Meta just suspended the Facebook account of Neal Stephenson

https://twitter.com/nealstephenson/status/1959759051732213812

by SLHamlet • 11 months ago

286 129 11 months ago

SLHamlet4• 11 months ago

"Today in 'you can’t make this stuff up,' Meta has suspended my Facebook account because they suspect me of impersonating someone noteworthy"

michaelbuckbee• 11 months ago

As someone in the burbs + middle america, Facebook still has a frustrating grip on many of the community social communications which tend to take place in private Facebook groups (Girl Scouts, community HOA, etc.)

SLHamlet4• 11 months ago

This is not an anomaly, by the way. I've interviewed many multiple Meta staffers (including senior leaders), and can find little evidence that leadership actually read "Snow Crash" and/or even cared about virtual worlds. Even after spending tens of billions claiming they were building the Metaverse.

Some background: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2025/05/horizon-worlds-meta-horizo...

wmf• 11 months ago

Meta's recent strategy is more reminiscent of Rainbows End.

bsenftner3• 11 months ago

They are still quoting Fountainhead and thinking they are intellectuals.

SlowTao2• 11 months ago

A few years back Chris Hedges did a showshow/podcast or something and he was forced to finally read in depth a lot more Rand.

I love his defeated responded of "It is amazing just how pedestrian those books are. There is nothing interesting in them.".

Hedges is always worth listening to even if you won't always agree but he does make doomers look like utopian optimists.

lenerdenator• 11 months ago

There's precious little value for those types to read stuff like "Snow Crash".

It's like the people saying "It's obvious these STEM people didn't take humanities courses". Well, yeah. The dream for the incoming freshman at Stanford's CS program isn't to graduate with a degree. The dream is to have some VC come onto campus, see some BS project the freshman cooked up, tell the freshman "You're literally Jesus Christ, and I want to fund your startup" and drop out with access to millions in funding and a network of people who can give more funding when the original round dries up.

Humanities courses and reading humanistic conceptions of how tech could go wrong doesn't get you millions of dollars. Reckless abandon does.

nirav72• 11 months ago

Who has time to read when it's about 'Move fast and break things..." /s

bitwize2• 11 months ago

Back when I was growing up, tech people read things like Snow Crash all the time. I guess I need to update my priors.

KaiserPro• 11 months ago

I dunno who you were talking to, but the RL research areas I worked in had some definite Neil Stevenson fans.

but then we weren't the pricks who thought you could make up for a shit lighting setup with polygon count cough any screenshot from horizon worlds cough

VWWHFSfQ• 11 months ago

And then went straight over to X, another social media silo, to post that his other social media account at the other silo was banned.

What a world we live in.

petcat• 11 months ago

Megacorp turf wars. It's silos all the way down.

jasonvorhe2• 11 months ago

There's always nostr.

timeon• 11 months ago

Reminds me Shadowrun.

the_real_cher• 11 months ago

X is pretty lenient with the banning though.

It seems like the best of the worst.

numpad0• 11 months ago

Twitter is "lenient" with ban evasion because it runs on cognitive load and they have no time to deal with it themselves. It's just completely beyond cognitive capacity of its controlling parties(including financial owners) that it could appear that they are chill with speeches it hosts as well as unilateral cultural influencing capabilities it has.

unsupp0rted• 11 months ago

People go where they’re treated best

neilv2• 11 months ago

More cyberpunk than this would be for the official author side to be a `.onion`, with a vanity subdomain that took a borrowed farm of GPUs a week to compute, and an RSS/Atom reader feed from that, plus a Fediverse/Mastodon account for the normies that you host yourself from an offshore data haven, paid for with mixed BTC, and a Reddit account just to keep some twerp from grabbing your name, all of which you access exclusively through Tor Browser, from a dedicated/compartmentalized immutable device. :)

But I'm sympathetic to authors feeling they have to be on the popular social media platforms. I don't know about big-name authors like Mr. Stephenson, but when I looked into writing fiction myself, the advice for new and less-known writers was to actively work marketing on all of Twitter/X, Instagram, especially TikTok (BookTok), and others.

(I decided it was too much demoralizing work, to not only write novels, which is grueling, but then to have to play games with TikTok influencers, if you want enough people to actually read the product of your suffering.)

Gibbon1• 11 months ago

Friend of mine complain about twitter and then turn around and send me twitter links.

Headdesk.

AIorNot• 11 months ago

well its obvious a rogue AI at Meta has gained awareness and just fired the first shot of the simulacrum wars by taking out Stephenson.

dekhn• 11 months ago

"Preliminary Roko Enforcement"

anthem20254• 11 months ago

The key was spending 14 billion to hire a guy who hasn’t actually built AI

zelias• 11 months ago

Clearly the counter-AI that counteracts the ban happy AI isn’t in place yet

uz3snolc3t6fnrq2• 11 months ago

can't wait for ai juries, 12 different ai models by different companies & they all have to reach the same conclusion, but one of them is a 300m parameter 2 bit quantized model and keeps hallucinating, causing an eternal hung jury

simpaticoder• 11 months ago

On one level this is amusing. But what if both accounts are owned by the same person impersonating Neal Stephenson? My understanding was that he was not on any social media. Did that change at some point?

gpm• 11 months ago

Assuming https://nealstephenson.com/social-media.html is real, he has social media accounts (linked from that page).

That domain has been registered since 2000, it's probably real.

It links to a google plus account, it's probably not updated promptly.

SLHamlet4• 11 months ago

That Facebook page is the one managed by his publisher.

He also has (had?) a personal one he used that just got suspended.

perihelions• 11 months ago

What an ironic error to happen to a creator of cyberpunk dystopia. And also to Mr. Stephenson.

kitd• 11 months ago

IIRC Sharon Stone got suspended on Bumbl for impersonating Sharon Stone.

jdlshore• 11 months ago

For people missing the irony here, the term “metaverse,” that Meta is named after, was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 book “Snow Crash.”

In the book, the metaverse is a VR version of the internet with an emphasis on accurate sword fights and realistic facial expressions.

neilv2• 11 months ago

CEO: "Bring me the head of whomever is responsible for this metaverse fiasco!" :)

VoidWhisperer• 11 months ago

"Uh.. that would be you, Mr. Zuckerberg"

Animats• 11 months ago

I was really hoping for a Snow Crash movie. That project has been in development hell for years. Instead, we got Ready Player One, which is like Snow Crash for dummies. There's a trailer for a low-budget version of Snow Crash.[1] It's awful.

I don't hold out much hope for that project. Snow Crash is about a conspiracy between a media baron and a televangelist to take over the world. That would upset a lot more people now than in 1992.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8WYiYcaRY4

brightball• 11 months ago

I'm still waiting for a Spawn reboot and universe now that Dune finally got a big budget version. Apparently Voltron too.

Don't give up hope.

daotoad• 11 months ago

That trailer is brilliant for what it is.

I would love to see a proper version of Snow Crash get theatrical release or maybe even the high-concept-tv-series-with-ten-episodes treatment the big streamers are cooking up these days.

croon• 11 months ago

I love Snow Crash too, for what it is, and I'm sure someone could make a worthwhile movie out of exploring the concepts, but then I'm not really sure it's worthwhile, as it wouldn't need to be strictly based on that work.

But if someone is hoping for a scene accurate depiction I'm equally unsure it's possible, or that anyone would want to see it, between everything from the "radical"(/Rule of Cool) Carmageddon pizza delivery for the mafia and variable rollerskate wheel sizes to the main character literally being named Hiro Protagonist.

It's a great nostalgic time capsule for me, which also spawned a lot of other great works, but I'm fine with leaving it as that.

chipsrafferty• 11 months ago

Ready Player One was terrible. The secret that was hidden for years was discovered by someone just trying to drive backwards on a racing map that tons of people play every day? I get that it's hard to drive the map backwards, but come the fuck on, gamers would discover that in the first week.

glimshe• 11 months ago

If Mark Zuckerberg didn't exist, we'd still have Facebook. Someone else would have done it.

But if Neal Stephenson didn't exist, we'd not necessarily have what he created. That's how unique his ideas are.

And Meta, billions of dollars later, is still no Metaverse...

tialaramex2• 11 months ago

Eh, I like some of Neal's books a lot, particularly Diamond Age is likely in any top ten I'd come up with. But this claim is basically only true in the trivial sense that wouldn't have any arbitrary creative work if its author hadn't created it.

So in that sense it's the exact same as Facebook. Without Neal somebody else would invented "post Cyberpunk" and without Mark somebody else would have invented whatever Facebook is - social media for your grandparents maybe?

Neal is "unique" but we're all unique, it's the least unique thing about us. He struggles to write satisfying endings, he leans too heavily on the rape-as-character-development trope, his novels have become flabby as his fame grew and presumably he was able to resist editorial demands more, he doesn't know as much about technology as he thinks he does... Like I said, "Diamond Age" would probably make my top ten, but that's not because it's flawless by any means.

bko• 11 months ago

If Mark Zuckerberg didn't exist, we'd still have Facebook.

Yes, because multi-trillion dollar companies are completely natural and spawn almost at random to whatever nerd happens to be working on a particular problem at any given time

copacopab2• 11 months ago

I have been locked out of my account for 5+ months -- and customer support has been a Kafkaesque nightmare. I am still locked out. (Oh, and I've spent $1M+ in paid META ads...)

ralphington• 11 months ago

You seem to have funded your own demise

copacopab2• 11 months ago

Haha... it's crazy. And I have friends at META who've been trying to help, and they themselves get in a customer support hell as well. It's wild. $1.9T company.

rpdillon• 11 months ago

Yeah, I've been locked out of Meta for a couple of years, just stopped VR altogether because getting the account back turned into a new hobby that I never asked for. Just moved on.

NKosmatos• 11 months ago

The problem with all big companies nowadays... Getting to a real (competent) support person that can help is almost impossible :-(

iammjm• 11 months ago

I've opened a ticket with Microsoft regarding a M365 Business account and an actual person called me within an hour and fixed my issue right away, and I am not even exaggerating here. It was a trivial issue and I am not claiming it's always like this, but it CAN be like this.

cloudwalk9• 11 months ago

Business account though. Everyone else is just a waste of time to provide support to.

I'm a regular consumer who bought a Dell Precision laptop (which still kicks ass btw, to their credit for all their faults) and they bent over backwards because I purchased through their business side. A shipping delay got me a 100 dollar discount, and another hiccup got me 150 dollars to spend at Dell. Bought a business grade 4K monitor from them that also kicks ass and has imperceptible latency in CS:GO/CS2 with the laptop.

Sometimes even in a bleak corporate world there can be good customer service. It's the exception rather than the rule too often.

GlenTheMachine• 11 months ago

I called MS support once because some random dude managed to get my son's account registered under his "family", and then locked my son out of being able to update his own machine.

The MS support guy literally tried to get me to password crack the random dude's account. Like, he wanted me to help him guess the guy's password so we could log in as him and change his family settings.

That was the only "help" he could provide.

ViscountPenguin• 11 months ago

The Microsoft family/organisation situation is fucking ridiculous. If you somehow get enrolled in either, good luck ever ridding your device of it.

For literal years after leaving university, my windows install was still linked to my uni despite multiple attempts to fix it. All this, because I logged in using my university Microsoft account once.

diego• 11 months ago

Meta has extremely opaque account policies. For example, I bought the Meta Raybans a month ago. It kept telling me the AI features were not available in my region, even though I am in San Francisco. I joined Facebook in 2006, and I have used my account for the Oculus headset without a problem. But no matter what I did, the AI function of the Raybans wouldn't work.

I ended up creating a brand new account just for that, and it worked fine. No idea why it would work with a brand new account and not with my old account in good standing, never suspended or warned about anything.

uz3snolc3t6fnrq2• 11 months ago

my best guess is, you could've connected from a different ip once 10 years ago and it improperly geolocated that ip as being in a tiny country and now it thinks you're secretly from that country even though you've been accessing the site from a US ip forever. it's the only plausible reason i can really think of. unless they set up a "country estimation" ai or a similar newfangled system and it's convinced for some reason you're actually not american. it's too out there but you never know

lazide• 11 months ago

Some GEOIP databases are rotting, near as I can tell.

I’ve got a proxy on random machine in a OVH DC in Oregon. Always properly geo-located to Oregon - until a few months ago.

Now YouTube insists I’m in France. Which is quite entertaining, ads wise.

michalpleban2• 11 months ago

I have recently had a need to create an Instagram account. I logged in from my home IP and it was recognized as coming from Vietnam (my home IP has been the same since 2016, always with the same ISP). Everything was in Vietnamese and I had to spend half an hour figuring out how to switch it back to English. But in the home feed I still got only Vietnamese influencers, and there was nothing in the settings to change that. I got assigned to Vietnam for life.

Well, I did nothing with the account except setting up the profile and following some people. Then I logged in to the account on my phone, which of course is not from Vietnam. Bam, account suspended for violating the TOS. I appealed, after one day got a message that the ban was upheld because I did violate the TOS.

I guess no Instagram for me. That's probably for the better.

hnuser123456• 11 months ago

Is it possible your FB account has been compromised for a while? Is your ISP's RIR whois information correct?

anal_reactor• 11 months ago

There's a mid-sized international bus company over here and once I bought a ticket for the wrong day, realized only after payment. I simply called the phone number, the lady spoke my language, reissued the ticket for a different day, that's it.

I was shocked that customer support can work like that.

VincentEvans• 11 months ago

Last time meta blocked my account was because I gave away free framing lumber after demolishing my poorly framed basement. Somehow it got flagged and that was that. Thankfully I don’t give a damn, and now never will.

Ps: some couple happily picked up 100 or so 2x4 studs of various lengths to build a greenhouse for their garden with.

viraptor• 11 months ago

I got blocked for sending a post asking if anyone wants to grab a lunch when I'm back in (location).

b112• 11 months ago

Tangential, but a decade ago I lost my original Amazon account, because I bought bandages. Yes bandages.

I'd had it for 5 years, no excess returns, no issues. I click add and go to checkout... banned.

Some reasons about religious icons flashed on my screen. It was red cross bandages ffs!

And why ban me, and not the seller?!?

Calls, emails resulted in confused but unhelpful people.

adastra224• 11 months ago

They must have assumed it was a scam, like those Nigerian prices offering free gold.

epgui• 11 months ago

I believe I have accumulated two moderation strikes on my Facebook account for (relatively politely) calling out posts for being racist/xenophobic.

Both cases my comments were flagged as promoting hate, ironically. The appeal mechanism is a joke: you press a button, and two seconds later you get a notification saying your appeal was reviewed and denied.

pesus4• 11 months ago

I got a week long ban for calling someone out for being a Nazi. The person openly praising Hitler did not get banned at all. At the time I thought it was mere incompetence, but in hindsight, it seems more like intentional malice.

AceJohnny22• 11 months ago

"Shoot the messenger!"

bachmeier• 11 months ago

Are you implying that being banned from Facebook is a bad thing?

vkou2• 11 months ago

It's not intentional malice, it's just 2025 - an age where calling someone a fascist or a racist is worse than being one.

If that doesn't make a lick of sense to you - it's simple. The latter is an offense against a nebulous, undefined outgroup of people, while the former offends a particular person.

It's the same reason why someone can steal a dollar from a million people, but why you'd go to jail for punching the thief in the face.

rl3• 11 months ago

The person openly praising Hitler did not get banned at all.

Content moderation at Meta is a joke now. I reported an account multiple times for hate speech. The account's photos were comprised entirely of racist caricatures of black people. Like absolutely vile, hateful shit.

Each time, I received a notification along the lines of: [paraphrasing] "We found that the account in question did not violate our community standards. Therefore, we did not take any action. Thanks for the report."

Yeah, OK. Gross.

AceJohnny22• 11 months ago

Was this within the last couple years? How much you wanna bet the appeal is handled by an AI.

dragonwriter• 11 months ago

Its probably just a variant on a placebo button.

maxwell-neumann• 11 months ago

I’ve experienced something similar in attempting to report very explicit and outrageously racist posts and comments. Zero action on blatant neo-Nazism (including specific threats of violence), and several lost appeals. However, far more benign posts and comments that don’t really violate the ToS are often flagged. This is quite prevalent on Instagram especially, which is quite worrying as it’s acting as a radicalisation tunnel for large numbers of impressionable young people. It’s almost as if the algorithm attempts to throw you into a far-right rabbithole because they know it boosts engagement.

zamber• 11 months ago

That's exactly what happens. The algo does not judge how hurtful a rabbithole may be - it optimizes for engagement with some moderation sprinkled on top. I've tried to make my facebook feed palatable for a couple months and eventually passed up on trying. I'd rather IM my family about cat photos than engage with their fringe political views. Same goes for colleagues on LinkedIn.

Tentacrul did a good video on it and more across the years https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MPyJBJTHyO0&pp=ygUWZmFjZWJvb2s...

torginus• 11 months ago

Had this happen to me on Reddit.

After I reported a post, nothing happened, then I messaged the mods, and they agreed with me that the post should be taken down and they did.

A day after it was taken down, I got a warning message from Reddit that my report has been rejected, and I should stop falsely reporting content, or else.

euroderf• 11 months ago

FWIW, I've been cut off twice, appealed twice, been reprieved twice.

Some heckler I guess.

nnechm• 11 months ago

Had a similar experience with meta. Extremely opaque decision making, terrible UX. Account permanently disabled ... did not follow community standards, literally on sign up to get a dx account. It's difficult after an experience like that to see how they are so successful. Is it because their users are so addicted and ad sellers will do anything to get onboard ? It's probably just a few dark patterns here and there to bump up impressions at will.

brador• 11 months ago

Why is their no libre clone of facebook?

Zak• 11 months ago

There is, but creating the software was never the hard part.

gtirloni• 11 months ago

How would one go about suing in cases like this?

chihuahua• 11 months ago

You would start by reading the complete terms and conditions of service. Somewhere in there is a paragraph that states that your account can be suspended and/or terminated at any time for any reason, or no reason. Then you find the paragraph that limits you to mandatory arbitration. You conclude that you're wasting your time if you attempt to sue anyone over this. Eventually you realize that you're better off without a FB account.

tialaramex2• 11 months ago

For any legal action you should find a lawyer. Many lawyers will be happy to meet briefly with someone to figure out what they can do for you or if they should point you to somebody else. In this case such a meeting is likely to be very brief indeed, the chance of success is negligible and the likely costs are sky high.

Thoreandan• 11 months ago

Huh. Posting a screenshot of the tweet just got my FB account suspended.

saltysalt• 11 months ago

If they suspend everyones accounts, the Internet will be a better place.

“Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.” - Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

SLHamlet4• 11 months ago

Update, 3:03pm PT:

Stephenson's Facebook account has been restored within the last 1-2 hours. (I've been checking since the morning.)

But the irony goes on forever.

chairmansteve• 11 months ago

"for impersonating someone noteworthy"....

theshrike79• 11 months ago

Tbh authors should have blogs with RSS-feeds I can follow to know when new stuff is coming out.

Way too many only post content on Facebook on Goodreads. Or even worse, the only notification comes from Amazon.

gusfoo• 11 months ago

I made a whatsapp business account yesterday, started a test advertising campaign. Went to log in to the developer area, "Your account is banned, there is no appeal". And whatsapp customer services says "Your account is fine and there are no issues and this ticket is closed"

I really, really don't understand why you have to make a facebook account in order to get access to the developer area, and now I get to watch my advertising spending tick up with no way of accessing anything about it.

richardatlarge• 11 months ago

Maybe the first sign of AI running full amok will be Meta canceling all its accounts in a runaway state of algorithm-induced internal paranoia

Meta just suspended the Facebook account of Neal Stephenson

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