Past
We had such a lovely community of around 800 people. Many thousands of posts over four years. Great conversations. It was a valuable and interesting resource.
Then Facebook ruined it all.
As you know, Facebook has a rampant problem with bots and fake accounts. So, they keep adjusting their algorithms to “automatically” catch bad accounts, without necessarily verifying whether a “caught account” is a good account or a bad account.
Once deemed a “bad account,” there is a process to follow. If a “good account” can get their request for appeal through to actual humans, it usually ends well.
That was not the case here.
Present
I’ll spare you the details, because when I try to describe what happened, I get sad and angry. Let’s just say that they disabled my personal account, then prevented any recourse whatsoever. Obviously a mistake on their part, but it was impossible to get a reversal of their decision.
They deleted more than fourteen years of memories, photos, and personal connections. And that included every post I had ever made within the group for The Beautiful Snow.
With so much lost content, I had to do a lot of thinking about how to proceed once I established a new Facebook account. A colleague who does marketing work for small businesses advised me to reconsider strategy going forward.
Until recently, he strongly encouraged his clients to invest most effort towards social media versus a website. Due to the recent mischief of various social media companies, however, he has reversed course.
The reality is that none of us have control over our social media accounts, which can be taken away without recourse at any moment, and on the whim of automated systems.
A website, on the other hand, is completely within our own control.
So, I have created this new author-level website that includes a blog feature (which you are reading! thank you!)
A casualty, of course, is the wonderful Facebook group for The Beautiful Snow, and the information we shared back and forth. Since that content was significantly depleted when Facebook deleted my posts, I will likely delete the group altogether sometime soon (and we’ve discovered that since I re-established my account, anyone making a comment on a post in the group receives a “you’ve violated community standards” message, which means something is still very wrong in FB’s inner workings). (Note: never was there any violations in the group nor my personal account…FB’s algorithms just sometimes catch good accounts and deem them bad).
Thank you so much for being a part of that community over the last four years.
On the positive side, I discovered (or more accurately, had to admit) that gee, I’m substantially more productive without the temptation of scrolling through Facebook! Thus I delayed establishing a new account while working on several deadline projects as well as a new research-heavy project.
Future
I have established this blog, which while not interactive like the FB group, allows me to share things without the risk of some bot swooping in and destroying the content. You can subscribe to the blog to receive an email when something new is posted, which I’ll try to do weekly.
Some posts may be musings about how things are going as I do speaking events, answer questions, etc. Some may be topics harvested during research that had to be cut from the new book or never found a good spot in the first place, but remained interesting.
P.S.
Also, some final advice for anyone with a Facebook account (the same holds true for Instagram and Messenger, since Meta owns all three and when one account is taken down, all three are usually affected):
1). Make use of their tool to download your photos now and then, and store them somewhere safe.
I’d had my account for over fourteen years, so fourteen years of photos and memories were lost. Several years ago, the hard drive on my laptop crashed and I lost all photos on that computer. Therefore over a decade of photos were only on Facebook. I lost them all. I wish I had taken time to download all photos and put them in a safe place.
2). Find a way to record the people on your friend list.
I had several hundred connections and I’ve had to sit and begin making a list, so that upon establishing my new account I can reach out to them. Some family and friends are close enough that I had emails or phone numbers to reach them outside of FB. But a good percentage are connections I only had via FB, thus no way to let them know FB had destroyed my account.
I wonder how many people think I blocked them, and worry about how many people may report my new account as an imposter instead of the real me simply trying to reestablish an account.
The good news is that currently I feel fairly detoxed from social media. It actually feels pretty good! Now to see if I can reestablish an account and not lose productivity to endless scrolling! 😉