“Without knowing – although somehow always expecting it – we let ourselves become nothing more than the content between adverts. Our battles, our beliefs, our loves – nothing more than the filler before the next ad break. We fought battles that we didn’t need to fight – battles that ripped our solidarity apart and distracted us from the causes we once believed in – just to create clicks and blinks and eyeballs for the advertising networks. We were nothing more than squatters in a space we wanted to believe we owned, paying our rent by giving ourselves away in the name of capital. Our revolution was a sideshow.”
-Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan
As some of you probably already know, last weekend my Facebook profile was hacked. Severly. Irreparably. We’re talking nuclear scale kinetic bombardment.
It’s usually easy to recover from such things. A couple of comments from friends about how they’re suddenly getting offers for goverment grants in broken English via your Messenger, followed by a quick password change, and you’re back in business. But oh no. Not this time. Not my guy. No, this little bastard is extra special. He ramped it up to an entirely different level by not only changing my password and logging me out, but changing my phone number and email, used by Facebook for password reset verification. So now, any attempt by me to reset my password sends a notice to the hacker instead of me. Isn’t he oh so clever? In an eye-bulging, blood pressure-increasing way.
I didn’t know what to do, and here we come now to the crux of my little tale of woe. When I couldn’t change my password, I tried reaching out to Facebook. Know what I found out? You can’t reach out to Facebook.
Sure, they have a knowledge center-style FAQ page with answers to every conceivable question but mine, but no email contact form, no chat feature, no customer service telephone number. So I went diving into Google, thinking someone, somewhere, had figured out the secret way into Facebook Shangrila. No dice. There are at least a dozen videos on YouTube showing people who to contact an actual human being at Facebook (and if that isn’t a symptom of the overall problem I don’t know what is), but none of these ways work any longer. One video, dated January of 2021, showed how to access Facebook’s business help page, with a chat feature clearly displayed near the bottom of the page. That chat feature is no longer there. Other videos showed a few different tricks. One, if I recall correctly, had a phone number. That’s gone now too. I think they simply replaced any actual human contact with their massive FAQ, but either way it seems strange that a billion dollar company would have no semblance of customer service whatsoever. Amazon is easier to get hold of than the Facebook, and they’re not that easy to contact.
By now I was really seething. Images of visiting Internet cafes in Kazakhstan or Istanbul for a little payback filled my head. I wanted answers. I wanted justice. I was pissed, and I wanted Facebook to know it. So I logged into my wife’s account and headed to Facebook’s Security profile page.
You can’t create posts there (of course not), so I jumped onto a halfway relevant post about mobile security keys for Iphone and Android users and bitched away.
And I wasn’t the only one. Another Facebo0k user stated that they were waiting on ID verification from Facebook and hadn’t heard back. Meanwhile, people were making purchases through her Marketplace and she couldn’t see or fulfill them, losing money and face with their customers.
And, in only what can be described as the most deliciously bitter irony, still others chimed in with referrals to hackers who had helped them recover their hacked accounts. I got similar when I asked for help on Twitter. A few of these people reached out to me directly, offering to get me back into my account for anywhere from $50-$100. One guy even takes Bitcoin. Bitcoin. I would have laughed uproariously if I hadn’t been so utterly pissed off.
Because the irony of a billion dollar company that prides itself on the safety and security of its users having no customer service and forcing those same users to resort to employing hackers to fix their accounts is thick enough to use for bodyarmor.
Apparently there’s a whole cottage industry of hackers who do nothing but hack back into some poor schmoe’s Facebook or Instagram account after another hacker broke in and changed the locks. If I wasn’t referred to these alleged white hats by a stranger I’d suspect them of being the same person who hacked me to begin with.
Now I know what some of you are thinking, and I see your point. “This is a Facebook profile. It’s not like someone broke into your house.”
And you’re right, to a point. It’s just a free Facebook page, where I share random gibberish and occasionaly peddle my wares. Hell, it’s practically little more than an app that tells you which of your relatives and old high school classmates are Nazis in exchange for showing you ads. But here’s where the home comparison diverges. I’ve been broken into. Being hacked feels similar. It feels like a violation. Of privacy, of the sanctity of something you’ve built–even though it ultimately belongs to someone else–of your home.
And there are people who do even more business than I do on Facebook. People who use a Facebook business page in place of a website, who sell via Marketplace and spend thousands of dollars a month on Facebook ads. What happens to them when they get hacked like I did and can’t get back in, and their ads keep running and running, whether they’re optimized or not? And Facebook won’t lift a finger to help them? I’m glad I wasn’t running any ads, because there are no tips or avenues for intervention even on the Facebook Business page, which the company claims is their bread and butter. It’s great to know there is no recourse for their paying customers either. At least they’re consistent.
Then there’s the social aspect. Of course, Facebook is a social network, and dang it, they’ve sucked me in, as they have sucked us all in. We need that dopamine rush of living vicariously through others’ shenanigans, and I’m no different. It’s my sharing place. The place where I “see” and talk to all of my friends. And without it I felt cut off. I may be an introvert, but I still like to have a finger on the pulse of what is going on. It’s how I network, and what that hacker stole from me took me years to build. I’ve created a new profile, and I’ve almost got my old friends list back. But I’ve had a peek behind the curtain, and what I saw there wasn’t pretty. I have some serious criticisms of Facebook now, which I have just shared above. I’ll continue to use it, because it is simply the best there is at what it does. But Facebook will never get a dime of my advertising money, at least until they establish an actual customer service department, staffed with actual human beings who know what the hell they are doing. I think my ad spend is worth at least that much, don’t you?
Other lessons learned? Plenty. Change your password every three months, including right when you discover you’ve been hacked. Make sure you have third-party verification enabled on your account. Don’t accept strange friend requests (or duplicate requests) from people with no friends in common with you. Facebook is very good at helping you prevent being hacked, but they go out of their way to not help you once it happens. Remember that, and treat them accordingly. When you pay for advertising. When you buy something through their platform. I guess it’s true what they say: you really do get what you pay for.
Use Facebook if you need to, but find alternatives if you don’t. I have a couple of friends who left. It can be done. And while I am commited to sticking around at least for the forseeable future, I am on the lookout for alternatives for reaching people. There’s this here website, for one. It’s mine. I can say whatever the fuck I want however I want. Because I pay for it. There’s also my mailing list. If you’d like to join,
go here. There’s my
Patreon, which you can follow me on without spending money. I’m still trying to figure out Discord. Perhaps I can make a group there for my readers to hang out in. Let me know if that’s something of interest.
And be careful out there, both in the real world and online. Things are already more difficult than they need to be without some hacker hijacking your Messenger app to send your friends nonsense. Facebook has a lot to answer for. Until they do, this is all we can hope for. Take care of yourselves, and each other.
