Digital death

 

Sometime in September of the year 2022, I received a surprise most rude, and it was near the date of my birthday too. I was in the middle of my usual browsing in between websites and social media accounts when I was suddenly locked out of my Facebook account, the original one I set up since I can no longer remember when. (I was one of the last holdouts then among my peers.)
 

In one fell swoop, I lost everything -- well almost everything. I lost an entire online archive of essays, rants, thoughts during extra-lucid and emo moments, over-shared viral posts that took my interest, the engaging comment threads that went with those, and most especially the irreplaceable photos.
 

Of course, I lost all my contacts along with it.
 

How did it feel?
 

It felt awful. I didn't know I was so dependent on FB that my life had been revolving around it. I practically opened and closed my day with it. It was where I chatted with everybody -- from family to friends to coworkers and informants to total strangers who needed my help as information officer.
In an instant, it was all gone, like my house burned down, or was swept away, or eaten whole by termites while I wasn't looking. So yes, it felt like a kind of death.
 

I was so disappointed by the rudeness of it all, since there was not enough warning and all. In its aftermath, I was groping in the dark for solutions that needed to be immediately found, when it struck me that I should probably just create another FB account.
 

It was so ridiculous that as I was seething in anger, I was also fighting off the urge to laugh inside me, as creating another account was as easy as ABC. 

And so, while I and my coworkers were left wondering why, I immediately created another account just so I would be able to inform everyone of what happened.
 

But like a plot twist from a very bad script, that, too, got mysteriously locked just as I was warming up to my new life online while trying to recover my 2,000-plus contacts. It appears that, while I was adding a contact after another at a fast clip, FB interpreted it as a bot's activity.
 

Good thing I have this habit of backing up my long articles, so those were safe. But the rest was gone, forever.
 

What went wrong?
 

With FB not giving any clear reason why, I could only speculate. Maybe it was the photos of boys being circumcised which I regularly reported as part of the medical mission of sorts held regularly by the local government. To be fair to FB, I was warned about that, even though I have routinely pixelized the boys' genital area thinking there is nothing to it, nothing that violates their person, invades their privacy, or nothing that is sexually suggestive in the least -- after all, these are but kids. I received some penalty for it (like my page appearing less in people's timelines or something), even if I made an effort to explain my side.  I took all that injustice on the chin, but not without some resentment for being thought of as a ped*phile, I admit.
 

But to go through it twice in a row is most discombobulating.
 

I mean, what have I done? I am not into terror, I don't do porn, I am not slandering anyone or stealing somebody's identity. Am I some kind of criminal that I deserved to be treated like that? Are my years' or decades' worth of content not enough reason to be more considerate and circumspect on their part?
 

Apparently not.
 

Apparently, what I needed to do was to make yet another account. Fortunately, I didn't have to.
I remembered that I had another pre-existing account that I barely used, so I went back to it and used it as my new account. The only catch is, it was under a pseudonym. But that was just as well, given how traumatizing now to identify myself under my real name.
 

I am slowly recovering my contacts one at a time and I am largely back in the social media game. But the pain of being digitally killed still lingers, especially since I am now sporting a new name, the choice of which I have to constantly explain to anyone who asks. (For the record and to end speculations, it's a code name for my hometown, whose patron saint is St. Vincent Ferrer.) Somehow, I feel like some kind of a felon forced into hiding for nothing.