When she woke up in the middle of the night last Thursday, Jasmine Ault went to check her phone like she usually would.

But she didn’t expect to see a notification telling her that her Instagram and Facebook account had been permanently disabled by Meta.

It was only the start of an odyssey of frustration and anxiety spanning multiple days as Ault struggled to get to the bottom of how 20 years of personal data and professional contacts had been taken from her overnight — all while being stonewalled by AI customer service with no option to reach a human being, even after paying extra.

“It feels like I've lost everything in a metaphorical fire with my digital albums and my digital memories,” Ault, who lives in Toronto, told CBC News. “And who's going to protect those if I can only speak to AI?”

Facebook did the job for her. Big step done.

When will this feature roll out to the rest of Facebook's customers? Looking forward to it!

And this is why you need to at least try to back up your important stuff in more than one place

While I want everyone to freely choose to end their Meta accounts, and while I agree that one should never be in a position where a unilateral decision can block access to one's personal data and contacts, we must not be smug about what's happened here.

Meta is like any monopoly platform: They actively and aggressively get as many people as possible to put as much of their life as possible onto the platform, and deliberately make it difficult to leave. Not to mention that they also effectively dominate so much of the “share with your friends and colleagues and customers” capacity, that any competitor would have an enormous disadvantage and therefore these people cannot leave Meta easily.

The solution here is not to shame people for still using the dominant platform, when that platform's switching costs make it immensely difficult to leave with one's data and connections intact. We must instead agitate for change so that there can never be any profit-motivated dominant platform. This will carve out the room for a rabble of competitors that are each small enough they cannot dominate, and must treat their users with respect in order to keep them.

It's not just the switching costs, it's the network effects that are forcing people to use Meta platforms. Once I was moving and needed to sell or give away some furniture, appliances and other items (the alternative would be to pay someone to have them disposed of). The problem is, other than the Facebook marketplace, there is barely a place where this can be done. Likewise, where I live, everyone has WhatsApp and everyone assumes that you have it as well.

Another problem is lack of good alternatives. Meta is making products that work for billions of people. I am not aware of any alternative to Facebook marketplace that works globally. All WhatsApp alternatives are worse in some respect: Telegram doesn't fully support non-Google Androids as it requires Play Integrity, iMessage only works on Apple devices, RCS must be supported by the carrier and until very recently didn't work on Apple devices, Signal and others have too few users and also lack important features such as web client. It is difficult to make people migrate off Meta if that means they lose things that they are used to.