As most people are aware, Facebook, that social media behemoth that controls half of the world’s population’s lives, doesn’t have customer support. Their principle is that anything can and will be done by artificial “intelligence”, and that you do not need to interact with a human in order to have the answers to your technology questions. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and other smaller social media ventures, has several online pages where they expect their customer to self-guide through links that will help them figure out how to solve every technology problem they might be facing with their accounts. I recently was victim of this lack of customer service when my accounts were hacked and as a result, Facebook permanently deleted almost two decades of memories, writings, pictures, and real life connections I have nurtured with people from around the world. Here’s a summary of the story and where I am today in this journey of losing my primary social media account.
I am a GenXer. Born at the very end of the 1970s, raised in the 1980s, and becoming a young adult in the 1990s. This is important because I am from the first generation that witnessed massive technological changes in our lives. I grew up without a telephone at home (I grew up in rural Puerto Rico. There was exactly one phone in my neighborhood, and about three houses with any form of cable TV.) But when I was in high school at a public boarding school in the west of the Island, I got a message at the school asking me to call the number of my parents’ brand new telephone at home. Later, on my second year in college, I got a Nokia, prepaid cellphone that I had to carry in my backpack because it was big and bulky. Of course, this cellphone was the companion to the pager I had already acquired, which we all called “beepers” in our native Spanglish. I point this out because I am from the generation that every survey confirms, it Facebook’s primary user. That is absolutely true.
The first time I heard about Facebook was while in Seminary. Since I attended Seminary outside of Boston, not far from Harvard, Facebook was a novelty we were all familiar with. I attended Seminary exactly at the same time as Mark Zuckerberg was attending Harvard and developing his innovative software. When the platform was first introduced to students outside of Harvard, I used my .edu Seminary email address to open my personal account. As most people from my generation, Facebook became the preferred social media platform to connect with friends, colleagues, and people I started to meet in other countries as I started to travel more often for both pleasure and work. Like most GenXers, Facebook became my way to interact with the world.
As the company continued to change and implementing rules and guidance for users, I tried to keep up, even if I didn’t agree with every single new rule. However, I never had any troubles until their infamous rules regarding names. I do not use my legal name for various reasons. The primary reason being that I was tired of hearing English-speakers butcher my name and not understanding that mine is not a “name” and “middle” name, but rather a composed name, and that I have two, not one, last names. I also started publishing under the name you all know me by now, styled as J. Manny Santiago (the “J” being a nod to my legal name, which was also the name of my maternal grandfather, whose memory I cannot honor as his last name is always stripped by the USAmerican naming customs.) I had to produce several pieces of proof stating that in fact, my name is J. Manny Santiago, even though my birth certificate, my passport, and my driver’s license do not have that name. More recently, I used a common Spanish word that has no derogatory connotation at all in Puerto Rican Spanish, but that I recently learned is used in Mexican Spanish as a derogatory term in some contexts. I was put in “Facebook jail” for using this word in a publication. I challenged the decision, based on the huge diversity that exists within Spanish dialects, and explained why the word had no negative meaning in my dialect, only to be told by Facebook’s AI systems that the software will not change their decision. And with that, I was given more time in Facebook jail. (By the way, other dialects of Spanish use words that are completely and utterly crass and vulgar in Puerto Rican Spanish, but apparently, Facebook has no problem with that.) Until this November, that was the most trouble I had gotten into with this social media tool. However, things changed in unexpected ways.
In early November, I temporarily deactivated my Facebook account. I do this regularly to disconnect a bit from the day-to-day of social media. But I am a regular Facebook user and always come back after some weeks. However, this year that did not happen.
On Thanksgiving Day, I am getting ready to welcome our dinner guests when I receive an email from Facebook that says “Welcome back!” I clicked on it and read that my account had been reactivated and Facebook was just welcoming me back. Of course, this concerned me but I didn’t have the time to get too much into it. Still, I took a little peek and opened the email. When I clicked on the link, Facebook started giving me a message that my account had been permanently disabled. This was odd, of course, but I was certain I could find the solution in the morning.
Lo and behold… the next day, when I went back to the email and the link, my account was still permanently deactivated. I tried everything I could. I searched for answers on Facebook, but since I could not access my account, there wasn’t anything I could do. Meta has a form you can use to submit any requests to reconsider their decision. However — and this is both cruel and a clear failure on Meta’s side — you must be logged into Facebook in order to submit that form. Of course, with no customer support system, it is likely that hundreds of thousands of accounts are being disabled unilaterally by Facebook with no recourse for their consumers.
I kept trying different ways to access my account. On one occasion, I was able to login into Meta and there was my profile picture from Facebook, and a message saying that my Facebook account had been permanently deactivated because an account I did not recognize and which did not follow Meta’s community guidelines was tied to my Instagram account. This at least cleared up what had happened. I looked for that account on Instagram and could not find it. My Instagram account didn’t have any linked accounts either. I assume the hacker account was either quick in disappear after the hacking, or Facebook was lying. Either way, at least I had a little bit of information on what happened to my account. Interestingly, even though it was my Instagram account the one compromised first, this one did not get deactivated.
As I kept trying to find answers and help, I came across information about supposed email accounts you can send information to. I emailed all of these accounts at Meta/Facebook at no avail. Those emails are not functioning emails. I had taken screenshots of the messages from Meta/Facebook, and wrote a short, one page letter explaining what happened.
On Tuesday after Thanksgiving, as I am checking my bank account, I noticed two charges for $250 each from… Facebook! How can this be if Facebook disabled my account? Obviously, the hacker used my stored cards to make purchases or to pay for something. This was another level of hacking I had not experienced before. Facebook is making me pay for the hacking I was a victim of.
Of course, I immediately called my bank and was able to report the fraudulent charges. My back was very helpful in reimbursing me the money and filing fraud reports on both charges. They also worked with Facebook and I was able to receive the reimbursement from them. However, the matter of my account was still pending. Now, the hacking had expanded to fraudulent bank charges and I still had not way of contacting Facebook directly to figure this out.
That was, until I ran into a YouTube video from a business woman in Florida who had a very similar experience. She explained what happened to her, and how her business page was also affected as Facebook requires that you use your personal account to create business accounts. In summary, this woman was able to make a different account — she could not use her previous email or an IP address associated with her personal email, as Meta bans anything that has to do with your old account from ever having access to Facebook again — and was able to reach out through Facebook help page. She also shared how she found out that Facebook has two special help sections, where you can actually connect with individuals, if you are a business or a government agency. Bingo! That was my possible saving grace!
A while ago I created a secondary Facebook account with my state agency’s generic email and my work phone number. Although it’s under my name, it’s actually a generic “personal” account that me and my staff can use in order to administer the agency’s page in case I took a break from Facebook as I usually did. I used this secondary account to login into my agency’s page and through there, I was able to finally reach Facebook help desk. A little bit of sun was already showing! I sent a note with all the print outs of the information I had gathered: the screenshots of the messages I received, the message about an account linked to my Instagram, and evidence of the fraudulent charges. I was cautiously optimistic about a possible resolution. But I also wasn’t holding on my breath because you cannot really trust a business that doesn’t have any type of general customer support.
A few days after I submitted my request, I did receive a note from a person from Facebook. It was a personalized note, acknowledging receipt of my note and the situation. I was excited, but still a bit doubtful that Facebook would do anything. I explained that the email I had used to submit the request was a generic email and that I might not have access if I were to move from my current position. I have tried to be as polite and as patient as possible. Since then, we have communicated a few times, sometimes because they need some information from me, or more recently, to let me know that the process to reinstate a disabled account can take some time.
It’s been over a month now, and things have not moved. Although I have been communicating with the Facebook staff, I have very little hope that my account would be reinstated. This whole process has been stressful, because, as I mentioned, I relied on Facebook to connect with many personal and professional connections from throughout the world. For instance, due to communication restrictions, it is almost impossible for me to connect with my contacts in Cuba outside of Facebook. Their emails are ever changing, and there is no direct phone calls I can make, nor do most of my contacts had any phones to call them to. The same for other connections on countries with limited phone or internet services. I do hope that a “miracle” happens and I get my account back. So far, nothing has happened and I doubt something will happen in the next few months. Perhaps I will get back to Facebook at some point in the far future, when I am able to set up a new account. For the time being, I am just waiting for the staff person I had been in touch with to give me any updates before I lose access to the secondary account.
The news have reported that the current White House administration instructed the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from using seven words on their budget documents. With seven days left for Christmas, I decided to take the time to write a piece each day highlighting one of the seven words.
SocioTheology 
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