Stay up to date without Facebook

Many local businesses and organizations publish only on Facebook. However, you can still follow them while avoiding Facebook’s issues.

  1. The latest problem with Facebook
  2. How to stay up to date without Facebook

1. The latest problem with Facebook

Facebook’s new AI moderation tool is banning what appear to be tens of thousands of innocent users around the world, including in Plovdiv.

Meta often accuses these people of terrible things, such as child sexual exploitation. However, many banned users appear to be innocent people who just use Facebook to keep in touch, and they don’t know what they supposedly did wrong.

When they get banned, it becomes harder for them to participate in their communities, since so many organizations publish only on Facebook.

What happens if you get banned?

You’re asked for private information
Often, Meta promises to review your ban if you submit a government ID and photos or a video of your face, taken from specific angles. However, many people who have submitted this information report that the ban isn’t lifted. They wonder what Meta will do with their ID and face.

You get no human support
Many banned users say they’re stuck with AI chats and no other support. It appears that no human reviews their case.

You lose everything you didn’t download
Many people say that the ban notice gives them a button to download their content, but it doesn’t work. They lose access to all messages and photos, sometimes from many years of posting.

You probably can’t create a new account
Users report that any new account they create is instantly banned.

You’re locked out of Whatsapp, Instagram, etc.
A Meta ban often applies to all Meta products. And if you used your Facebook identity to log in to unrelated sites, you’ll also lose access to them.

Learn more

  • BBC story
  • Overview with timeline and tips
  • Change.org petition that summarizes the impact and links to media coverage
  • Reddit subs for Facebook and Instagram include many stories of banned users

2. How to stay up to date without Facebook

In Plovdiv, many businesses and organizations publish only on Facebook. Here’s how to stay in touch without depending on Meta.

On Facebook now? Prepare

  1. Back up your content in case you get caught in the ban wave or age verification comes and you don’t want to submit to it.
  2. If you have friends who communicate only through Messenger, give them your phone number or email address.
  3. Go to the Facebook page of each business or organization that you follow and wouldn’t want to lose. Copy the URL of that page and save it in a document separate from Facebook.
  4. If you use Facebook to log in to other sites, change the logins to use an email address instead.
  5. Consider keeping a low profile on Facebook – reduce how much you post, and interact less with content to avoid triggering the over-reactive AI ban hammer.

Follow pages without Facebook

Businesses and government agencies have public pages on Facebook. But even though they’re public, Facebook still forces you to log in to see more than a bit of the page.

Here’s how to get around that and avoid the hassle of visiting individual pages.

  1. Choose an RSS reader. These are free, lightweight sites or apps that show you new content that has appeared on the sites you follow. Feedly is a friendly one that lets you follow up to 100 sites for free.
  2. Choose a service that creates RSS feeds from Facebook pages. FetchRSS is an easy one and will create feeds for 5 Facebook pages in the free version.
  3. Create an RSS feed for each page: Paste the URL of the Facebook page into the feed creator, and then copy the address that the generator creates.
  4. Go to your feed reader and paste the feed address to subscribe to it.
  5. Visit your feed reader to see what’s new in all the pages you follow, without having to log in to Facebook.

Follow news sites directly instead of through Facebook

Many news sites offer RSS feeds, so you can follow them in the same reader you use for Facebook posts.

Usually, your feed reader will find the feed if you give it the URL of the main site. If that doesn’t work, you can go to the main site and look for “RSS” in the menu or at the bottom of the page.

Here are some useful RSS feeds. Copy the address and paste it into your feed reader.

  • Novinite (Sofia News Agency) in English: RSS
  • Plovdiv24 city news in Bulgarian: RSS
  • The Sofia Globe in English: RSS

Learn about events without Facebook

The best event calendar for Plovdiv: Справочник Марица

Encourage you favorite club or organization to submit their events to the Марица calendar in addition to Facebook.

A subset of Plovdiv events for people who don’t yet speak Bulgarian: Plovdiv event calendar

Message people without Facebook or Whatsapp

Viber is popular in Bulgaria, but it collects a lot of data about you and your contacts. Consider using Signal instead.