Unfortunately one of the worst things that can happen to a creative sole trading business like SvenStudios happened last week, where all of our accounts related and linked to Facebook came under attack by a malicious third party.

I woke up to my mother in law frantically texting about inappropriate images appearing on my personal Facebook wall which in turn caused my accounts to all become disabled due to facebook policy. Looking at my emails it seems as though someone gained access to my business page and 6 minutes later all my accounts were disabled.

On the surface this seems like a reasonable thing for Facebook to do in order to protect users from horrible images that should not exist, and it’s pretty amazing it only took 6 minutes of them being posted to take them down. So well done to them.

However this takedown has also caused an automatic ban of all accounts linked to my personal account. This means my business Facebook page – which had 2.5k followers. My SvenStudios Instagram, which had 14k followers and also my other project pages and instagrams relating to StevenDuncanART.

Facebook disabled

Impossible to reactivate Facebook disabled accounts due to Policy

You’d think surely an organisation like Facebook would be caught up in this sort of thing rather often right? Should be an easy fix – their automated takedown of illicit material was needed, so all they need to do is reverse it while removing the material yeah? Wrong.

It turns out that Facebook, and Meta do not believe in customer service and would rather outsource all customer relations to Artificial Intelligence – ‘AI’. Any thing and everything you interact with when you seek out help direct from Facebook is AI.

There is a review process in place in order to keep the AI in check for any inevitible blunders which is – or used to be staffed by real people. However when trying to make use of the review service one is merely greeted with ‘We can’t Rewview the Decision to disable your account’

unable to review

New SvenStudios Social Media Accounts

Doing research around the web, and Reddit, the chances of having my accounts restored seems pretty bleak and pretty impossible to achieve. The only success stories for people in my situation have been people who know someone who works directly for Facebook. One example is handxmade who kind of got thier acocunts back, but not eithout firends help.

I have reported the hack and use of my accounts and posting of illigal images to the Police which I hope maybe in their contacts can achieve something positive, but Facebook has already done everything in their power to protect the innocent from their view, the disabling of my acocunts is simply collateral damage which is none of their concern.

if Facebook and INstagram werent as important for a photography business to operate, I would not have bothered with recreating my acocunts – however they most certainly are important, so you will find my new SvenStudios facebook page at https://facebook.com/svenstudiosphotography/ and my new instagram page at https://instagram.com/svenstudiosweddings/ Eventually once the original pages are taken down (as my onl Facebook page is still visible) I should be able to reclaim the original URLs.

There may be a slim chance for my Facebook Disabled accounts to be returned to me – but at the moment by the looks of the finality of any correspondance I have with Facebook – chances are slim. I’ll of course update this if anything changes.