I ran for local office. 11 days before the election, Facebook suspended my personal account.

It and all associated Meta accounts could have been gone forever. They wouldn't tell me why.

[For a full summary of my 2022 campaign for Borough Assembly, click here.]

[Update 10/10/2022: I was finally able to connect with an actual person who was able to un-suspend my accounts. They are live and accessible again. I learned that Facebook suspended my account due to multiple reports that my account was fake. As soon as they did an investigation on these reports, they re-opened my account.

I am not blaming my opponents campaign for this, nor am I saying that it changed the outcome of the election.

Thank you to Lael Oldmixon, who was able to help me get in touch with Eva Guidarini, the manager of state and local government outreach at Facebook, Lisa Murkowski’s office, and the many friends who helped me stir up some good trouble to help get this solved. I’m keeping this post up to serve as a warning and account of what happened to me.]

My name is Kuba Grzeda and I live in Fairbanks, Alaska. I was months in to and less than two weeks away from the end of my political race for Borough (County) Assembly when I lost access to my personal Facebook account. It not only damaged my chances of winning, but it’s meant that so many of my personal memories disappeared, too.

I started a Facebook account over a decade ago, when still in high school. I used it to share photos and make connections with friends and family across the world. When my grandparents sold their home in Poland, I took a final photo tour of the property and shared it on Facebook. When I made friends while backpacking in Europe, we made and kept connections through Instagram. These photos and connections don’t exist anywhere else, which means that they didn’t exist anywhere.

Because my personal and campaign Instagram accounts were linked to my Facebook account, they were suspended as well.

I woke up 11 days before my election to an email saying that my account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow Facebooks community standards. I had 30 days to disagree with that decision. I appealed that same morning.

Our municipality publicly lauded the positive, cordial race between myself and my opponent. We stuck to the issues, we disagreed but supported each other, and I certainly didn’t post anything that attacked or mocked him or anyone else.

What community standards, of which there are pages and pages, did I break? Facebook wouldn’t tell me. I had gone through a verification process with Facebook the month before, submitting my ID and other personal info to be able to run ads about politics and social issues. Though a drawn-out process, I passed. I became verified. So, what had happened?

When I appealed my suspension, the response was:

Facebook has an additional appeal process for suspended accounts, but due to COVID-19, it’s currently impossible to submit an appeal on their website. There is no email or phone number to contact, and I failed to get a response through any other channel.

I am so incredibly disappointed in Facebook and their parent company Meta. I feel like a large chunk of my digital life was erased from under my feet, and I didn’t even know why. When you searched my name on Facebook and Instagram, nothing came up. I could not log in to retrieve priceless digital memories or look back on conversation I have been having for years with loved ones.

I originally wrote this to ask Facebook to reinstate my accounts, and now to build better systems for these kinds of suspensions. I’m dismayed at the thought of anyone else running into this problem, especially someone who didn’t have access to a sitting senator and the manager of state and local government outreach at Facebook, like I did.