Remember: you (yes, you) are always one step away from being permanently removed from Meta platforms without any meaningful explanation or a right to appeal. Even after you show it your face and move it sideways and up and down, which is a humiliating process in its own way.
Trying to open a brand page in Instagram and connecting it to Whatsapp Business this week resulted in its permanent removal which cannot be reversed or appealed in any possible way. There were no posts, just a nice logo and description. The brand name (and username) did not exist anywhere yet, and now this Instagram handle is useless. I spent a lot of time and effort finding a new consistent brand name.
A simple web search tells us that:
Mark Zuckerberg controls roughly 61% of the total voting power at Meta Platforms. This gives him near-absolute unilateral control over the company's major corporate decisions, including electing the board of directors, approving acquisitions, and rejecting shareholder proposals.
The story today is about mom and pop type of business, about a common person trying to survive. This is who Meta hurts most with its horrific AI automation that is off the rails this year.
Try to open a website or a corporate page of any business based in Europe that comes to mind. Literally any website. Scroll down to the footer or a contact section. What do you see?
I guarantee that they feature at least two social media icons and those icons are Facebook and Instagram. Every single business is registered there, it's mandatory at this point as a social proof that you exist. You might skip Twitter/X, you might ignore LinkedIn because you're not going to advertise there anyway, but FB and IG are an absolute necessity across the whole planet (almost).
When messaging the clients in a messenger app, a company very likely to use either Facebook Messenger (if you live in North America) or WhatsApp if you live in most of the rest of the world. Both of them are owned by Meta too.
This means, that one company, unilaterally, can decide if your small barbershop, or a cafe, or a startup have the right to exist in the public space. And only one man has the real power within that company.
How did societies in 120+ countries accept this? How?
How did people look at this and think: yeah, it's nice to put our entire livelihood at a whim of one man, who controls Facebook (3.07 billion monthly active users), Instagram (3 billion), WhatsApp (3.3 billion) and Messenger (1.1 billion)?
Is everyone okay with it? Is society alright with the fact that anyone's whole social presence can be destroyed by an unaccountable person whose company won a Latvian court case when a person tried to actually appeal those AI automation tools' decisions in court? How come there's only Pixelfed that barely registers as an Instagram replacement because it has just 1 million users and society won't accept it because it's a complex federated service?
No one is barely trying to change this. It costs less than $1000/month to run a clone of the old Instagram if you want to save server space and host only compressed images and text. We don't have even that.
Europe must tackle this issue ASAP because this is a matter of survival. Currently the town square of Europe, more than 80% of it, is fully owned by two U.S. centibillionaires.
All we needed was one platform that is a little better than Linktree, shows simple posts and serves as a proof that you or your brand are alive and well. It's insane that we don't have anything of that sort in 2026. This current situation is legitimately unacceptable.
