I’m posting this because I just saw another post about it yesterday: Meta is using AI/automated systems to police accounts, making mistakes, banning people with no meaningful way to fight it, and your Quest account can disappear with everything else! It’s happened to my family too!
I just saw another post yesterday about someone losing access to their Meta/Quest account, and it had hundreds of upvotes and a bunch of people describing similar experiences. I figured I should share what happened to my family because this problem just happened to us too, and it goes well beyond losing a Facebook or Instagram profile. Meta is using AI to police their accounts, making tons of mistakes, and there’s nothing you can do to fix it! Consider yourself warned!
My wife and I have been Facebook users basically since Facebook became available to the general public. We’re talking about roughly 20 years of history with these accounts.
Together we own two dance studios and a small law firm. We have three daughters, all of whom dance, and over the years my wife created and managed Instagram accounts for them. She also had her own personal Facebook and Instagram accounts, as well as another Instagram account where she posted the school lunches she made for our kids everyday, which had developed a decent following.
These weren’t throwaway or anonymous accounts. They represented years and years of our family’s photos, memories, contacts, businesses, and online history.
A few months ago, Meta contacted my wife regarding one of the accounts associated with one of our children because they thought it was an underage account. They asked my wife to submit her ID to prove she was of age. She did.
Meta said there was a problem reading the ID and asked her to submit it again. She did that too. And then they banned/restricted her.
Not just the child’s account they were reviewing. ALL of her other associated accounts were taken down as well.
Twenty years of being a Facebook user, gone.
We have spent MONTHS trying to get someone at Meta to actually look at what happened. We tried every avenue we could find. We spoke with people who claimed they could escalate it or help us. We paid for subscription Meta services associated with our businesses because they promised we could talk to a real person. None of it has mattered.
The most astonishing part of this experience is that it is effectively impossible to get a real (or competent) human being at Meta to review what happened and fix an obvious mistake. You submit forms. You get automated responses. You go through online processes that send you in circles. You are promised resolution that never comes, or you are told decisions are final or that there’s nothing else you can do.
Big companies like Meta have years of our lives and data, and yet there is no meaningful customer service. You can also lose hundreds or thousands of dollars in Quest purchases. You can lose access to your business pages. And Meta doesn’t care; there is no real way to reach a person. I would absolutely advise you to think twice before buying any more Meta products. My family owns four Quest headsets and several accessories and more games than I’d like to admit. But we are now filling out arbitration papers against Meta because they are over-relying on AI and they can take everything away from you in a blink of an eye!