A DC-based musician’s Facebook account was briefly hacked by someone promoting ISIS — and now the platform will not restore his account because the hackers violated their terms of service.
Andrew Carlson, 34, lost access to his account on Sunday evening.
Carlson was alerted to the hack by his mother, who had sent him a photo of his account featuring the ISIS flag. The account was deactivated within hours.
The next morning, when Carlson attempted to regain control of his account, he received an email from Facebook claiming that he had violated the social media giant’s guidelines and would be permanently banned.
The email from Facebook said that they “don’t allow credible threats to harm others, support for violent organizations or exceedingly graphic content on Facebook.”
Carlson is unaware of what the hackers posted on his account before it was deactivated.
“I responded and explained that I was hacked, possibly by ISIS, and that I had nothing to do with any content posted to the account that evening,” Carlson told the Gateway Pundit. “They responded, again, but did not acknowledge the hacking. They simply repeated that I violated the guidelines and that they would no longer be responding to my emails.”
Facebook responded to his request for help by saying that they will not reactivate it “for any reason” and that “this will be our last message regarding your account.”
“Your account has been permanently disabled for not following the Facebook Community Standards. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to reactivate it for any reason,” the email from Facebook read. “This will be our last message regarding your account. For more information about our policies, please review the Facebook Community Standards.”
Carlson used his account to keep in touch with family and friends, as well as to promote his band. In addition to losing his personal account, he has also lost access to his band’s page.
Another user who was the victim of an ISIS-supporting hacker posted to Reddit six months ago about their issues communicating with Facebook to have their account restored following the hack.
“I’m trying to convince facebook that I haven’t violated any terms which is pretty difficult when your profile picture is an ISIS flag. I even tried requesting the data from my profile so I could at least salvage most of my online data and start over, but again with the loops. I’m told that to request data from a deactivated account, I need to contact facebook via email, so when I contact facebook, they respond and redirect me to the webpage that told me to contact facebook via email,” they wrote.
The replies to the post were filled with dozens of people who have faced the same difficulties — all hacked with ISIS flags — and none having any luck getting their accounts back.
ISIS, and their supporters and sympathizers, have a long history of hacking social media accounts.
In 2018, Facebook admitted that as many as 90 million of their users may have had their access tokens, which keep you logged in so you don’t have to sign in every time, stolen by hackers. They later claimed that the number was closer to 30 million and that they had rectified the issue and nobody would need to change their passwords or change anything.
The same year, a Wisconsin mother of two was arrested for hacking Facebook accounts and using them to promote the terrorist organization.
The terrorist organization continued their attacks on random social media accounts and 2019 saw a large batch of dormant Twitter accounts being stolen to spread their propaganda.
“The hijacked accounts we reviewed included Arabic-speaking videos of Islamic State fighters wielding weapons and other curated content. Others simply contained text — also in Arabic — that praised violence and other attacks, or retweeted other accounts,” TechCrunch reported at the time.
The Gateway Pundit has reached out to multiple contacts at Facebook’s press office for comment, but have not received a response by time of publishing.
