Digital Feudalism Sucks - we do not own our followers

Imagine discovering your 80K followers over IG and FB product accounts were gone in an instant.

I run my social media accounts by myself and built them up over the past decade, featuring my products, company, upcoming projects and personal anecdotes all gone. My content is pretty milk toast material, Mighty Wallets, other inventions and insights on design.

Some Ai moderation tool decided I did something so horrific that it required immediate deletion and removal from IG and FB platforms - including my "personal" account where photos of my kids growing up are gone forever.

"Gut punch, Depressing, Anxiety producing" - are just some of the ways that Redditors on r/FixMyInstagram and others r/InstagramDisabledBans rack up over 25K visits per week. The other sudden discovery about Digital Feudalism is that its rampantly removing many other creators and indie small businesses across the US and around the world.

Trust me I don't want this post to sound like a whinny customer service email - it's actually the tip of the iceberg that is coming for many creators accounts out there. What I have discovered is that some black hat services will collectively report you simultaneously triggering such a take down for violations of the terms of service. I would not put it past my competitors to do such a thing.

So social media platforms have turned their moderation and policing over to Ai without any clear tools or process for appeal (I was permanently banned before I could even submit an appeal) and I'm not alone. So many stories on Reddit and in the few media articles talking about this repeat the same series of actions.

What do we do about it?
I have some ideas.

One of the most motivating emotions I have is injustice. I have a visceral reaction to injustice and this problem has created a fire in me that has launched some very inspiring and creative ideas to help all of us better protect ourselves online as Digital Citizens in this ecosphere. Some ideas are even so bold as to overthrow the kings.

We won't do it with pitchforks and fire but with our intellect and our intuition.

Comment, like and lock in your interest now so we can build some sovereign digital citizenry together.