Ironically, my Facebook account, with which I've attempted to build friendship and community with people in the disability community, has been
DISABLED. How's that for a little humor to start off the morn- er, afternoon right? Apparently I added too many friends too fast, so they not only banned me from Facebook, they deleted the entire profile. Now, to give you some perspective, it's so hard to get deleted from Facebook that the
New York Times ran an article where they interviewed a man who had to threaten legal action before Facebook removed his information. But because I added too many friends, my profile is not only banned, but removed from all my friends' friend lists, removed from the search function, and likely exists now only in archived copies on Facebook's servers
I'm not one to critique the moderation style on websites I visit (much), but Facebook seems to be
looking too hard for ways to make money and make sure
nobody else is making money on Facebook, and not hard enough for ways to make the site valuable to users. I didn't get value when I had a Facebook profile from being
invited to a million different surveys and applications. I did not get value from being told I was "flirtable" or that I could join a "CSI Addicts" group. I got value from the presence of activist groups and causes, where I could find people with the same interests I had. How did I do that? I added random people from disability and activist groups, people with cool profile pictures or who lived near me, and waited for them to respond.
But that, apparently, is spammer behavior. However, I reported actual spam, comments on a group's wall saying things like, "See me naked 4u on my webcam," and they took over three weeks to be removed by Facebook admins. If a human being had taken 10 seconds to look through the messages on my profile, on my "Wall," or my interests, they would see I'm a human being, not a computer or a spammer, and that I was, at the time when they banned my account, engaged in conversation with a very emotionally vulnerable Facebook friend. Maybe they are too busy
collecting sensitive data from users' profiles, including likes and dislikes, and sending it to Google Adsense to bother checking out my profile or deleting obvious spam.
