Following the previous post,1 I did add another one of my accounts as an admin of the association’s Facebook page. That didn’t work. But it turns out, from further discussion with the the Meta AI support assistant, the issue is much more complex than I realised. To illustrate that, today I asked the bot to describe the issue—in as much detail as possible, in less than 200 words. Here’s how it summarised the issue:
Your account ([ID withheld]) is permanently restricted for a Deceptive Persona violation under Meta’s Fraud and Deception policies. This occurred because your personal login profile is named Vampire Studies Association rather than an authentic human name.
Meta requires all personal profiles—the identities used to log in and manage assets—to represent real individuals. Using an organization’s name for a personal profile is a policy violation. This restriction was applied on May 14, 2026, following an automated identity review triggered when you attempted to publish content.
Because this account is the sole administrator of the Vampire Studies Association Page, its permanent restriction locks the Page. The Page itself is not restricted, but since the only account with administrative rights is now unauthorized, you cannot post or manage settings. Because this decision is final and the account identity cannot be restored, you must use a separate, authentic personal profile to reclaim the Page through the Page admin dispute process.
As noted in the previous post, the only thing posted on the page that day as an announcement that the page had been regained following it being inexplicably marked for deletion.
The issue of using a “Deceptive Persona” is, itself, a strange one that may be familiar to people who run their own Facebook pages. You can’t post under your own name. When posting to your own page, you post as the page name. Confused? Here’s what the Meta bot said about it during the same conversation:
The restriction feels like a punishment because the system treats a technical naming error as an intentional policy violation. Even though the Switch Accounts feature is the standard way to post as a Page, the system constantly verifies the login identity behind that action.
Meta’s security systems require that the individual holding the “keys” to any Page must be an authentic human profile. Because your login identity ([ID withheld]) is named Vampire Studies Association rather than Anthony Hogg, every administrative action you take—like posting—triggers a signal that a non-human profile is in control. To the automated system, this is a “Deceptive Persona” violation, regardless of whether the setup was intentional or a result of a technical migration.
It doesn’t just “feel” like one, of course, it is one. After all, I am permanently suspended from posting on our own association page because I am posting under a username they made me use. This dispute the fact that I can still post normally under my own account elsewhere.
The next step, of course, will be submitting a page admin dispute so I can prove that I am the person posting on my own account, to wrest control of the page…from myself? Ugh.
Were it not for the fact that the page has over 3,600 followers and lots of milestone content on it, I might have been inclined to give up on it by now. But I can’t. No sir. Not that easily. And I’m not the only one. Take this unfortunate experience by political commentator, Snarky Gherkin, on the “hold” placed on his account:
I have no strikes, no warnings and no visible account issues. Everything I can see remains green, so at this stage I do not know whether this is a technical glitch, an automated error or a genuine restriction.
More broadly, Facebook is becoming increasingly sporadic and incoherent. Features appear and disappear, support channels contradict one another, and automated systems can apparently identify a problem while being entirely incapable of explaining or fixing it.2
Like Mr. Gherkin, there are no visible strikes, warnings or visible account issues on the VSA Facebook page. The only reason I know there’s one is the bot’s confirmation and me being trapped in a loop of trying to verify my identity by my phone app by submitting an access code via an SMS that never arrives. A complete shambles, but one apparently not isolated to Facebook.
As Mr. Gherkin notes in another screed on his Facebook experiences—in which one of his posts was removed, restored on appeal, only for his page to remain under restriction anyway—”That experience is personal, but it is hardly unique. Across Facebook and Instagram, creators, community organisations, small businesses and ordinary users regularly find themselves locked out, demoted, restricted or stripped of functionality by systems they cannot meaningfully interrogate.”3
I’ll keep you posted.
- Anthony Hogg, “Our Facebook Page Has Been Experiencing Major Technical Difficulties,” News, Vampire Studies Association, June 26, 2026, https://vampirestudies.org/2026/06/26/our-facebook-page-has-been-experiencing-major-technical-difficulties/. ↩︎
- Snarky Gherkin, “Facebook Has Put the Gherk ‘On Hold,'” Snarky Gherkin (blog), July 2, 2026, https://snarkygherkin.substack.com/p/facebook-has-put-the-gherk-on-hold. ↩︎
- Snarky Gherkin, “Mea Culpa,” Snarky Gherkin (blog), July 7, 2026, https://snarkygherkin.substack.com/p/meta-culpa. Interestingly, Facebook and Instagram are both under Meta’s umbrella. ↩︎
