My involvement with Facebook as Louise Wilson began in 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 2025, saying I could use it again.
On 16 May 2025 I received three messages from Meta.
- The first, received at 7.03am local time, suspended my account, apparently for breaching community guidelines, with 180 days allowed to appeal.
- One minute later, a second message restricted me from advertising, although I was NOT advertising. Meta said: ‘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 complete mystery to me.
- The third message, received twenty minutes after the first, at 7.23am on 16 May 2025, informed me that my account was permanently disabled, with no further rights to a review.
Boy, whatever that hacker advertised, it must have been bad! I doubt that a review team was involved in Meta's decision, because one minute spent by human eyes on my Facebook site would have seen years of my community-based posts, heavily focused on Australia and totally consistent with someone in my age group.
My pages as Louise Wilson and as Louise Wilson, Author have been completely wiped, along with all the invaluable contacts I built up from 2011 onwards.
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. I'm now dabbling with Instagram, trying to learn its ways, if you'd like to follow me there.
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?