Anyone else been randomly banned by facebook?

[Meowster]

'Lo all,

Strange thing happened two days ago - tried to log into my facebook account and was told that it had been deactivated by a moderator for breaching of the TOS. I was not aware of having broken the TOS and after reading them through I decided that I definitely had not.

After a bit of moaning over MSN I also discovered that five of my friends had had their accounts deactivated in exactly the same manner at exactly the same time, without warning and for no apparent reason (other than the vaguely stated 'TOS breach' which we're all certain we didn't do).

We are all very careful with security and giving out our passwords, my facebook account has a different password to every other account that I have and so it's fairly impossible that something got a hold of my password and spammed using my account (I also don't click dumb links and all that basic stuff).

One of my friends also received an email warning saying that they would ban her if she didn't stop spamming... she doesn't even post that much, so she definitely wasn't guilty of that crime! And again, her account had not been compromised by spam bots or anything.

I emailed Facebook when it happened, explaining that I thought it was a mistake and could they reinstate my account? My friends all did the same, but two days later have not received any reply back at all.

A quick google search shows that people have been banned before for no reason, or for ridiculous reasons such as having "fake sounding" names, pictures of cats as their avatar etc. It's certainly not a new thing, it just hasn't happened to my group of friends before. How on earth do they moderate, do they examine social graphs or peruse networks of people actively looking for stuff to ban people for???

Has this happened to anyone else recently?

[Ryan Timothy B]

Perhaps they are running tight on space and you upload hundreds of megabytes of images/videos and they are looking for excuses to free up some space.   Joking.

I haven't heard of ANYONE being banned from facebook.  Something must have gone awry.

[Moresco]

Hasn't happened to me, but I bet it has to do with one of those Jumbo Wall, Extended Wall, whatever Super Wall applications that spam people without the user knowing that it's happening.  They really should ban those applications, rather than attack people for spamming since it's the application's fault after all.  But that would be too easy.

[Meowster]

Yeah, I agree those applications are bloody horrible. The thing is though that none of my friends nor I had any of them installed. I had those apps, I hate joining stupid groups with no purpose, I hate poking people, I don't send ridiculous amounts of messages nor do I upload stupid amounts of photos. I'm actually a pretty inoffensive user... as were all my friends who got banned.

But I've deleted people from my friends list before for being absolute terrors on facebook, for constant pointless poking, group invites, app invites etc... and yet those people still have their accounts...

[TerranRich]

I left MySpace for the horrible apps spamming me and my bulletin. Facebook so far has been good to me, and I haven't heard of anybody being banned. I'd actually find a phone number for Facebook and speak with somebody, if at all possible.

Somebody (no idea how) hacked into my MySpace account and, one by one, deleted all of my friends, then deleted my account. I was actually happy after a while to have been rid of MySpace and haven't looked back since. But if that happened to me on Facebook, I'd be extremely worried and more than a little mad.

[m0ds]

The only correlation I see in all of this is that it's always you Yufster that seems to run into these random, rare consequences. Have you ever wondered if it's perhaps you?

[Tuomas]

The only correlation I see in all of this is that it's always you Yufster that seems to run into these random, rare consequences. Have you ever wondered if it's perhaps you?

Well when ti comes to that, I think she's one of the importnat people, that bring these things up on the table. Otherwise people would just go about with them. I know a lot of peopl who've had problems, but have never mentioned them! Though here, with facebook. well, the whole thing is so buggy and crap and full of beep, that it wouldnät make me surprised if it was just some error somewhere.

[Darth Mandarb]

I have heard of people bing banned from facebook because they [facebook] received a lot of complaints about them.

The Apps system is actually a great way to 'expand' facebook but sadly, as is always the case, people abuse it and take advantage of it.  That is, most likely, where your ban originated.  An app carried out annoyances in your name

I would email/contact them and request an explanation (more detailed than a simple 'violation of TOS') on why you were banned.