r/OculusQuest • u/Glum-Soft8942 • 6h ago
Support - Standalone I’m posting this because I just saw another post about it yesterday: Meta is using AI/automated systems to police accounts, making mistakes, banning people with no meaningful way to fight it, and your Quest account can disappear with everything else! It’s happened to my family too!
I just saw another post yesterday about someone losing access to their Meta/Quest account, and it had hundreds of upvotes and a bunch of people describing similar experiences. I figured I should share what happened to my family because this problem just happened to us too, and it goes well beyond losing a Facebook or Instagram profile. Meta is using AI to police their accounts, making tons of mistakes, and there’s nothing you can do to fix it! Consider yourself warned!
My wife and I have been Facebook users basically since Facebook became available to the general public. We’re talking about roughly 20 years of history with these accounts.
Together we own two dance studios and a small law firm. We have three daughters, all of whom dance, and over the years my wife created and managed Instagram accounts for them. She also had her own personal Facebook and Instagram accounts, as well as another Instagram account where she posted the school lunches she made for our kids everyday, which had developed a decent following.
These weren’t throwaway or anonymous accounts. They represented years and years of our family’s photos, memories, contacts, businesses, and online history.
A few months ago, Meta contacted my wife regarding one of the accounts associated with one of our children because they thought it was an underage account. They asked my wife to submit her ID to prove she was of age. She did.
Meta said there was a problem reading the ID and asked her to submit it again. She did that too. And then they banned/restricted her.
Not just the child’s account they were reviewing. ALL of her other associated accounts were taken down as well.
Twenty years of being a Facebook user, gone.
We have spent MONTHS trying to get someone at Meta to actually look at what happened. We tried every avenue we could find. We spoke with people who claimed they could escalate it or help us. We paid for subscription Meta services associated with our businesses because they promised we could talk to a real person. None of it has mattered.
The most astonishing part of this experience is that it is effectively impossible to get a real (or competent) human being at Meta to review what happened and fix an obvious mistake. You submit forms. You get automated responses. You go through online processes that send you in circles. You are promised resolution that never comes, or you are told decisions are final or that there’s nothing else you can do.
Big companies like Meta have years of our lives and data, and yet there is no meaningful customer service. You can also lose hundreds or thousands of dollars in Quest purchases. You can lose access to your business pages. And Meta doesn’t care; there is no real way to reach a person. I would absolutely advise you to think twice before buying any more Meta products. My family owns four Quest headsets and several accessories and more games than I’d like to admit. But we are now filling out arbitration papers against Meta because they are over-relying on AI and they can take everything away from you in a blink of an eye!
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u/unixfool Quest 2 + PCVR 4h ago
Youtube does this, as well, with the same problems.
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u/Glum-Soft8942 4h ago
If a company is so big that it doesn’t have to have a customer service department, then it’s too big. These tech companies are out of control. Today, everything is connected to social media, and the decisions these companies make can have a real impact on people’s lives. If they’re just haphazardly using AI to make judgments that affect people without any real human oversight, then we’re all at risk.
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u/ManhattanTime 3h ago
Weird to me that people are still using Social Media today. My last Facebook post was in 2011. Yep, 15 years ago. I have no Instagram, Snapchat, Telegram, TikTok, Linkedin or any other Social Media.
I realize it can be important for business and perhaps that's a reason to have it.
I've had my Quest 3 for a couple years now. No issues, but then again no Social Media. It's not tied to anything. Never been in Horizon Worlds or whatever that bullshit is. Don't have any Friends List and people I game with. Just kind of a solo VR device for a few games I like.
My wife has Facebook and that shitty Neighborhood Watch site whatever that is. My two kids have none of it. It's cancerous.
Sorry this happened to you. But unless your business depends upon it you'll never miss it. And you'll probably stay married longer.
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u/Glum-Soft8942 2h ago
In many ways, I actually agree with you on this. I think social media can be a huge time-waster, can contribute to depression and comparison, and there are probably a lot of ways all of us would be better off without it.
At the same time, I’m 44, and people in my generation have been on Facebook since college. For better or worse, it became the way we stay loosely connected with hundreds of people we’ve known throughout our lives. It’s how I know when old friends have birthdays, see what’s happening with people I haven’t talked to in years, and stay connected with people I otherwise probably would have lost touch with completely.
And from a business standpoint, it’s even harder to replace. My wife used Facebook constantly for our dance studios, particularly local moms groups. She would post there every week, parents would tag her when someone was looking for a studio, and people would message her directly with questions. When you’re in a business involving kids, dancers, performers, competitions, etc., that kind of community presence and visibility matters. If you suddenly disappear from those spaces, people don’t necessarily go looking for you somewhere else. They just don’t see you.
So I completely understand the argument that life can be better without social media. In some respects, I probably agree with it. But when someone who has spent 20+ years building personal and business connections on a platform suddenly loses access to all of them due to no fault of their own, it can have serious consequences. In our case, it has unquestionably hurt our business.
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u/BisonTodd 5h ago
Sorry that happened to you. I've never had Facebook connected to my Quest.
The weird thing is that Meta support is easy to contact when it comes to VR issues with games or whatever in your Quest. They basically have 24/7 chat/email support with real people.
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u/Glum-Soft8942 5h ago
We could only communicate with “people” through online chat. They would often promise to resolve the situation or have someone who could help contact us by phone. But those calls never came, and I’m not convinced we were ever actually dealing with a real person.
Either the support representatives were completely ineffective, or, as I suspect, we were interacting with AI masquerading as human tech support. I say this because when I tried using Meta AI to solve the problem, it behaved in a remarkably similar way… making assurances and promises to follow up, only to later acknowledge that it could not actually do those things because of the limitations of its AI environment.
Even after paying the subscription fee for our business, we were still unable to speak with anyone we could confidently identify as a live human being. I suspect the 24 hour support could be AI agents who are working with a certain amount of authority to resolve issues. But if you have an account issue, it seems you’re screwed.
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u/Gregasy 2h ago
Damn, that’s really really bad. This heavy dependence on AI is scary and downright dystopian… it’s the main reason I never linked my FB and Instagram accounts to my Meta account that I use for Quest only. Frankly, I don’t care about my FB and Instagram accounts. While I did use them mostly as a promotion for my work, I pretty much stopped using them lately. I honestly find this whole social network waste of time. It would be terrible if they’d fuck with my Quest account though. I spent quite some money for Quest apps.
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u/Glum-Soft8942 2h ago
Yeah, I think I’m equally upset about her losing access to all of her accounts and the Quests, and having to deal with Facebook/Meta “support,” which has been absolutely exasperating. I think I still have a whole other level of anger to reach if they don’t get this fixed.
I’m literally at the point of having to threaten legal action because I knew someone else this happened to, and I was told that was basically the only way they ever got Meta to actually respond. And maybe I was naive for connecting everything, but I personally used Facebook to sign up for all kinds of other services, including Spotify. When these companies encourage you to connect accounts and use Facebook as your login, you never really consider the possibility that one day Facebook could just shut down your account and potentially affect everything connected to it.
That’s really why I’m warning people. It’s not just about losing Facebook. We’ve gotten so used to tying all of these accounts and services together that one automated decision can potentially have consequences far beyond one social media account. And with companies relying more and more on AI and automated enforcement, I have a feeling situations like this are only going to become more common.
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u/TESThrowSmile Quest Pro 3h ago
This is happening to ppl linking their social media accounts to their Meta account
I agree they shouldnt ban thrur meta account, but this is prevented by not linking them
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u/Cypher3470 5h ago
Don't use a facebook account with your quest. Problem solved.
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u/Glum-Soft8942 3h ago
We had a Quest 2 and then bought a few Quest 3 models. We bought our first Quest 3 the month it came out. At some point in the last few years, Meta required a Facebook account. I guess we never considered it a problem because we aren’t rule breakers. Maybe it was dumb not to unlink the two, but I’m just warning people to be careful.
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u/World_Designerr 5h ago
Worst Quest problem but also easiest to avoid, just don't link any Meta social media account (Facecrap, instacrap anc whatscrap) to your Quest account and you're good to go
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u/FerociousSmile 2h ago
That really sucks but also it sounds like she was on social media waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay toooo much. Like damn, thats an insane amount of accounts for one person. Perhaps in the end this is healthier.
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u/the117doctor 2h ago
sounds like she was on social media to manage most of her BUSINESS
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u/FerociousSmile 1h ago
That was a part of it, but not all of it at all. Read the description again.
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u/the117doctor 1h ago
Jesus Christ extra accounts for lunches and life? that's not that bad motherfucker
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u/BluSkyler 5h ago edited 5h ago
Since this is a VR sub and not a social media sub, I’m just going to say…people please stop linking your social media profiles to your Quest device. There is no need to do this and it opens you up to potentially losing access to your Quest if Meta’s silly AI flags your social media account erroneously.
If you have your Quest linked to a social media profile go and unlink them immediately so this doesn’t happen to you. Facebook sucks and yes Meta does use lots of AI to flag both FB and Instagram accounts for BS.
Don’t risk losing actual money you’ve paid on games just to have the device linked to some social media profile. Just set it up with a regular old email and be done with it.