FIRST PERSON | I spent 18 years building a life on Facebook, but then Meta simply erased me | CBC News
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This is a First Person column by Sonja Arsenault, who lives in B.C. For more information about CBC’s First Person stories, please see the FAQ.
780: That was the number of friends I had on Facebook.
For 18 years, that little blue app held the archive of my life: photos and videos of my kids growing up, friendships from every era, a marketplace where I bought and sold items. All the little pieces of my life lived online. For me, Facebook wasn’t just a social network. It was a scrapbook of my life and one that I hoped my friends and family could revisit long after I was gone.
And then one morning in April 2025, my account simply vanished.
It happened out of nowhere.
I had posted a few simple photos from a family trip to Palm Springs, Calif. Nothing political. Nothing inappropriate. Minutes later without warning, Meta informed me that I had violated its community standards and my account was deactivated.
I was stunned. Confused. Certain this had to be a mistake and would just as quickly be resolved. I was wrong.
To appeal the decision, Meta wanted a video of my face — something I now understand allows its facial recognition system to flag and track any future attempts I may make to open a new account. My appeal was denied instantly and my account was permanently disabled. No explanation. No available human review.
I discovered I wasn’t alone
As I tried to find a solution, I read numerous stories saying Facebook had deleted several million accounts and thousands had signed petitions complaining their accounts had been erroneously suspended. Many users suspected this was happening because Meta had shifted large portions of its moderation to artificial intelligence systems, and there was no human customer service. Many of those accounts were of people like me — those who hadn’t posted anything controversial or harmful and who believed they had been wrongfully deactivated.
And here’s the part that’s hard not to dwell on: Meta knows this. It’s been widely reported. People are begging for reinstatement. And the company still hasn’t fixed it.
When you’re up against a corporation so large you can’t even find a phone number, your mind can go to dark places. Mine did. Why would a multibillion-dollar company leave customers locked out?
Meta says it’s been purging fake pages and accounts in an attempt to get rid of spam, but I didn’t do anything of the sort.
I’m not pretending to know the answers. But I do know this: the grief surprised me.
The fallout felt all-encompassing
I didn’t just lose a website that documented my existence. As a Gen-Xer, Facebook was my part address book, part scrapbook and part newsroom. It was how I bought and sold unwanted items, connected with others about my animal rescue work and received information on neighbourhood concerns.
I received several texts from people who asked why I blocked them. Others whom I met in person asked me if I got hacked. A friend told me others in our common circles were speculating what I must have done to get booted from Facebook. There was no way to tell anyone what happened.
In angry defiance, I revived an old account I had used for work. I wasn’t sure if it would work because every news article I found on the subject explained that Meta’s automated systems scans IP addresses and devices and looks for overlap in friend requests between new and deleted accounts to identify anyone trying to return after being banned.
250: That was the number of friends I slowly rebuilt. I added people methodically, carefully.
I barely posted.
And then came the second blow. In September 2025, my new account was also unexpectedly deactivated. It had been flagged as “related to a previously disabled account” — possibly because I had finally uploaded a photo of me and the dog I was fostering.
I didn’t expect to feel so deeply for the sudden missing chapters of my life, the rupture in the fabric of my social relationships and the sting of excommunication from a group I had belonged to since its early days. I was suddenly an outsider filled with envy and shame. I mourned the versions of myself held in those posts. It felt as if someone had shredded my family photo albums and simply told me to move on.
A new perspective
However, once the panic settled and a few months passed without access to my Facebook account, I realized how dependent I’d become on the drip-feed of likes, tags and comments that had trained me to surveil myself through other people’s eyes. Losing Facebook twice has forced me to step out of the performance of being “seen” and to acknowledge that I had stored too much of myself in a place where I don’t control my own information.
It also made me ask harder questions: Who am I without an audience? Who am I when I can’t curate my own story?
Since stepping back, I’ve come to recognize that Facebook no longer feels like a connection or the platform I used to love. In its absence, I’ve learned that my legacy exists in the people who actually know me, not in the posts I once wrote. Now, I am focusing on building connections that don’t need algorithms.
Facebook may be able to keep my snapshots. But I get to keep my story. And just maybe, that is where freedom lies after all.
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