A couple of years ago a friend of mine had his Facebook account suspended. No warning or reason given. Repeated attempts to contact their support were ignored. In the end he gave up and just decided not to use that platform any more.
A little while later, I had a similar experience. My account was banned, but I was able to get it back in a couple of days.
None of this really matters unless Facebook is important to you. Perhaps your business has a page over there which gets lots of hits. Perhaps you run a community which is important to you, or your business.
If any of these are true, then Facebook suspending your account could be about the most important thing imaginable. I know of several people who have their entire lives wrapped up in their Facebook account. If that account were to go away, their livelihood would be significantly impacted, in a heartbeat, without their knowledge that it was about to happen. The tsunami would arrive without the news broadcast warning you.
What I’ve just said of Facebook could be said of any platform. YouTube, X, Instagram, TikTok, and all the others. They offer free tools, free exposure, free access to their massive audience. It’s all free, and it’s all great.
Until it’s not.
Until the day that you wake up to realise that you’re locked put, banned, suspended. You’re unable to get your account reactivated because the platform is all about the product, and not about the support of the product. You realise that you’re a tiny fish in a giant ocean, and you’re not going to be getting back any time soon, perhaps ever.
I’m sure that this is rare, but it happens. I’m sure that car accidents are pretty rare, but we’re forced to take out insurance so that if the rare thing happens, you’ve got some way to get back on your feet, get a new car, get all the vehicles repaired.
You need to have something like insurance for yourself on the internet. A place that you own, a place that you can backup, restore, move, delete, pause, reignite whenever you choose.
I feel like in the early 2000’s people understood this. But then along came Web 2.0, with it’s free services, where all you had to do was provide an email address and log in. They gave you all the tools, you didn’t need to worry about a thing. They made the ‘owning your own’ platform feel like a hassle.
“You have to pay for your website? You have to spend time managing it?!?”
Yes, a little. A really small amount of money. A really small amount of time.
In return I’m able to write what I want with no need to worry about whether it’ll be removed, banned, suspected or redacted. I use WordPress to do all this, here and in other, different, places, but there’s dozens of other options out there as well.
I think that, in the year 2025 it’s very, very hard to make the case for having your home on the web. Typically, the platforms do not ban users. They don’t go out of business, or cause us any problems whatsoever. They just work, and there’s a generation who have grown, or are growing, up in an era where owning your own content is of no concern.
Don’t get me started on how this giant platforms actually make it possible for it to be free at the point of use. That’s a whole other things, and perhaps more important that what I’m talking about here.
I’m not going to try to persuade you that this matters, it does for me, and one day it might to you. I hope that, at that moment, you’re in possession of a way to keep going, and get back up and running right away.
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