Dear Steven,

I found your quote in the "How Sticky is Your Membership in Facebook?" article so inspiring, I started pressing the delete button on my Facebook account hard and fast, until it was almost wiped clean!! It took about 8 hours.
I kept The Scrabulous application and thus, my account, because I really did enjoy playing
Scrabble on line with my good buds who live so far away. Also, truthfully, I was slowly weaning myself from what my friends and I now refer to as the "anti-social network" time wasting addiction.
While I did take measures to at least provide myself with some on line security with Facebook in the first place like a false name, false birthday, false email etc., so only my REAL friends knew how to find me, I was totally naive as to the true nature of Facebook, and how much Big Brother really is watching. Until I read your article. So thank you.

However, I did go out of my way to forward links to your very helpful "2504 Steps to closing your Facebook account" as well as the NY Times article to all of my Facebook "friends", via sent messages, My Wall and My Fun Wall applications, as insightful and timely food for thought. A few weeks later, my friends and I noticed that the Wall and Fun Wall messages regarding your information that I posted, were removed from all of our profiles by Facebook with a quirky little "spam message" in its place. Which was very interesting, considering the sheer volume of really offensive discussion board posts I've read, authentic spamming, disturbing psychological profile application invitations, and profane wall messages I had been forwarded in the past year without THEM being removed by Facebook.

Then, last week, with out warning, the "team at Facebook" disabled my account.
I pressed the inquiry with them via email, and I was told it was because I had sent "spam", and that their decision was FINAL. Ironic and disturbing, given all of the other clear "Terms of Use" violations I had already done, like the fake name, fake birthday and fake email from the beginning, without a problem.

Well, I am so very glad that I had already deleted 90% of my Facebook profile and content before this. But now I have a disabled account that the "team at Facebook" won't let me gain access to, in order to finally DELETE it.
Also, it seems to me now that Facebook isn't REALLY a forum for authentic, legitimate free speech, is it? Unless of coarse you are a young teen girl naively pimpin' yourself in your photo albums which every cyberstalker with a Facebook account can whack himself off to. Or you are sending wall messages to your dealer to get your next drug fix. But excuse me, now I'm ranting.

Do you have any advice you can give me about how I can delete my disabled Facebook account now?
Regards,
Violet

Hi Violet,

It's pretty incredible that they still haven't offered a way to batch-delete your own content, which is much easier to do on other networks. If you must stay on, it's good at least that you're not providing valuable personal information there, and using a false profile instead.

Even more sobering, it's very interesting that they would erase the links to my content calling it 'spam' - that's a pretty clear illustration of their ownership of / supremacy on their own network. It's a pretty straightforward issue, but most people fail to see it for what it is. You can't have net neutrality on a closed network.

All I can suggest is to write to them via email and make sure your account is closed... feel free to open up another fake one to continue playing Scrabble though!