Recently, Twitter has deactivated users who have been inactive on the platform for a long time. Apparently, Facebook is also doing a series of account deactivations, but with another reason – particularly if they find out that those Facebook accounts are linked to Instagram accounts that are violating community guidelines. We hope this does not happen to you. Continue reading for the details of the news.
Deactivated over violations of accounts they don’t own
Facebook users can link their Facebook accounts to their Instagram accounts. But there can be instances when hackers can link your Facebook accounts to spam Instagram accounts where they commit community guidelines violations. If that happens, Facebook will definitely deactivate your account.
Some Facebook users affected by the deactivation reported this on Reddit, where they said they received a message from Facebook saying they could no longer use the Facebook and the Messenger apps because of a linked Instagram violating the photo-sharing platform’s community guidelines. These linked Instagram accounts are not owned by those users, and consist of random letters and numbers typical of spam accounts.
What’s even stranger is that the hackers who were able to link spam Instagram accounts to real Facebook users’ accounts do such so they can freely violate Instagram’s community guidelines. This has led to the company disabling those linked spam Instagram accounts and the real Facebook profiles of innocent users who are just victims of this cyber threat.
Unclear
The exact dynamics of this linking and how it happens are still unclear. Even more interesting is that various sources failed to attribute this to hacking, but the possibility cannot be ruled out. For instance, there are no signs of accounts getting compromised, and the affected Facebook accounts were never breached, except for the unauthorized linking.
Experts, however, believe these incidents lie in potential security vulnerabilities in an application interface (API) or a similar system. It is possible that the “hackers” are taking advantage of these vulnerabilities to link spam Instagram accounts with real Facebook accounts to carry out community guidelines violations.
Casey Ellis, founder, and chief technology of Bugcrowd, a renowned crowdsourced cybersecurity platform, issued a statement regarding this. He said, “This attack, and the vulnerabilities it exploits, highlight the difficulty and risks that come with platform integration.”
Legal action
Moreover, the affected Facebook users have already taken legal recourse. Some filed complaints with various state attorneys general, particularly reaching out to the California attorney general since Meta’s headquarters are there.
Some users reportedly said their accounts got restored within a week of speaking with the California attorney general.
Additionally, for users outside the United States affected by this, it is recommended that they file complaints to the relevant government agencies in their respective locations.
Ellis hopes that Meta will address this issue, but Meta has not yet released a statement regarding this as of press time.
