Well, that sucks
Realising you really are at the mercy of a computer
On Thursday morning the Instagram account I’d been nurturing for fourteen years, that had hundreds of photos, reels, memories, and most of my writing network (especially since Twitter went to shit), was arbitrarily banned.
I’d celebrated so much on there. My children’s first days at school. Their milestones. Date nights. Visits to my best friend. Time spent with my family. Trips abroad. My ill-fated stint as a vocalist in an electropop band. My book deal. Random moments. Items I love. All those things gone in an instant, because a computer somewhere decided I was a fake account.
I, of course, appealed, but:
And the first question I was asked (by quite a few people actually, as if I’m some sort of troublemaker) was what I did to get banned, but the truth is nothing at all. Rien du tout.
My movements on Thursday morning were a quick scroll, a meme sent here or there, and a coffee walk with my husband before work.
And I’m nice online. I don’t start drama, I just watch it from the sidelines. I send memes to my sister and my best friend telling them how much they mean to me. I champion other writers. The spiciest thing I’ve done recently was comment that Adam Blythe’s jumper on TV was a bold choice and honestly, I stand by that.
When they disable your account, you can’t get into it and they don’t tell you what’s wrong, rendering, I think, the appeals process entirely fucking useless, because there’s no way you can actually speak to a human, or fix the thing they don’t like. So I guess that’s that.
RIP stephiecwrites.
Get bent, Meta.
Someone on Facebook told me to quit with Instagram altogether, but is it really as simple as that when social media is such an important part of book marketing these days? Felt a bit myopic. My initial reaction, caught in the crosshairs of upset and anger at the injustice of being kicked off my most engaged platform for nothing, was, okay boomer.
But as I said, I don’t start drama online. So I flicked the V at my computer and humphed off instead. It’s easy, isn’t it, to say it was just an instagram account, but it really makes you realise that you own very little online. Sobering moment. Something to think about.
I’ve started another account, (and made a back up) firstly in an attempt to get it quickly verified so I could speak to a person and get the old one reinstated, but there’s a waitlist for verification, because of course there is. And anyway, I don’t want to give my money to Meta. So perhaps a forced reboot will do me good? Drop the bots invariably accumulated in over a decade of being on the platform. Hide from people I don’t want to speak to, and all that jazz. Curate my feed and steer my algorithm from things that make me cringe (for real, why do I get shown mukbang content?) to things I actually like. Nail art, for instance. Bookish things. Boys on bikes and Korean skincare.
And whilst we’re on the topic of boys on bikes, not only have the Spring Classics started, but I have started querying Love Unchained. Slow going because of the London Book Fair, and also because querying is often glacial, but so far I’ve had two form rejections and nothing else.
That’s all for now. Bye!