Random Thoughts & If You’re Not On Facebook, Do You Even Exist?

15 Hours in Facebook Jail

I’m currently in Beijing, my 4th time coming here since last November. I wrote up a kind of trip report here just a month and a half ago, so I’m hopefully not going to bore people by writing the same stuff again.

Substack is one of many sites that are blocked by the GFW (Great Firewall) of China. Google and Meta are the most prominent forbidden sites/services here, but they’re far from the only ones. How am I reaching Substack to write and publish this? A VPN, of course.

Here’s the curious thing. My mobile carrier in the US is T-Mobile. One of the things I like about them is that I get 5 gig of international roaming data every month. I don’t have to buy any sort of roaming data from them (unless I exceed the 5 gigs); I can’t buy any sort of local or electronic SIM card because my phone is locked. In China, I’m roaming on the China Mobile network. When I’m outside using mobile internet, nothing is blocked. I can get Facebook, Google Translate and Maps, The NY Times, you name it. But once I’m on WiFi (in the hotel, the office, a shopping mall or restaurant) then it all gets blocked and I have to fire up the VPN. Not as simple as it sounds because the Chinese apps that one relies upon for everything here don’t like VPN’s; they start coughing up blood until I remember to kill the VPN again.

So far, this trip, I’ve been here for just under a week, with just over a week to go. When I was here in December, I froze my nuts off. For the trips in April and May, the weather was glorious. It’s July, and I’m dying.

At home in Austin, when the temps go above 90 degrees F, I simply don’t go out (except to my patio to smoke). Here, I don’t have a choice. My phone said it was 95 degrees this afternoon; my watch was showing 102. Air conditioned hotel to air conditioned Didi rideshare to only vaguely air conditioned WeWork office - plus going outside and having to walk at least a few blocks each way for lunch. Today, after lunch, sitting in a tiny WeWork cubicle, my co-worker needing to close the door for the conference call we were on, no ventilation in the room at that point, I had to get out of there. I felt that if I sat in that room for 5 more minutes I would pass out. I have two USB fans at home, naturally I didn’t bring either with me on this trip.

After checking the likely contenders in the fancy pants mall next door and coming up empty, I asked at the hotel’s front desk. One of the concierges actually walked me back to the mall and translated for me - at 2 toy stores in the basement! One had a tiny handheld fan that I couldn’t feel, the second shop had something perfect. Yes, it says “Kindergarten Boy Shinchan” and also “Shinchan has a cute dog named Shiro.” But it’s 4 inches high, has 3 speeds, and charges via USB-C. Ask and ye shall receive, eh?

I’ve been to faux Irish bar Paddy O’Shea’s (a friend who joined me here in May insists on calling it Patio Chez) twice so far. The staff recognize me now - is that good or bad? I haven’t had Peking duck yet but have been back to that barbecue place with the Sichuan crawfish boil.

Last night’s film was The Bikeriders. Some photographer followed a Chicago motorcycle gang around from 1965 to 1971 and wrote a book about them; now it’s been adapted into a high profile film.

Starring in this film about an American biker gang in the 60s are Jodie Comer (from Liverpool), Tom Hardy (London), and Austin Butler. Hardy loves to do voices and accents and does them well - Bane in Dark Knight Rises, Alfie Solomons in Peaky Blinders, both Kray brothers in Legend, and so on. Jodie Comer, I’m not so sure about her accent here, I think she’s laid it on a bit thick.

The film was written and directed by Jeff Nichols - his last film was Loving (also based on a true story) and if you haven’t seen it, you should correct that error. It’s really well done - a great supporting cast, a great soundtrack, it looks authentic (some of Danny Lyon’s photos are shown during the closing credits and it’s stunning how closely Nichols matched them in the film), and some moments that struck the right emotional chords. I’m sure I’ll watch it again.

Today is the day that my stepdaughter graduated from university - Far Eastern University in Manila with a nursing degree. I jokingly call her The Bad Seed, which she finds hilarious. My wife says “it’s not nice” but I tell her it ain’t about the kid, it’s about the piece-of-shit father who has never paid one peso towards the kid’s upbringing. And in all seriousness, she is the first person from her family to graduate from university and I couldn’t be more proud.

But here’s the thing. When it comes to the iPhone, it seems as if the only apps my wife knows are Facebook and Messenger. We rely on Messenger for all of our communication when we’re apart. This morning, my wife sent me photos of her and the kid, all made up and dressed up for the graduation ceremony.

And then the feed went dead. I was in a Didi going to the office when I spotted an email saying that my Facebook account was suspended. I got to the office, looked at it more closely to determine if it was phish or real and it appeared to be real. My Facebook feed went blank and Messenger kicked me out.

The email said that I had violated their community standards, that I had 180 days to appeal, that I couldn’t access my account or any services, etc. etc. etc.

How could I have violated Facebook’s community standards? No, seriously. I don’t post any photos with nudity or violence. I don’t post hate speech (aside from my loathing of a certain ex-president). About the only thing I could think of was that I was posting from Beijing. As I said, all of Meta’s products are blocked in China. Did Facebook suddenly decide that I’m in China, I must live in China, therefore I can’t have Facebook? Do they do that? No, that wouldn’t make any sense.

So the only thing I can figure is that 2 days ago I got an email with an access code for a Facebook password reset that I most assuredly did not request. Someone was trying to hack my account. After they were unsuccessful, did they go through my posts and tag something I posted and report me? Most of my posts are not public, they are only visible to friends, so I don’t think it was that. I’m sure I have enemies, or at the very least people who don’t like me. Do I have any Facebook “friends” who don’t like me enough to do something like that? Anything is possible.

Or did someone manage to hack my account, post a nude picture of Mother Theresa or some other weird nonsense, and then that got tagged and got me booted? That’s possible. Whatever it was, I don’t have access to Facebook or Messenger now. (Why did Messenger get cut? That doesn’t make a lot of sense - especially because I still have access to Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp.)

Meanwhile, I’m feeling like someone who had an arm or a leg chopped off. Sure, I know plenty of people who don’t like Facebook, who deleted their accounts and won’t touch any Meta product. For me, it’s how I stay in touch with family and friends all over the world, in some cases friendships going back more than 50 years, and some of the FB groups I follow are actually useful. Yes, I have too many friends there, too many people I don’t interact with, some of whom I never even met. But I have a lot of real friends, too. And that’s not to mention the dozens of photo albums I posted, the hundreds of photos - going back to when I was using FB to promote my blogs and my HK photo studio.

So the prospect of losing all of that and having to start over (which I would indeed do) is boggling my little mind. Plus … well, there’s a lot of people I stay in touch with only via Facebook. I have no other way to reach out to them to let them know, hey, I’m not dead, I’m just in Facebook jail.

I clicked on the “appeal” button, which apparently takes 48 hours. There’s not much else one can do - given that it’s a free service with billions of daily users, it’s not as if there’s an 800 number for customer service. But I did have one thing that’s not available to everyone else - a friend who is an engineer at Meta. I reached out to him but it was evening in California, so I’m not expecting to see anything happen until late tonight …. or tomorrow …. or the day after?

It’s a weird feeling, I’m not sure if I can properly explain it but I feel cut off from a major segment of my life. Maybe that’s what has been bugging me throughout the day. There are too many people whom I only interact with on Facebook.

(It reminds me about a trip to Bangkok I took in 2018, my first time back there in 6 or 8 years. I went to see my dear friend Jimmy Wong, the brilliant tattoo artist who has been inking people since the Vietnam war. “We talked about you all the time. We didn’t know what happened to you. We thought maybe you were dead.” And then he gave me two tattoos as a “glad you’re not dead” present. Now his daughter Joy, also a brilliant tattoo artist, is on Facebook every day. They know I’m not dead …. yet. I suppose no more free tattoos for me.)

I do need to take this as a lesson. First of all, I should download my data periodically to be sure I don’t lose anything. And I need to work out alternate methods of contacting those people who are important to me but whom I only connect with via Facebook. So thanks for that lesson.

UPDATE: A few minutes ago, I got back into my Facebook account. No notification that it was back; I restarted the app and this time everything was there. No explanation of why I was temporarily locked out. No apology for a mistake. I’m not leaving Facebook, not by any means, but I have to think long and hard about how I use it.

P.S. Welcome to all the new subscribers who came here via Tripperhead’s recommendation. Let’s see how many of you stick around after this post. I actually felt obligated to post something now, rather than wait another 2+ weeks till I’m back home. Hopefully you’ve taken a look at some of my other musings here and will stick around.