Facebook suspended my 20-year old account for good

Hi Reader,

I hope you are doing great wherever you are.

I am in Malta, enjoying a few weeks working remotely from here. I picked it because it was the sunniest, driest place in Europe this time of year outside of Spain and I am very happy with my choice.

📩 This week's email comes from Meg and is a personal account of something that happened a bit over a week ago.

We had kept our hopes high for the right resolution, but it has not come through, at least not yet, so reality is now sinking in.

This has been a sad reminder (one that is not new, we have feared this for years now), for us, that we are at the mercy of a faceless, and heartless, algorithm and that having helped build Facebook for over 10 years through our vibrant and thriving community of almost half a million members means absolutely nothing.

We each spend about 2 hours a day just moderating and managing the community. For years. Every. Single. Day of the year without fail.

But in the blink of an eye, it can all disappear.

The saddest part is that we didn't share spam, or fake news, or anything that goes against the Community Standards, but just our annual survey, designed for the community, just like we have been for the last 6 years.

We were trying to do good, to advocate for solo female travelers. There is no gain for us. In fact, to incentivise participation, we are giving away hard cash, our own money, so we provide an extra reason to take the time to fill it in.

I will let Meg explain with her own words, what happened.

And if you want to fill in the survey, here are the links (fill just ONE):

Facebook Suspended My 20-Year Account for Posting a Women’s Empowerment Survey

I didn’t think much of it when I hit “post.”

It was the same thing I’ve shared to our close to half a million community every year for the past six: a link to our annual Solo Female Travelers survey.

This is a survey created by women, for women, with the goal of understanding what keeps women safe, supported, and confident when they travel, and what motivates them to travel solo in the millions now.

A survey 5,000 women fill in every year, the results of which have been published across the globe by some of the largest publications, and used by travel companies, destinations to and even governments to tailor tours for women or train their staff.

This year, though, something disturbing happened.

Facebook instantly suspended my personal profile.

20 years of photos, messages, memories, and more than 2,500 connections - gone in a millisecond.

No warning. No explanation. Only an “appeal button” that said they would make a decision within a day, whether I was permanently banned from the platform.

Ten days later, Facebook remains a locked door, with the sense that I’ve been erased from a platform I helped build with two decades of my life.

And all because I posted a link about women’s empowerment.

The Absurdity of “Community Standards”

To be clear: our business has posted this survey on Facebook every year without issue. We’ve always shared it openly with our community of 484,000 women. The content didn’t change. My behaviour didn’t change. The mission didn’t change.

What changed was Facebook.

There was no spam, no policy violation, no suspicious activity. I hadn’t mass-posted it; I hadn’t tagged strangers; I hadn’t broken any rules. And yet, this year, Facebook decided that asking women about safety, travel, and empowerment was dangerous enough to suspend a long-standing personal account.

And worse: they didn’t just cut off Facebook. They wiped out my Messenger access too - a tool most of us rely on to communicate with family, colleagues, and friends scattered across the globe.

Overnight, everything was gone. People I’d spoken to every day for years simply disappeared from my digital life. I couldn’t even respond to messages that were mid-conversation.

All because I shared a link to a female empowerment survey.

A Personal Reckoning With a Platform That Once Mattered

When you lose access to a platform you’ve been part of for 20 years, you expect to feel something akin to panic or grief. But here’s the surprising truth: I’m… fine.

Friends and family kept checking in every day to make sure I wasn’t spiralling, which says a lot about how normalised our collective dependence on Facebook has become. The perception was that losing an account is like losing a limb.

But once the shock wore off, something else settled in: clarity.

I realised just how little Facebook actually supports the communities it claims to champion. It’s a platform built on connection, yet it disconnected me instantly and without thought.

It’s a platform built on “community standards,” yet it can’t differentiate a predatory scammer like the ones we have to remove from our community every single day, from a woman posting a legitimate survey. It’s a platform that insists it’s safe and supportive, yet it penalises content designed to keep women safe.

What does that say about the direction Facebook is heading?

And - more unsettling - how many women-focused initiatives have been quietly throttled, flagged, or suppressed without anyone noticing?

The Bigger Picture: Empowering Women Is Still a “Risk”

Suspending my account wasn’t just a personal inconvenience. It was symbolic.

Women’s empowerment is still treated as provocative. Risky. Controversial. Something an algorithm might swat away because it doesn’t fit neatly into the content patterns Silicon Valley is comfortable with.

For a tech giant that claims to prioritise safety, Facebook has created a system so crude that it cannot recognise genuine, community-driven safety work. Instead, it punishes it.

And it’s not lost on me that a corporation with more power than many countries can erase an entire digital identity without accountability - while women all over the world are still fighting just to have their voices heard.

Life Without Facebook

It turns out life without Facebook is much quieter.

Calmer.

Less performative, even.

But that doesn’t make what happened any less frustrating, even ridiculous.

Losing access shouldn’t be a rite of passage for trying to support women. Two decades of memories shouldn’t be collateral damage because an opaque algorithm doesn’t understand context. And a platform that built itself on community shouldn’t be allowed to sever the very people who’ve helped build it from theirs without transparency or recourse.

If anything, this whole experience has strengthened my belief in our mission.

If a simple survey about women’s safety can get my account suspended, then clearly, the work isn’t done. Not even close.

Facebook may not want to hear it - but that won’t stop us from asking the questions that matter to women. And it certainly won’t stop us from doing the work.

If you believe empowering women is worth fighting for, this is the survey Facebook tried to silence. I’d love for you to fill it in.

And here are the results of last year's survey, always published freely and openly for anyone who wants to us it to help women travel solo better and safer.