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.

I'm going off memory here, but @mayintoronto@beige.party once wrote that social media serves as a life line for many communities and basically operates as a form of community infrastructure. Rather than framing this as a need for regulation, we may want to ask what does life look like for some communities or sections of the population if social media were suddenly turned off.

Without social media, some communities are cut off entirely. Which raises the natural question should private and for-profit social media companies be permitted to fill such a critical public communications infrastructure gap?

@runsmooth If you don’t own your contact list, they own your business, or life. You’re working for them.

Reality is though, there are many who may not have a phone, a steady number, or even an address, but they still have a Facebook account. I agree it's a scary thing to accept that one may be in deep and there's actually no choice because there's nothing else to rely on for the same network. You might literally depend on social media for even news to act on, and to make allocations of time or resources. And, perhaps it's this very dependence, the creation of a captive audience subjected to the surveillance economy, that makes modern American social media so much more distasteful.

@runsmooth Facebook should not be a monopoly. It isn’t a necessary ingredient at least it shouldn’t be