Stay Informed. Stay Safe.

One email, No phone number

You don't own your accounts, you're just renting them. And the landlord can evict you overnight, with no warning, and nobody to call

In the summer of 2025, thousands of creators woke up to the same email... "your account has been disabled," The reason? Usually something horrifying, like child exploitation, abuse, etc. that they had nothing to do with. An algorithm flagged them, and just like that... the business they'd spent years building was gone.

They appealed. The appeals came back rejected in minutes - fast enough that everyone knew no human looked. And the only door to an actual person? You had to pay for it.

Banned by a bot

​The 2025 Meta ban wave swept up gym coaches, photographers, small shops, and full-time creators. These are people whose entire income lived on an Instagram or Facebook account. One day they were running a business, the next they were locked out and labeled with violations they couldn't have committed. Family photos got tagged as abuse. Pet pictures. Most of these creators were just a fish, caught in a net not meant for them.

There were hundreds of these complaints logged and the pattern was always the same. A vague notice, an instantly auto-rejected appeal, and then... a wall of silence. And the salt in the open wound was the idea that if you pay $15/mo for that 'ol verified badge, you'd get access to human support (not that it was necessarily that helpful). Basically, the folks whose livelihoods depended most on getting their account back were the ones asked to pay a ransom for the privilege of talking to a person.

It's not unique to this incident, or to Meta platforms either.

In May, LinkedIn flagged a whole heap of normal posts as nonconsensual intimate imagery. TikTok creators regularly accuse the platform of censorship.

A group could decide they don't like what you're saying and mass report you. You could rack up too many community violations in a short period of time and just lose your account.

None of this is uncommon... or limited to a single platform.

The pattern we keep seeing You think you own your audience. But on social, you don't. You're a tenant on land somebody else controls, and your lease can be shredded by an algorithm that doesn't have to warn you, explain itself or ever even speak to you.

The lease was always written in their favor

This isn't about Meta being uniquely careless or evil. It's the business model working as designed and once you see the mechanics, you'll see them everywhere.

Moderation happens at a scale no human team could ever cover... billions of accounts, millions of posts an hour. So it gets handed over to AI and when you're operating at that size, the thousands of wrongly-banned accounts aren't a problem the platform is racing to fix... they're just acceptable collateral damage. A few thousand creators losing everything is a rounding error to them, even though it's the entire world to you. Real human review doesn't scale, so they wall it off and sell it back to you as "priority support."

But the AI is just the mechanism. The actual reason you're exposed is in the paperwork. You don't have a partnership with these platforms... you have a terms of service agreement that you clicked "agree" without reading it (because everybody does). That agreement says, in much longer words, "we can change the rules, throttle who sees you, or shut you off entirely, whenever we want, for any reason or no reason, and we don't owe you a warning or an explanation."

That's not the platform being broken. It's the whole deal and it always was.

Which is why this keeps happening across every platform, with every kind of trigger. Whether it's a mass-report mob, the algorithm update, the new policy that makes your whole content niche unwelcome, the hack you can't get anyone to help you reverse - they all run through the same trap door → your business lives on ground you don't own, governed by rules you don't write, and enforced by a system you can't appeal to.

Rent the Reach. Own The audience.

You can't fix any of this because the lease isn't yours to rewrite, the bot isn't yours to fire, and no amount of rule-following makes you ban-proof. So stop trying to make the platform safe... it isn't and it never will be.

The move to reduce your risk is to make sure that the platform isn't the only thing you're standing on. Sure, the platform owns the reach... but you can own the audience. Ya gotta go get them though.

Right now, your followers belong to Instagram (or TikTok or LinkedIn). The relationship, the list, the way you actually reach people... that can belong to you.

• Get a direct line no one can cut. An email list, a podcast... build something on a platform you control. You keep it, you export it, you own it outright. If every social account you have vanished tonight, that's how you'd still show up in your people's lives tomorrow. (you're reading this in your inbox right now... see??)
• Build the lifeboat while the ship's still dry. You can't export your followers after you're locked out. So you've got to move people off-platform while everything's still fine and it feels unnecessary. The day you need it is the same day it stops being possible, so ya gotta do it early.
• Put a strong lock on the door. A hack is the one version of this you do have some control over. Do two-factor authentication, use passkeys, a unique and strong password that doesn't get shared with any other login, and recovery info that's actually current. At least make yourself a hard target.
• Don't let one platform be it. A second home for your content, even a quiet and half-tended one, means one eviction is a setback, not the end. You don't have to be everywhere, you just have to not be erasable in a single click.

None of this means you have to quit the platforms. That's where the reach is and that reach is real. It just means stop mistaking that reach for something you own. And the former CFO in me is begging you to diversify that risk and build the part you can own before someone reminds you that you didn't.

Your move · This week If your main account vanished tonight, how would you reach your audience tomorrow? Sit with that for a second, then answer honestly. If the answer is ..."ummm...." then focus there. The dependency on a single platform is a risk that we don't talk about much, but it's the most important one when you lose everything at once. So make a start... if you don't have an email list, start one. Don't have a backup account? Start it. Pick a different platform to do low-effort cross-posting to.

On the Radar

What we're watching

01	What's App User Names. WhatsApp is opening username reservations - so go reserve yours. Once you have it, you can use WhatsApp without exposing your phone number - win 🎉! To get one, go to the app > Settings > Account > Username and grab yours.
02	Apple's Hide My Email... doesn't. 404 Media broke a story that, if you're using Apple's Hide My Email feature, hackers can get to your real email.
03	Meta lets anyone use your Insta Photos in AI images. If you're on Insta, go adjust your settings to opt-out(if it's available for you). Go to Settings and Privacy > "Sharing and reuse"> "Allow people to use your content on Instagram and with AI features on Meta" > Toggle off switches for Posts and Reels,

Stay safe, Susan @ Unpublic

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