What to Do Before and After Meta Disables Your Author Account

My new steamy romance pen name’s Threads account was active for fewer than 72 hours before one of the worst possible notifications got shoved in my face: Your Threads profile has been suspended.

I’d made maybe three posts in that time, plus a handful of likes and comments. I said and did nothing that should’ve flagged me for “account integrity” Community Standards violations. Nevertheless, I had to provide a verification selfie (!) upon appealing if I wanted to get my account back.

I did. And I lost my appeal. The @daphnepondbooks Threads account is no more. (That being said, she’s still on Instagram for now, and you can sign up for her newsletter.)

As my very unprofessional posts on my main Threads account will demonstrate, it is extremely upsetting to have an author account taken down without just cause and with no real recourse. Reddit is awash with people reporting similar seemingly random bans—not just on Threads, but on Instagram and Facebook, and across platforms. If you’ve ever reported a comment or a post for an obvious Community Standards violation—like hate speech—then gotten a notification weeks later that no action was taken, you know how broken Meta’s moderation is in particular.

Daphne Pond is a brand new pen name, but it does not take much imagination to grasp how devastating this would be if the account had thirty or three hundred or three thousand posts.

Hear this: you cannot protect your author accounts on social media from getting disabled. But that doesn’t mean you’re powerless. Follow the suggestions below to secure your audience now and potentially save your sanity later.

Do This Before Your Author Account Gets Taken Down

This first step is not particularly fun, but it is important: back up your posts. For your convenience, here are the steps straight from Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Twitter.

This might seem a little ridiculous, especially considering that major platforms don’t allow you to bulk-upload and stagger/schedule old posts. But just because that functionality is currently lacking from platforms doesn’t mean we’ll never see it added. Even if it never is, having those images, captions, et cetera—and all the data concerning which posts got the most engagement—can help you make decisions about which posts you ought to take the time to manually post again with or without tweaks.

The second and even more important thing to do is send anyone perusing your socials straight to your author newsletter.

Have as many author accounts as you want, but don’t trust them to keep you connected to your readers. Only a newsletter can achieve that. Subscribers will always be infinitely more valuable than followers because you own your email list and can take it with you from platform to platform. Plus, the inbox gives you a far better chance to be seen than any algorithm or “curated” feed.

Don’t have an author newsletter yet? Don’t know how to attract readers’ clicks? I’m hosting a free workshop that will help you get started. More details below!

Has Your Author Account Been Disabled? Do This Now

Let your readers across all your other platforms know. Remind them that social media platforms do this all the time. If they want to keep in touch with you and all your goings-on, they should sign up for your newsletter!

After that’s done, it’s up to you whether to create a new account on the same platform that smote you. I’ll probably start another Threads account for Daphne Pond eventually. This time, I’ll have a clear-eyed understanding of just how delicate a thread can be.

And my first post on any new author account I make from now on? A nudge to sign up for my newsletter.

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