- Meta closed a woman’s Facebook and Instagram accounts with no warning
- The closed accounts contained 20 years’ worth of ‘digital memories’
- The woman couldn’t contact a human and was forced to use AI chatbots
What would you do if you lost your Facebook and Instagram accounts along with all of the photos, posts, and memories they contained? That’s the prospect faced by one unfortunate woman — a situation made even worse by the actions of Meta’s AI chatbots.
When Jasmine Ault checked her phone in the middle of the night, she was greeted by a notification saying her Facebook and Instagram accounts had been permanently disabled, taking 20 years of personal data and contacts with them.
Ault attempted to contact Meta to rectify the situation, but found herself passed from pillar to post and unable to secure a resolution. In fact, Ault found herself completely shut out by Meta’s customer service and could only talk to an AI chatbot that couldn't fix it. Even after paying for expedited service, Ault was unable to get through to a human.
“It feels like I’ve lost everything in a metaphorical fire with my digital albums and my digital memories,” Ault told CBC News. “And who’s going to protect those if I can only speak to AI?”
Ault appealed the ban but says she received a summary judgment just minutes later declaring that her case had been closed and that there was no possibility of any further appeals. And with that, she had seemingly run out of options.
An opaque, uncaring system
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a case like this. Social media is awash with reports of people being erroneously banned from Meta’s platforms without any means of recourse — there’s even a dedicated subreddit for it.
With Meta rolling out AI across its platforms, it’s likely that situations like this will continue. Many people have accused AI moderation tools of incorrectly flagging users’ accounts, which might be one cause of the distress.
Part of the problem is the opaqueness of Meta’s actions. While Ault received a message saying her account was banned for breaking the platform’s rules, she was never informed which specific rules had been broken or how. She told CBC that she stayed awake for 26 hours straight in an attempt to restore her accounts — and all the memories contained therein — back to working order.
Yet Ault has been unable to resolve the situation. Speaking to CBC, she said “it feels almost sick to me that they just think, like, ‘We can just shut these people’s accounts down, they can’t get through to us and talk to us,’ and it’s people’s lifelines. It’s people’s memories. It’s people’s everything.”
If you’re concerned something similar might happen to you, it would be worth downloading your Facebook and Instagram data so that you have a backup. You never know when Meta might send everything to the digital incinerator and leave you stuck with an unsympathetic AI chatbot.
Alex Blake has been fooling around with computers since the early 1990s, and since that time he's learned a thing or two about tech. No more than two things, though. That's all his brain can hold. As well as TechRadar, Alex writes for iMore, Digital Trends and Creative Bloq, among others. He was previously commissioning editor at MacFormat magazine. That means he mostly covers the world of Apple and its latest products, but also Windows, computer peripherals, mobile apps, and much more beyond. When not writing, you can find him hiking the English countryside and gaming on his PC.