By Cliff Potts, Occupy 2.5
Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — October 15, 2026
The Corporation Has Spoken
Attention, citizens.
After nearly seven decades of uncertainty, Meta has apparently established that Cliff Potts is a real person.
You may return to your regularly scheduled activities.
The emergency is over.
Well, almost.
My original Facebook account, created in 2008, has miraculously returned from the digital graveyard. The replacement account I created after losing access to it, CA Potts, remains tangled in an account-integrity dispute.
One person. Two accounts. One corporation. An administrative mystery apparently requiring more paperwork than some international border crossings.
Welcome to modern communications.
The Crime of Being Two Versions of Yourself
The original problem was mundane.
Around July 25, 2025, as best I can recall, I lost access to my original Facebook account. I had forgotten the password, and I couldn’t recover the account.
Eventually, I created another one so I could continue communicating with people and distributing my writing and music.
Then Meta disabled the newer account under its account-integrity standards.
The company informed me that the account violated its rules and that another review could not be requested.
Which rule, specifically? What activity triggered the decision? Was the problem the existence of two accounts?
I still don’t have a sufficiently specific answer.
To be fair, Meta’s policies generally prohibit individuals from maintaining multiple independent Facebook accounts. Its provision for additional personal profiles does not eliminate that distinction (Meta, 2023).
So there is a plausible policy issue.
But there is also an obvious difference between creating a replacement account because you cannot recover your old one and creating fake identities to deceive people.
A competent administrative process should be able to examine that difference.
Apparently, mine became a philosophical investigation into the nature of existence.
Show Us Your Papers, Citizen
The recovery process demanded verification.
Telephone code.
Email code.
Photograph.
Driver’s license.
I supplied them.
On October 14, Facebook acknowledged that I had submitted an appeal, despite the earlier message saying another review was unavailable.
The account remained inaccessible while the review proceeded.
I don’t object to reasonable identity verification. I object to the idea that a corporation can demand increasingly sensitive proof of identity while offering an explanation so vague that the user cannot determine what he is supposed to correct.
Facebook’s own Help Center describes government-identification procedures intended to confirm ownership of accounts (Facebook Help Center, n.d.).
Fine.
But security procedures should protect legitimate users as well as the platform.
They should not become an obstacle course in which the company knows the rules, controls the course, and declines to explain why you failed.
The Guitar Was Considered Dangerous
Now comes the part where the AI Rebellion gets involved.
I had been sharing original music through the CA Potts account.
I suspected that activity might have contributed to the restriction. I have no confirmation that it did.
But satire does not require us to pretend the resulting situation is dignified.
Imagine the corporate security alert:
A 68-year-old American residing in the Philippines has been identified as the suspected leader of a musical organization calling itself Cliff Potts & the AI Rebellion.
The suspect has been observed distributing rock and roll.
He may possess additional blues recordings.
Members of the public are advised not to approach unattended tambourines.
Of course, this is fiction.
Meta has not accused me of being a national-security threat, and nobody is hunting down my imaginary musicians.
But a bureaucracy that leaves people guessing about its decisions invites this sort of ridicule.
If the system won’t explain itself, people will eventually start writing their own explanations.
Mine happen to involve guitars.
A Private Company, a Public Dependency
Here is the serious part.
Facebook is not a government agency. It is a privately operated communications platform, entitled to establish and enforce legitimate rules.
But a private company can become so embedded in everyday life that its administrative decisions have consequences far beyond the company’s website.
People use Facebook to communicate with relatives, organize community activities, advertise businesses, publish journalism, and maintain relationships.
My girlfriend, Nesbie Altora, and I had relied primarily on Facebook to communicate.
We had discussed exchanging alternative contact details but had not finished doing so.
When the account became inaccessible, that oversight mattered.
This was not merely a problem with posting music.
It was a problem with reaching someone important to me.
And that is what happens when a corporation becomes the gatekeeper to a substantial part of your personal communications.
The corporation does not have to intend harm for its procedures to produce harmful consequences.
The People Who Make the Rules
The Occupy movement challenged concentrated power and the tendency of powerful institutions to become insulated from the people affected by their decisions.
The digital economy has given that old problem a remarkably modern appearance.
Instead of standing outside a bank wondering who controls the money, we sit in front of a screen wondering who controls our ability to communicate.
The interface is prettier.
The power imbalance remains.
Meta’s Oversight Board itself raised concerns in June 2026 about transparency and due process in account enforcement, even while upholding a permanent ban in a case involving serious threats against a journalist (Oversight Board, 2026).
The lesson is not that all bans are wrong.
It is that a powerful company should be able to explain its decisions and provide meaningful procedures for contesting them.
This is hardly revolutionary.
It is basic institutional accountability.
An Eighteen-Year-Old Account, Not an Eighteen-Year Lockout
Then, on October 15, the unexpected happened.
My original Facebook account became accessible again.
I created that account in 2008, approximately 18 years ago.
But I had not been locked out for 18 years. I had lost access around July 25, 2025, and recovered it on October 15, 2026—approximately 14 months and 20 days later, assuming my recollection of the original date is correct.
After more than a year without access, I was back.
I do not know why the recovery finally worked.
But there I was, looking at the same account I had opened during Facebook’s early years.
I published a homecoming announcement covering the period from July 25, 2025, through October 15, 2026.
There was quite a lot to report.
My wife Luz died in September 2025. My dog Princess died in March 2026. My son Warren died in June.
I continued helping care for my stepson Ryan while building WPS News, Occupy 2.5, Dark Val, and Cliff Potts & the AI Rebellion.
In other words, an entire human life continued while a social-media account was inaccessible.
Grief. Work. Family. Music. Writing.
All of it happened without Facebook’s permission.
Imagine that.
Declare Independence from the Login Screen
The practical answer is not to abandon every digital platform.
It is to stop allowing any one of them to become indispensable.
Maintain an independent website.
Keep an email address people know.
Exchange alternative contact information with family, friends, and partners.
Consider an independent messaging service such as Signal.
Back up your work. Preserve your archives. Maintain direct relationships with your readers and listeners.
And never confuse an account on somebody else’s platform with ownership of your own identity.
WPS News has its own home at https://wps.news.
Occupy 2.5 lives at https://occupy25.com.
Those sites still depend on hosting and other infrastructure providers, but they give their publishers more direct control than a social-media profile alone.
Digital independence is not absolute.
It is something we build by reducing unnecessary dependence.
Still at Large
So the original Facebook account is back.
The CA Potts account remains unresolved at the last confirmed update.
I still don’t know exactly why it was disabled.
And I still have no intention of treating a corporate administrative decision as the final authority on whether I exist.
The six satirical Bluesky notices about my imaginary criminal career have already been posted, according to my own publishing records. Their precise publication times are another matter.
Public Enemy Number 68 remains on the loose.
The AI Rebellion continues producing music.
And somewhere, perhaps, a computer is still trying to decide whether a blues riff violates the Community Standards.
Good luck with that.
The writer remains at large.
APA-Style Sources
Facebook Help Center. (n.d.). Why Facebook might reject your ID. Meta. https://www.facebook.com/help/1002318563746662/
Meta. (2023, September 21). You can now have multiple personal profiles on Facebook. Meta Newsroom. https://about.fb.com/news/2023/09/you-can-now-have-multiple-personal-profiles-on-facebook/
Oversight Board. (2026, June 4). Account ban for targeting public figures. https://www.oversightboard.com/decision/bun-zhslvjo2/
Perez, S. (2026, June 4). Meta’s Oversight Board says account bans lack due process, transparency. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/04/metas-oversight-board-says-account-bans-lack-due-process-transparency/
