
Facebook
Sucks!
I really liked Facebook for a long time. I spent many hours
working on my FB page nearly every day for over 13 years. I had a personal
page of course, but more importantly, a fan page which
worked very well with my site Real English®, with over 886,000
FB followers.
My fans were really important to me, in a personal sort of way. I got to know some of them very well. We became friends, similar to real friends in the real world. I felt like I was part of a community that I built up little by little with a lot of hard work, while having fun at the same time.
I posted 15 to 20 times almost every day, posting pictures with quizzes, all of which I made myself, using, to the best my knowledge, public domain photos. I also re-edited my videos, the Real English videos, of course, just for Facebook. I would show an extract of a video, asking my followers to go to my site to watch the complete versions and to do the Exercises for these videos. And it worked very well. I had a lot more visitors to my site 2 months ago, before Facebook disabled my site.
Yes. Facebook suddenly disabled my account. My personal page and fan page have
been gone for over 2 months as of this writing. Today is November 15th, 2019.
This catastrophe took place in early September of the same year. But why? What
did I do that was so bad that Facebook decided that they had to trash all my
pages? My 13 years of work? After all, I was looking forward to a million followers
before the end of 2020, and doing everything I could to keep everyone engaged
with good content.
I have very honestly imagined everything possible, and I still don't know. I have read a lot about the Disabling or Blocking of FB accounts, and one astute person pointed out that people with disabled accounts actually know deep down that they have done something wrong. This is definitely not my case.
The original version of this "Facebook Sucks" spelled out all of Facebook's Rules and Regulations in order to help other people avoid making "the same mistake that I did" (whatever that was?!?!). But the more I think about this, the more I am convinced that I made no relevant errors. But how can I know for sure? First Facebook DESTROYS YOU, and then they completely ignore you!
Proof is impossible because I don't know what FB objected to AND THEY HAVE ALWAYS REFUSED TO TELL ME.
In other words, THIS TOTAL LACK OF TRANSPARENCY leads me to believe the worst. I think it is simply due to a whim of a person who works for Facebook, who has little training and no morals, and especially, no heart at all.
In my opinion, somebody who feels like he works way up high on a big horse at Facebook doesn't like the fact that the name of my page was Real English®, with the trademark sign at the end. I have owned this trademark for over 30 years in the US and the European Union and more recently the UK, separately, too. Nowadays, it is not possible to create a name of an FB page with any symbols in it, such as the trademark symbol, but it was perfectly acceptable in the very early days of Facebook when I created my fan page! I'm convinced that a new FB employee presumed that I hacked the FB system somehow by including my trademark sign. In point of fact, I am not at all capable of hacking. I can barely write this HTML. But it is certainly possible that an FB employee was offended by my unusual trademark sign. They had certainly never seen one.After all, I'm an old man of the very first FB generation of FB users, and the employee who objected was likely a kid who thought he found a BIG OFFENDER of FB Rules. But I will never know since Facebook, thanks to Mark Zuckerberg, does not communicate with people whose accounts they destroy. Yes, they destroyed 13 years of hard work, and they said nothing at all after completing their destruction. I wrote them over 25 letters using their link, the only way to contact FB then.
Facebook is in fact so extremely opaque, not answering a single
message that I sent them, which seems outrageous to me. They are much too big
for their britches.
Posted by Michael Marzio,
Creator of Real English® Video and Lessons,
November 15th, 2019.