Facebook is proud of its artificial intelligence technology, and has come to heavily rely on it to help moderate content on the platform. However, these supposedly brilliant algorithms can make some pretty stupid mistakes. That was the case this week when a Pythons and Pandas coding instructor was banned from Facebook for life because the algorithm mistakenly flagged him for trading exotic animals.

To make matters worse, when the instructor appealed this decision, the appeal was also handled by AI, which obviously reached the same conclusion. When he reached out to friends who work in Meta, even they told him there was nothing they could do. According to Facebook’s rules, they only hang onto user data for 180 days, and because the instructor waited longer than that to reach out, his account is gone for good.

“The bottom line seems to be that Meta’s AI made a mistake, a big one. (You can be sure that I’ll be using this example when I teach courses on machine learning.) The fact that both the original judgment and the appeal were handed by AI is pretty ridiculous,” the instructor wrote. “But even more absurd is the fact that because I didn’t react to their ban within a certain amount of time, there now seems to be no way for me to undo it.”

While this is just one user’s story, it’s indicative of Facebook’s overall indifference toward helping people (including the victims of hackers and scammers) who have been locked out of their accounts.

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