erased from history (by facebook)

You won't be able to find me on Facebook any more.

And more than that - you won't be able to find any trace that I was ever there since I first registered my account on the platform about 20 years ago... no sign of any photos I posted, comments I made on your posts, nor membership of any groups.

And it's not because I've decided I hate you all and don't want to hang out with you anymore - but because I found myself being targeted by hackers who, it seems, when they couldn't get through my passwords and 2-factor authentication do-hickey, managed to find a back door way to link my personal Facebook profile to what must have been a very illegal Instagram account.

And I know this because when I recently tried to log into Facebook , it told me that my account has been disabled - and reading around this topic, it seems that whatever the hackers were doing on the Instagram account was bad enough for it to qualify as an immediate and automatic disabling (deleting) of both that account, and under the rules of the Metaverse, any accounts linked to it (which included mine, thanks to the hackers), with no right to be able to submit a request to review the decision.

Now - I know what most of you reading this will be thinking at this point:

"how awful for you (I'm glad it wasn't me that happened to!)"

"that's really unfair that you can't appeal this - surely there must be something you can do?"

Well - like I said, I read around this level of disabling and them's the rules that we signed up to when we created our accounts, and agreed to keep them going when Facebook went Meta.

Life isn't always fair - and no-one owes me anything (a personal mantra that helps me with navigating and pressing on in this world).

I'm fortunate to have grown up in a pre-Facebook world, so as upsetting as this might seem, I feel I'm able to bear it better than those that have come after me into this internet age would. Somehow I navigated this life before Facebook was born, so there's a chance I'll (hopefully) be able to again.

Whilst I do have the option to 'regenerate' myself on Facebook by recreating a new profile and account from scratch, I'm not immediately rushing to do so.

I'm using this unexpected plot twist to allow myself some time away from that playground - to have space to reflect and experience what it's like not to be on Facebook, so that if/when I return, I'll be clearer about how I manage my relationship with it (and hopefully it will have strenthgthed it's security and rights of appeal by then, too...)