Meta support allegedly says selfie verification may be part of wider account ban problem

A Reddit post that popped up a few days ago claims that Meta support privately told a user that the ongoing wave of account bans is a global issue, and that the selfie verification process may be part of why so many appeals are failing.

According to the post by u/BlaxXxican_2500 on r/facebook, a friend of theirs managed to reach an actual human at Meta support, which is already rare. What they were told is that when users submit a selfie for identity verification, the facial recognition system isn’t properly matching the face to the account, which causes it to flag the person as a bot and block the appeal entirely.

Whether that’s actually what’s happening under the hood is hard to say. Meta has not confirmed this, and the explanation comes entirely from one person’s account of a support conversation. Still, it lines up with something a lot of frustrated users have been saying for months.

The post also mentions that Meta support described the delays as being caused by a massive review queue, essentially a virtual line of millions of affected accounts being looked at one by one. Another user in the comments, writing in Spanish, said a Meta agent told them the same thing: that it was a global problem and they couldn’t give a timeline.

I’ve been tracking this situation for a while now. What started as scattered complaints eventually became hard to ignore. Earlier this year, I reported on another wave of Meta bans hitting users across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads seemingly at random, and before that put together a full breakdown of what to do if your Facebook account gets disabled.

Over on our sister site, TechIssuesToday, I covered this going back even further. The original mass ban report dates to when users across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp first started getting hit with sudden blocks and no real explanation. Meta eventually acknowledged it had been over-banning accounts during a global CSE crackdown, though it never went into much detail about what actually went wrong.

One detail the OP mentioned is that if the 180-day appeal window closes and the account gets permanently deleted, there’s no data left to verify, so even if Meta eventually fixes the system, it might be too late for a lot of people.

Again, Meta hasn’t confirmed any of this. Support agents aren’t always privy to what’s going on inside a company, so it’s best to take the information with a grain of salt. Still, it doesn’t change the fact that this is a major problem, and Meta hasn’t been fully transparent about the situation. This might just be the closest we’ll get to an official explanation.

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