Meta's Overzealous Security Efforts Are Leading To Bad Customer Service: Opinion

"They want businesses to spend ad money, but they have no one help you with pages when they get hijacked."

My Facebook account was disabled recently. Why? Well, it has to do with Instagram – which of course, Facebook/Meta owns.

Someone accessed my Instagram account using an old email I thought I had deactivated years ago, and tried to spread spam, porn or some other bit of naughtiness that lands you in Facebook jail.

I am in the middle of appealing to Facebook that I am just a harmless tech journalist and could barely break into my own home if I were locked outside, much less wreak havoc as a hacker on social.

So far, I have had no response or any other way to make my case.

But my experience today led me to think of other Facebook friends' recent experiences.

One dear friend, a lady who has dedicated her life the past decades to serving and bringing joy to elderly and infirm patients at nursing homes and rehabilitation centers, recounted her Facebook nightmare to me in detail.

My friend, I'll call her Sue, knowing I was a tech person, messaged me saying she had been locked out of her Facebook account and wanted advice that I could not offer. Sue said a hacker not only accessed her account but changed the email and phone number, leaving her with no recourse to plead her case to Facebook.

Another very successful businessperson, whose livelihood depends on her Facebook account and her clients' social media accounts, shared with me her own Facebook headache.

Wendy Karlin-Pace is the founder of Pace Setting Media – an Atlanta-based marketing firm. Karlin-Pace has clients all over the world and has been in business for almost a decade.

She said even as a Facebook business user, the lack of customer service has been frustrating.

"When my phone got hacked and I had to change the number, I was unable to reach anyone at Facebook to regain access to my personal account which is also the account that I use to be an admin on my many clients' business pages," Karlin-Pace said.

She said she tried reaching out because Facebook had sent her a message that she had received an authentication code to re-access her account, which took her days to track down – costing valuable business productivity time.

"Then, they sent a community standards violation notice. When I go to look at these notifications, I can't see what the post was, and there is no way to correct everything. They said I had posted something on July 3, [but] I was traveling that day from Europe and the only posts that were going up were ones scheduled for my clients."

"They want businesses to spend ad money, but they have no one help you with pages when they get hijacked."

I contacted Meta for a response to these issues but have yet to hear back.

So, I recreated a new Facebook account. It's a personal account, so no great loss to start over. But for business owners, the abject lack of customer service and dead silence from Meta when these issues happen, could wreck their business.

It's understandable that in this dystopian cybersecurity nightmare we are currently living in, that social media platforms would opt to be rather heavy-handed with a zero-tolerance stance for anything that reeks of hacking. But the problem is, when the parties being accused are innocent, Meta is offering no clear path or any customer service for them to fix the situation. That's unfortunate.

Overzealous security is prioritized over users and especially, Meta's business customers.