Since 2020, Dowson Turco Lawyers has acted against Facebook / Meta in claims for reactivation of clients’ Facebook accounts. These claims have arisen because clients have been either hacked or otherwise affected by the Facebook algorithm, triggering deactivation of their accounts and ostensibly no way to reactivation through Facebook’s client facing systems.
Dowson Turco has clients around the world who have been specifically impacted by the ISIS hack of their Facebook accounts. In this scenario, a bot will break into a person’s account, remove all photos and replace the profile and background photos with ISIS propaganda, triggering Facebook’s algorithm to shut down the account.
You can read a news story about the issue here where ABC The Drum presenter, Julia Baird, said on Twitter that:
“Overnight my personal account was hacked and my profile pics changed to ISIS flags. I think I’ve secured it by changing passwords. But they also deactivated/erased my work page, removed me as admin.”
“If Facebook wants to be consistent with what it puts out there as its Terms of Service, you would think that it would respond to a person’s request for help.”
Nicholas also spoke to business reporter, Carla Jaeger, from the Sydney Morning Herald about the devastating impact of Meta’s response to hacked accounts, saying:
“[This demand] is about Facebook deliberately stalling – and rejecting the online world – when it comes to bringing proceedings against Facebook.”
Facebook / Meta is a parallel world, yet the worlds Facebook / Meta have created lack natural justice, fair governance and control
Facebook / Meta has created a digital universe and, as the controller of that environment, users would think that it is easy to reactivate an account affected by a sinister hack. But the Facebook / Meta systems and processes don’t appear to always work the way that Facebook / Meta claim. In fact, all of the clients Dowson Turco has acted for against Facebook / Meta have had no success following the platform rules, when seeking to have accounts reactivated.
Many clients simply heard nothing after raising complaints or concerns, others received a notification that Facebook / Meta had received the client’s notification, but no resolution followed. For most clients, this lack of procedural fairness meant that they experienced months of deactivation and had to engage Dowson Turco to apply pressure on Facebook / Meta. Many clients use Facebook for both personal and commercial purposes. For example, comedians and artists may rely on their personal identity and friendship networks for sale of their art. The detriment experienced by these users when Facebook / Meta failed to re-active their accounts, was enormous.
We can help
We have had significant success having our clients’ Facebook accounts reactivated after an ISIS hack. While this has involved considerable work, we have built a reputation for our experience in this kind of work. We know how and what to argue in relation to Facebook’s terms, and we argue, with forensic detail, that our clients are credible, authentic users of the Facebook platform, and should not be harmed by arbitrary algorithms within the platform.
We compile this forensic evidence and serve it on Facebook / Meta in California.
Ring our crime and litigation team for assistance with your social media accounts. We are located at 235 Macquarie Street, Queen’s Square, Sydney, NSW 2000, next to the Supreme Court of NSW. You can email us here: enquiries@dowsonturco.com.au or call us on 61 2 8000 7300.
