Facebook account disabled for having too many Realtor friends.

Here’s the “more to the story”:

The day I was disabled, I had received 3 or 4 friend requests. All of these requests were from Realtors. I accepted the first one and sent a message thanking them.

I accepted the 2nd one and sent a thank you message. AFTER I accepted I got a warning that I was violating FB’s Terms of Use in regards to abusive behavior. No mention of what I did wrong. Certainly it was some error, I thought, because how can ACCEPTING a friend REQUEST be considered abusive?

I accepted the 3rd request and up pops another warning. Moments later, my account was logged off. Upon logging back in, I was notified that my account was disabled.

I sent an email to Facebook’s User Operations and received an auto-reply stating that they would get back to me sometime.

Four days later, I received another form letter email, this time telling me that “Facebook has limits in place to prevent behavior that other users may find annoying or abusive. These limits restrict the rate at which you can use certain features on the site. Unfortunately, we cannot provide you with the specific rates that have been deemed abusive.”

The email also stated “Also, please keep in mind that we do not allow users to maintain a personal profile for business or promotional purposes. If you want to give your business a presence on Facebook, I recommend creating a Facebook page at the following link: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php.”

I was sure that this was a standard reply, because if they had taken the time to look at my profile, they would see that I did not use it to plug my business and that I did have a Facebook fan page for my business. I was even a Facebook advertiser!

I pressed for a better explanation, and four days later I received this message: “Your account was disabled because you exceeded Facebook’s limits on multiple occasions, despite having been warned to slow down.” Slow down? slow down doing what?

It went on to say that they believed that some of my friends were strangers and had determined that a “large group of my friends shared similar physical characteristics”. Since the only common denominator was that most of my friends were Realtors, I assumed that’s what they were referring to.

I’ve been involved in the real estate industry for 30+ years. I count over 18,000 real estate firms as clients. I couldn’t even begin to estimate the agent count. I’ve traveled to virtually every city in the US, attended well over a thousand real estate conventions. Of my 2700 FB friends, probably 2500 of them were Realtors. I have met and established relationships with a lot more than 2500 Realtors.

Bare in mind, that these FB friends didn’t get added overnight. They came as a mixture of requests from me, requests from others and suggestions my friends have made. I don’t think I ever used FB’s “friend suggestions” feature. I’ve never used any application, game or quiz, some encourage quickly adding friends, joining groups, commenting as part of the game play. In any event, every FB relationship formed was with a willing user. It is well publicized that FB has a 5000 friend limit. Many of my friends have reached that limit.

If FB thinks that 2700 friends is too many, why set the limit at 5000?

If FB doesn’t want the platform to be used for business relationships, why did they include workplaces as networks?

There is a limit for nearly everything on Facebook.

There is a messaging limit

There is a search limit

There is a friend limit

There is a group limit

There is a poking limit

There is a wall posting limit

Unfortunately, they refuse to reveal just what those limits may be. Another disabled user sums it up well: “Picture if you will, getting pulled over by police. Upon appearing at your window and looking at your ID, the policeman says, “I’m going to let you off with a warning, but don’t let me catch you doing it again, or you’re going to jail.” Doing what again, you might answer. The policeman looks sternly at you and bellows “I can’t tell you that, but you better not do it again.”