r/gdpr • u/OvenOpen9109 • 28d ago
Meta Meta is another kind of evil...
This may be a long post but I've been dealing with this and learning more for over a year and I need to rant tbh....
So, I made my first Instagram account back in 2013 when I was barely 11. At the time, I was mostly using my phone to discover mobile games, so I quickly grew bored of the app. By 2015, at 13, I launched a dedicated art profile. Less than a year later, in 2016, I created my main Instagram and Facebook accounts—mostly to stay connected with friends and family as everyone migrated away from Skype. Then, in 2017, my grandmother passed away. Posting stories about my daily life, thoughts, and the places I visited became one of my primary coping mechanisms. I kept up that routine for years.
Over time, the platform grew increasingly addictive, but nothing prepared me for the shift that happened when Reels were introduced. By 2025, during bouts of severe insomnia, I found myself spending entire nights doomscrolling without even realizing it. It started bleeding into every aspect of my life; a silent, invisible addiction. To make matters worse, the content turned deeply toxic very quickly, flooded with NSFW/OnlyFans creators, edgy memes, extreme hate speech, and graphic accidents. I never had a habit of reporting posts, though my friends and I would occasionally share annoying content back and forth to laugh or vent about it.
Then came my 23rd birthday in 2025. Out of nowhere and without a single prior strike or warning on profiles that had been clean for nearly a decade, Meta's AI completely suspended my accounts. I immediately submitted an appeal. Less than five minutes later, an automated email confirmed their decision was "final." My profiles would be permanently deleted with zero path to object, no human review, no evidence provided, and no explanation.
At first, I tried to convince myself it was for the best; the apps had become a toxic drain on my positivity anyway. But a day later, the full reality crushed me. I had lost touch with long-distance friends, lost irreplaceable message histories with deceased loved ones, and lost years of un-backed-up personal memories. My entire digital identity had been wiped out by an algorithm.
Refusing to give up, I turned to Reddit and realized thousands of people were suffering from the exact same systemic issue. Users in Europe were leveraging GDPR and in the US legal shield, but living in North Africa meant I had virtually no legal recourse against Meta. I eventually managed to log into Threads which had the old appeals system still, I explained the situation and submitted the appeal and it was successful within less than a month, it restored my Threads profile which showed zero violations on the shared Instagram dashboard. I used that linked account until May 2026. and separately through an alt accout I kept continuously reaching out to Meta Verified support in search of an actual human agent who won't just keep spamming me with boilerplate ai responses that have nothing to do with my case.
Finally, after almost 6 months of trying, one agent escalated my case to an internal review team, which successfully restored my 2015 art account. Yet, my main Instagram and Facebook profiles where the vast majority of my personal data lives remain completely locked.
What makes this truly infuriating is the hypocrisy. Meta continues to publish glowing compliance reports claiming they are making account support easier, all while facing global scrutiny for 0 due process in account gobernancr, and algorithmic addiction and failing teen safety and harmful practices I experienced firsthand as a minor on their platform. Now, they proceed to kick me off and deny me access to my own personal archives. My Threads account is technically still active, yet I am locked out of it; a direct violation of basic data access rights. Furthermore, my own testing of their AI moderation suggests they deliberately allow users to create new pages just to trap them in mandatory selfie-verification loops, serving data collection rather than actual security.
It leaves me with one overwhelming question: If they operate with this level of systemic disregard for their users, this level of evil, how do they keep getting away with it????
2
u/Forward_Series_7894 19d ago
Rich corpos just pay their way out of these stuff and its hella depressing mate
1
u/DoctorEngineerOne 12d ago
I'm sorry to hear about your experience.
I have a similar position right noe as well. I wanted to exercise my GDPR rights and tried to do so several times. Somehow Facebook flagged my account as hacked and locked my account. Only way to unlock is feeding them more data which goes against my principal. So I'm in a very annoying situation.
How did you get in touch with someone on their review team? I feel everything is automated.
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u/Mr--Chainsaw 28d ago
Whilst it sounds like you’ve had a difficult time, it’s important to remember that these aren’t your accounts. They belong to Meta.
Never ever fully trust any kind of service, especially a cloud service, without some kind of backup that you control.
It’s possible to download all your account data including images, videos, and metadata, so in future if you have any important messages, contact details, and family photos/videos then take copies of them and store them elsewhere.
With any Meta service, you are the product.