It appears my new account was also taken over, no doubt by those who took over my original account. And today I got a sextortion email. Lovely.

I have almost no faith I will be able to recover my FB account after reading comments online about what others have gone through. FB is run by computers and algorithms and doesn't deal with nuance. Uploading my photo ID failed, probably because this is an older PC and the camera does not take nice, sharp pictures. But the upload has to be done on the computer that was last used to log in to FB. I'm not even going to try to talk to a real person at FB, I'm not sure such a thing exists.

I'm wasting no time angsting about the lost pictures and posts because FB was never my main storage for anything. I have all my pictures here, and I considered my posts ephemeral.

I'm more bothered by the fact that FB makes it near impossible to resolve situations like this AND by the fact that the hacker(s) have used my account to post things against FB's community standards which has caused FB to temporarily disable my accounts--the old and the new. . . . Maybe that's not a bad thing.

I highly recommend that you turn on two-factor (or multi-) if you haven't already done so. However, I set up two-factor authentication for my new account, yet it's apparently been taken over.

Life's too short to waste on this nonsense. I haven't been happy with FB for some time, especially after I discovered that what I see in my feed is drastically different from one PC to the next. Fb controls what others see of your posts and what you see of theirs. It's a mess. Meta is not a good company in my opinion. (Can you believe this clown show between Musk and Zuckerberg!? Two of the wealthiest "men" on earth, owners of two of the largest corporations, are going to duke it out. How low we've sunk.)

So I'm considering dropping FB altogether. This seems like the push I've needed to find a better alternative. I still have my blogspot account and might start posting entries there again. I don't know yet.

The really hard part is not being able to let many friends know what's happened. Slowly, I'll be able to get in touch with them I hope.

P.S. For those who followed, I took possession of my new car yesterday. And the Subaru is also back, sitting in the drive waiting for me to do something about it.

I'd like to say what I actually think of FB but think I might be banned from this forum.

J/k

Sorry about your ordeal with Facebook, Bernard. I don’t store or do anything “important” on FB. Indeed I’d say move on and forget about FB. Good luck!

Thanks, Ax.

A quick update... Facebook gave me back the new account I opened. Not the original, old one. I suspect that is gone for good. Don't know how much I'll be on it 'going forward', I'm still rethinking it all.

well that's good news. i love your wall on FB. so many interesting projects of all kinds. i just sent your new ID a friend request.