My involvement with Facebook as Louise Wilson extends back to November 2011. For more than thirteen years my major contact with friends and readers of my books via social media was on Facebook. As an early baby-boomer, this site has been where I've generally met my 'tribe'.
At the end of April 2025 someone in Chicago, USA, known and identified by Meta but unknown to me in Melbourne, Australia, added their name to my account.
After restricting my account for a few days Meta apologised on 8 May, saying I could use it again. On 16 May 2025 Meta suspended my account, claiming it breached community guidelines. On the same day it restricted me from advertising, although I was NOT advertising.
Meta stated in its email to me: ‘We used technology to detect this violation and either technology or a review team to carry out this decision. Further violations of our Advertising Standards may result in your account being disabled or restricted.’ Said advertising was a mystery to me.
Meta rejected my appeal and on 19 May 2025 my account was permanently disabled, with no further rights to a review. My pages as Louise Wilson, and as Louise Wilson, Author have been completely wiped, along with all the contacts I built up from 2011 onwards.
It seems that someone hacked into my account, did something wrong using my good name, and an automated system took over, with no human intervention.
So, for the past fifteen months I’ve had no access to my major source of contact with the thousands of descendants of the people who are the subjects of my numerous books on Australian family history. Many of those books have won awards, as my website illustrates. Louise Wilson, the virtual 'David' in this tale of woe, did NOT win out against the Facebook 'Goliath'.
Loss of access to Facebook has had a big impact on my ability to participate in various events in the lives of my friends, relatives and customers, and on the sales of my family history books.
Direct contact with a local Facebook representative in Australia seems impossible, as such a person either is not employed or is impossible to track down. Why does the Australian government not insist that social media sites like Facebook must employ an accessible local person, able to understand and handle easily-fixable problems such as mine?