Aisha Sultan: Meta shuts down some Facebook accounts, ruining businesses and lives

Aisha Sultan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Nov 7, 2025

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ST LOUIS -- Karen Hoffman tried to open her Messenger app to confirm a meeting she had later that morning in September. For some reason, it wouldn’t open.

She didn’t panic. It must be some kind of glitch. She tried to go through her Facebook account to look at her messages. That’s when she saw a notification that her account had been shut down because she had violated a community standard.

“What the heck could I have violated?” she wondered. “That was the beginning of the most horrible weekend of my life.”

Hoffman, 72, of St. Charles, Missouri, has spent the past 17 years building a community of more than 6,000 friends and followers. She used the platform as a way to spread positivity, promote the good work others are doing, connect with family and friends and bring audiences to events that her nonprofit, Gateway to Dreams, hosted.

In many ways, she’s been the model Facebook user.

She filed an appeal using the link that Meta sent. She never got a response. She tried opening a new account with a different email – denied. She emailed whichever public email addresses for corporate Meta employees she could find. Nothing.

“It’s crazy how much the loss of this platform impacts business and personal,” she said. Desperate, she hired a digital marketing company, 100th Monkey, to try to help her. She learned that she’s part of a much bigger trend of people whose accounts have been shut down by Meta, without any apparent violation and no recourse to reclaim their social identities, histories or business platforms.

Jill Lee, director of operations for 100th Monkey in St. Louis, says that over the past year and a half, they have taken on at least a dozen cases from clients in similar situations to try to get relief from Meta. They’ve had even more people reach out to them with problems that they can’t escalate.

“We’re hearing it all over the place,” Mich Hancock, CEO of 100th Monkey, said. Most of their clients do business on Facebook, and it can be crippling for their livelihoods. They’ve spent months trying to work through their ad representatives to try to get some accounts restored.

“They can’t give a solid reason for things like this happening,” Lee said. From her perspective it looks like they are using AI to shut down a proliferation of hackers and many innocent people are getting caught in the dragnet. Others are shut down because their account gets hacked.

Meta did not respond to inquiries for this column.

A recent report on the tech site Engadget shared how many of those affected have been forced to turn to small claims courts as a de facto customer service hotline. Since you can’t call or email any customer service department at Meta, ordinary users have taken the $1.7 trillion tech behemoth to small claims court to try to get their accounts restored and recoup some damages.

Out of the five individuals highlighted in this report, three recovered their accounts, one received financial damages and another won a cash settlement from Meta. Other legal service startups have reportedly seen significant increases in cases like this against Meta.

Some people who have arbitrarily lost their platforms have appealed to their state attorneys general for help. The sheer volume of these requests prompted a coalition of 41 state AGs to write a letter to the company stating: “We refuse to operate as the customer service representatives of your company.”

Hoffman plans to write a letter to Missouri’s AG and is considering filing a small claims court lawsuit, also. As she’s told people about what happened to her, she’s heard from several other businesswomen and friends who have experienced the same thing and how devastating it can be.

It’s outrageous that small business owners and ordinary folks have to square up against a trillion dollar company that refuses to invest in customer service. When a consumer product wrongly targets its users and causes material harm, it needs to be held accountable. The worst part is that Meta actively encourages small businesses and creators to conduct business using its site. But then it can arbitrarily shut you down without any recourse?

Hoffman recently hosted one of her regular events for nonprofits. She tried to market it through LinkedIn since she’s still cut off from her Facebook contacts.

It’s the first time no one showed up.