Digitally Blonde

Facebook’s Biggest Fail Ever?!

So, 5 days after Facebook disabled (banned) my account for reasons no one can understand (read my letter that explains everything here), they send me this email:

Great job, Facebook! Not only you kept my personal information (including credit card info) but you forgot to tell your advertising team that you banned me from your website!!!!! And why banned? Because I replied to my fans!?!?! Read my open letter to Facebook here.

Are your users a joke to you??? Don’t forget FB: without the people (users) there’s no Facebook and no billion dollar revenue.

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Banned from Facebook for interacting with fans?

This is my open letter to Facebook:

Dear Facebook,

I’ve been banned from your website, FOREVER. And NO ONE can understand what I could possibly have done, that was so wrong to be treated like a criminal by you.

Apparently, you deleted my profile for “regularly contacting strangers.”

I had been trying to keep my personal profile private. I made that decision when I had about 3000 friends on Facebook and was getting SO MANY invites to stupid apps and events in different countries and virus messages and freaking pokes… POKES! gah. I couldn’t even keep up with my personal friends updates, they thought I was a jerk!

I was honest with my followers and told them that maybe it was time to have a fan page. Unfortunately, that also meant that I’d have to delete them from my profile. We joked about the South Park Facebook episode, which is hilarious, don’t you think?  So, from 3000 friends I went to about 600 friends. –By the way, your system had SO many bugs that it took me a lot longer to delete people. Sometimes I would delete a profile and it would come back to my friends list.

Even after doing everything I could to hide that profile and “force” people to ‘like’ my fan page instead (I hid my profile from your lists, but left the “add as a friend” option so my personal friends and family could add me), I was still getting over 50 friend requests/DAY. Hell, I couldn’t change the URL (which was my name, like totally obvious, and even appeared on Google search) and some friends would link people to pictures on my personal profile: “Hey guys, have you all seen Carol Zara’s latest photos??” Great, this was not helping.

I couldn’t just ignore all of those friend requests and give them no actual reason (I’m not like you, Facebook). So what I’d do was send everyone a friendly message:

“Hey hotness,

I would love to add you, but I don’t really use this profile anymore.

You can find me at my fUn page: http://www.facebook.com/iamcarolzara

See you there?

xoxo, CZ”

It’s true. I wasn’t really using that profile anymore, except for “liking” friends’ pictures, and keeping in touch with people I knew. My updates and pictures were all on my new fan page. I had 2 on the site, by the way: Carol Zara (the new page with close to 4000 members) and Digitally Blonde. The Carol Zara fan page only had myself as an admin, so it was disabled/deleted together with my profile.

My Twitter followers and I first thought that my account was disabled because of the sexy Octopus pictures I had recently posted (they were provocative, but no full nudity shown -I’d add black banners to the pics that I thought would make you mad).

Octopus Paul and I: a promise I made if Spain won the World Cup. And yes, I took pics with a real octopus.

Last year, you deleted a cartoon of me (fan art) where a famous comic book artist used his imagination and drew me sitting down with a naked back.

How would I guess that that C-A-R-T-O-O-N is inappropriate to you? It wasn’t like it was a cartoon of Homer Simpson fucking his daughter or the chicks from Family Guy sucking a dildo.

Which makes me think IS THE POPE THE CEO OF YOUR WEBSITE?

Thinking that it was because of the sexy pics -I agree with not allowing porn, but sexy pictures shouldn’t be a problem, considering your “meet local girls now” ads that feature REALLY young chicks.

Boys have all the fun. Female users on Facebook usually get ads for pilates classes and cupcake discounts.

Don't trust this ad. She'll never show you her boobies. Never.

My friends and I started doing research on how models behaved on Facebook, specially Playboy models and porn stars. We found full-on nudity -no black bars- on a page entitled “Larissa Riquelme” (not sure if it’s the model’s official page, but photos were added by the admin, not the fans).

We also found this on a porn star’s page (again, not sure if it’s an official page, but it’s there being hosted by FACEBOOK):

I was ready to start a tumblr account called “Faceburka” to showcase all our FB finds (oh, because we found MANY things on your website that are apparently against your rules. You should totally hire me as a cyber detective. That’s a sexy title.)

Carol Zara's Faceburka

Original photo posted on Facebook. It had black bars censoring what God gave me.

Finally on Aug. 13, I get a response from you -and it WAS final, with NO right to appeal *single tear left cheek* :(

Let’s clarify things once again:

Sending friend requests to people I don’t know? No, I haven’t been sending friend requests randomly. In fact, my personal profile used to have about 3000 friends (because I accepted everyone’s friend requests) and I was getting so many invites to stupid apps and virus messages that I decided to delete a good chunk of the friends list and keep only people I knew and long time fans.

Regularly contacting strangers through unsolicited Inbox messages? aka Replying to random friend requests asking them to add my fan page instead. I’d get about 50 new friend requests EVERY DAY. What to do if I don’t want to add all those “strangers” to my private account? Send them a polite message asking them to find me at my new fan page instead. Yes, it was exhausting to reply to all those messages myself. Yes, I wished there was an app that would save me time. Yes, sometimes after copy/paste’ing the message, I had to type those words to prove that I’m human, which was a lot more work.

Soliciting others for dating or business purposes? huh DATING?! No way! Business purposes, nope. I’d add or send a “hello” message to people that I have worked with in the past or whom my friends had introduced to me. That is all!

Question is:

1. Will you delete all the users that send friend requests to people they don’t know (I was affected by it), considering the fact that your app “People You May Know” usually features people we don’t know 98% of the time? It should actually be called “People You Have No Effin Clue Who They Are” feature.

2. Isn’t social networking a way of interacting with “strangers” aka “world citizens” who share common interests? No wonder why Twitter had such a fast growth and has been kicking your ass since 2009. I met so many wonderful people there. I don’t care if I don’t know them in person (some I have met IRL). They make me happy and I learn a lot from them.

Also, how can you call me a threat? I’m only 5′3” and 100 lbs. My friends made fun of me when I dressed up as Darth Vader for Halloween, so I gave up being evil. :S

So FB, we’ve had a serious spat, and you’ve kicked me out of your house, and now I’m standing outside your window with a big boombox, letting you and everyone else know how I feel.

Maybe you could man up and let me in? The fight was really one sided, and I didn’t receive any warning at all.

In other words, let’s put this fight behind us so we can get to the make up sex already!

And just for you, I promise to wear the burka.

Thanks Hotness!

xoxo

CZ

UPDATE -Aug 17: Facebook sent me an email. HA! Looks like they forgot to tell their Advertising team that they had banned me…

You might also like:

Carol Zara talks to Techvibes about online privacy

#FreeZara Campaign

Facebook drops the ban-hammer on Carol Zara for talking to fans

Facebook VS Carol Zara comics

Bookmark/share It