A Healesville business has been caught up in a global trend in Meta accounts being wrongly suspended for breaking community guidelines, despite no feasible offence occurring.
Luke Bibby, who owns the Habitat1 shared office space in Healesville’s main strip, had his personal account banned around June or July, which was linked to the profiles for the business, subsequently resulting in all his accounts being banned for months.
He shared his story with Star Mail to prepare and warn other small business across the region.
Mr Bibby said his access to the accounts was only reinstated on Tuesday 21 October and that his personal account only contained pictures of his dog, his donkeys and of himself and his wife.
“A two-second fly through social media will show you the amount of people that are running a business solely off social media, I was lucky that the office space is filled but if I had two or three clients leave, and it’s quite a few months without that, I’m in a lot of trouble because I can only advertise on social media,” he said.
“You look over the internet and there’s hundreds of thousands of people worldwide that have just had all their social media removed, people with much bigger followings and much bigger businesses than me, just gone.
“It actually scared me how much it impacted me…how helpless you are, you’re completely helpless, there’s no phone number to call, there’s no complaints department, if this was an Australian business, it’d be straight on the phone to Consumer Affairs or the Ombudsman and they would be dragged over the coals.”
Mr Bibby lodged an automatic appeal and attempted to email a help email he estimated ‘70 to 80 times’, but only received automated responses.
Mr Bibby said he had prepared to ask his partner to hop on one of the local notice boards and post a picture of an office space, but worried about it looking illegitimate.
“It’s an office space attached to no social media, no one can follow a link, it’s not professional, it just looks dodgy,” he said.
“I went through three or four government avenues and they can do nothing… I ended up sending an email to the Minister for Small Business (Anne Aly)…she seemed very concerned and was going to try and escalate it.
“So many people are are trying to run a small business because the cost of living is so bad now so they’re trying to get a bit extra money in and I think what people need to remember is the whole social media thing, it seems like it’s easy, it’s a right and everyone’s got access to it but they’re a business and they can very quickly decide that they don’t want you and remove you.”
Mr Bibby was eventually advised to try creating a new account for his business, which was also removed, and has been reinstated alongside his other accounts despite having little to no use for them.
Mr Bibby said he has realised he now can’t be reliant on any platform attached to Meta.
“I will be leaning more on YouTube and TikTok, which I really didn’t want to do, but that spreads me across Google and TikTok as well, so the chances of all of those things being shut down are pretty slim,” he said.
“The only option they gave me was to write a letter to Meta legal in states, I put my name down for two class actions in the states because of this problem, but because you’re not US based, they don’t really care, it’s just a really horrible feeling and I didn’t know how long it was going to go on.
“I just think people need to be very very aware of it…don’t for a second think it’s not going to happen to you.”
A change.org petition about the issue has garnered over 46,000 signatures and be found at change.org/p/meta-wrongfully-disabling-accounts-with-no-human-customer-support.
Meta was contacted for comment.
