The most random thing happened to me last night and I am not sure how it happened. I went to login to my Facebook account last night and next thing I know I get the following message:
“Your account has been disabled by an administrator. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page here.”
The thing that really gets me is not one piece of communication from Facebook to the user, in this case, me other than at the login screen. There was not one email sent from Facebook possibly stating: “Your account was disabled for the following reason…”
Furthermore, typically when someone violates a terms of services or anything of that nature, there should be a communication sent out to the individual. When you strip someone of any type of product, service, account, etc. there needs to be a valid reason for it and also what they can do to re-initiate their account. Going WAY back into the past with AOL, they use to do this if your account was reported, etc. I remember a specific occurrence where i called someone a name as a joke, in a chat room and I was reported by someone else (yes, I am a geek that lives online practically and I did at some point hang out in chat rooms with friends, insert one of many jokes <here>). AOL still sent an email to us, saying the account was disabled for the following XX number of reasons, the specific comment made, and furthermore, provided steps to getting our account back.
Moving back to Facebook, you can not strip someone of their means of communication and not provide reasoning for doing so. Disabling a users account without any explanation is like stripping a family of telephone and snail mail communication in the 1970’s, you just don’t do that!
So, I went on my way and tried to do a little digging to see if I could find a way to contact customer support or something along those lines. As you can see in the screenshot above there is a fancy little link to the FAQ page, “here”. (Side mistake by Facebook…right…because “here” describes what this beautiful little page is? Why not just link “disabled account FAQ page” to be a little more semantic…sigh)
What do we have here, on this fancy little FAQ page which provides absolutely no contact information? Ooops, I leaked it a bit to early…yes…you heard me right…the FAQ page does not provide ANY contact information to the user attempting to get in touch to find out why their account was disabled. Facebook, seriously? Are. You. Kidding. Me?!
Here is the fully open disabled user FAQ page, with…(yes I’m going to say it again)…NO CONTACT INFORMATION:
Let’s recap for a moment here on where Facebook had a FAIL of EPIC proportions:
- First and foremost, disabled a users account without any absolute reason
- Provided the user with no explanation, let alone a detailed explanation of the problem
- Did not provide any steps to re-enable or bring their account back online
- Worst of all, did not provide any contact information to the user for them to contact facebook.
A lot of the actions above can be easily handled by setting up triggers in your database or code. The disabling action should trigger an email, of which, should contain the reasons for disabling the user. The reasons can be linked to the users profile, provide that string of text in the email. Furthermore the contact details should be provided in the email template and/or a list of things the user can do in the meantime. Rather than getting frustrated and writing a blog post, like me. 
Now, I have actually emailed facebook, the disabled email address is disabled@facebook.com. I found that address thanks to Steve Ganz doing a search for me. (Which I’ll admit, I should have thought of doing, but was so confused I didn’t) The url to that page is http://www.facebook.com/help.php?hq=account+disabled. We will see how this comedic drama of my account being disabled turns out. Hopefully Facebook can clean up their customer support and disabled account policies in the meantime as well.
Updates:
7/13 @ 4:05pm: It is a Sunday and typically not a “business day”…but 12 hours since my account was disabled and still no contact from facebook support or a reply to the disabled email address.
7/13 @ 4:30pm: Thanks to a tip from @carlayoung on twitter, I have fwd’ed my email to their appeals@facebook.com email address for yet another attempt at opening communication lines up.
7/14 @ 8:05am: It has been a full day since my first emails have been sent off to Facebook’s disabled support and I still have not received an email. My account is still disabled.
7/15 @ 4:55 pm: Facebook finally re-actived my account and said that I need to browse Facebook less…interestingly enough, they state there are rate limits, but refuse to state what those rate limits are.
July 13th, 2008 at 11:02 am
I’m commenting on this in hopes that someone from Facebook will read this, and what’s above.
To start: I am a HUGE Facebook fan. I often speak at a keynote level on social media, and feature Facebook as my exemplar. I coach VP and C-level execs, often from well-known enterprises, on the business productivity of social networks (again, with Facebook prominently featured), and I host webinars on using social networks (again, Facebook) to build business results.
And I’m a pretty low-key person, I think; not the type to put hate mail, profanities, spam or other offensive content anywhere, really, and certainly not anywhere in my online presence. That would violate my “personal TOS” even more than it might those of any online service I used.
So I was astonished to receive a warning message last week, similar to that above, saying that I had violated Facebook’s TOS by putting offensive, hateful, profane etc. content on someone’s wall.
To be clear: I didn’t.
But my only path to get rid of the message was to “acknowledge” that I had rec’d it, which to me felt like admitting or agreeing to having made an offense.
I would never acknowledge something that I hadn’t done. I left the warning message as it was and did not acknowledge.
I did write to Facebook customer support about this, and (although I never rec’d any sort of response) after a few days the warning message just went away.
So many things were wrong with the experience that Facebook delivered when they sent me this message. It was clear, from the workflow and the wording, that they were expecting the worst from their users rather than the best. That is really a bad way for a company to view their users.
Also, they gave me no specific information…and trust me, if something had triggered this punitive message, they had the data; it would have only been fair for them to share that data with me. I had absolutely no idea what post they might of been referring to…where and when I had ostensibly put the inappropriate content, what the content had been, what I should do to set it right.
Can you envision being stopped by some sort of law enforcement official and being told that you had done something wrong, and that you were at risk of being cited for it, so don’t do it again—but not being told what you had done wrong? Or, if you’re a parent, telling one of your kids to “Stop it!” but not telling them what they should stop? I was truly befuddled by Facebook’s message and followed the same path described above (read the info that FB had sent me to) and again…nothing. No relevant content, no specifics, no path to set it right.
Facebook is a world-class service with a ton of vision and very high-quality performance on so many levels. However, the “resolution” part of their customer experience is a violation of their brand promise and a true breakdown in the sophistication of the service. It feels reflexive, not thought out, punitive, caustic and nasty.
If someone from Facebook is reading this, first: thanks, and second: get some of those smart, talented people on your team to flow-chart what might trigger a warning message, what the various causes or possibilities for that message might be, and then create the messaging, specific content, and resolution path that would allow a user to resolve it. And, as you do so, assume the best from your users rather than the worst. I assure you, if you expect that of them, you will be much more likely to resolve issues positivity rather than offend your users and weaken the great brand that you have.
thanks,
Ellen
July 13th, 2008 at 11:11 am
@Ellen Thanks for the great comment and feedback and I totally agree with your points as well! It’s amazing they haven’t developed a system for this yet. There has been so much bad PR about it and here lies yet another reputation management issue.
July 13th, 2008 at 11:12 am
You know these Services are set up to make it hard to near impossible to regain your account and information.
Remember he days when it was impossible to quit AOL?
I’m having a similar but not quite alike problem with MySpace. I admit I blew the Email address for logon by putting 2 @’s in it. I admit I can’t type. I’ve written to the help people, sent the “salute” mug shot picture required, only to get back the same form letter from a robot telling me to do what I just did.
Oh yeah, thanks for the reminder, Nice quiet Sunday, good time to devote my energy to tracking down MYSpace leaders. I guess I’ll start with Wikipedia as Google hasn’t helped.
Get Your Name On!
Mike
http://twitter.com/mike1mb
July 13th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
I had the same a few days ago - no warning, and I had to find the email address to ask about it from google.
Not only was my profile disabled, but a facebook ad campaign I was runnig disappeared, as did the ‘Page’ I use to promote a business - all done well within their ToS.
When I got an answer as to why my account had been disabled, it was because I had changed my profile name a few months ago. You have to get approval to change your name, so they had already ‘okayed’ it - then several months later, close down my profile and my ads for something they’d already approved - with no warning, and no telling me how to communicate with them about it. Sheer stupidity.
They did restore everything after a couple of days, and I’m still at a complete loss to understand what on earth they thought they were playing at.
July 14th, 2008 at 7:56 am
I think it’s a mistake to ban users like this from a service and not give them any way of appeal.
July 14th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
It’s an unfortunate welcome to the club:(
Each attempt to learn more about the disabling of your account reduces the probability of getting the account reinstated I have discovered.
The only potential upside is that they will not share any information with third parties but their bureaucratic tendencies melts this hope away as well.
Hopefully the new board member will convince FB to have an Amnesty Day to reinstate accounts since the entire disabling approach is rather web2.0-Nazi like:(
July 16th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
It seems strange that just a few months ago Facebook was facing issues because users could not fully delete their accounts and now they are doing it for them…with no warning. All very odd.
July 17th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
[...] is not a whole lot to talk about in regards to social communities. Outside of Facebook deciding to ban people at random, social communities are pretty much business as [...]
July 18th, 2008 at 7:58 am
[...] TOS. This is an interesting read and offers some helpful tips if you find you’ve been suspended. Thanks Facebook for stripping me of your service __________________ Jean Lloyd Solid Cactus - Sr. Search Engine Marketing [...]
July 18th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Is it ironic that I found out about this post because Tony’s notes-blog on Facebook is still active and I saw it on my Facebook feed?
July 18th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
@terrychay - I had remove and/or update all the apps that were on my facebook profile…my account was re-activated on 7/15.
August 8th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Tony,
Unfortunately with Facebook and Myspace, it’s a free service.. one of the risks with using this is there is not real “agreement” from facebook’s end to provide you service.
This is where LinkedIn’s account upgrade has a little teeth, at least you do have some expectation of service because you have “purchased” something.
I understand your ire completely, i used to have like 50k friends on myspace which were people that wanted my information on dance music events worldwide. it was about a $5k a month side business, however once that profile was removed, so was my reach.
it does however resemble SEO with Google or Yahoo! (not sure how much today, tho now that we have employees from both focused on search.. unlike the people who accept yahoo! express submit applications)
however, trying to get a listing in yahoo! directory once you have changed a URL is near impossible.. after billing the client for 42 man hours in trying to geta URL changed, we finally had to give up and submit a duplicate URL.
you are lucky you got your profile back.. myspace never replied, nor restored my profile, of course i never renewed my 55k monthly ad spend for 4 different clients either.