website and yadda yadda yadda. They gave me my account back with my current legal name and everything was fine and dandy.

I'm under the assumption that they're cracking down on anyone who might be using an alias because of this incident, but I could be wrong. Something about your name or profile probably seemed spammy enough that some robot overlord decided it would be better to be safe than sorry and your account was disabled.

Anyway, they don't have to give you your account back, but based on my experience, they probably will.
posted by giraffe at 11:32 AM on February 12

Don't know if this could be relevant, but I got a lot of warnings appearing throughout a "chat" session I had last week, conducted via "Facebook email", basically saying that this is a message facility and shouldn't be used for chat (and if I wanted to chat, I should take it to the chat window) -- ie, I was sending too many messages back and forth with a friend in a given period of time, and I should stop if I didn't want my account to be suspended. Who knows how many messages are deemed appropriate and at what point I crossed the line into inappropriate -- but, yeah, just one more thing to add to the list of totally non-harrassing infringements for which they'll apparently delete you.

No idea about account reinstatement though, sorry. Sounds like it's just a matter of waiting 'til they're good and ready; good luck with it!
posted by springbound at 5:27 PM on February 12 [1 favorite]