Every so often a story lands that makes the argument better than I ever could. This one is worth reading if you run any part of your business, club or community group on a social platform — because it is not really a story about social media. It's a story about what happens when the thing you built sits on ground you don't own.
What happened
Sarah Sharples at news.com.au reported the case of a Victorian woman, Christine Hocking, who had five accounts abruptly shut down in May. Among them was a Facebook and Instagram volunteer community page for a junior surfing club on the Mornington Peninsula, along with personal accounts she used for paid work. She described the experience as “traumatic”, and reported spending around thirty hours a week trying to get back in.
She still doesn't know which account triggered it. Her suspicion is photographs of kids in wetsuits — a surfing club, doing the obvious thing a surfing club does. The group had taken the care to get parental waivers signed for those photos.
An RMIT professor quoted in the piece explained the mechanism plainly: image-analysis tools primed to flag potentially inappropriate content will sometimes catch people whose content is entirely innocuous. And the report is clear this is not a one-off — it describes the same thing happening to Australians repeatedly, with no warning, and with real financial and mental-health consequences.
The detail that stopped me was what happened next. She paid for verification in order to reach support, provided a passport, phone number and multiple email addresses, and at one point had someone from the platform join a Zoom call to look at her computer. It still went nowhere — she reported being told there was nothing that could be done. She is now paying a third-party recovery company $600 to try.
It's worth reading the full report at news.com.au.
The part that should worry a business owner
It isn't the false positive. Any system reviewing billions of images will get some wrong, and reasonable people can accept that.
It's that she was never told what the alleged breach actually was — which makes a meaningful appeal impossible before you even start. And when a platform decides your account is finished, your appeal goes back to the same organisation that made the call. In fairness, Meta has previously said it offers several routes, including in-app appeals, its Help Centre and an AI support assistant launched in Australia this year, and that it's engaging with government on dispute resolution. But note what that list has in common: every step stays inside the company, and the newest one is itself automated.
What doesn't exist is an external umpire — an independent body in Australia that can compel a different answer.
That gap has been recognised for years. The ACCC's Digital Platforms Inquiry recommended an independent dispute-resolution scheme back in 2019, and a review of the Online Safety Act recommended an ombudsman again. The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman has fielded around two thousand complaints about digital platforms in two years while having no power to act on them, and wants a Communications Ombudsman with binding decisions — free to complain, funded by the platforms themselves. Consumer group Choice backs it. The federal government gave in-principle support in 2022.
It may well happen. But you cannot run a business, or a surf club, on a reform that has been pending since 2019.
What actually gets lost
People underestimate this because they think of it as "losing the page". What goes is usually:
- The audience. Not the people — the ability to reach them. Every follower you spent years earning is a connection held by the platform, not by you.
- The content. Years of posts, photos and video, often the only copy that ever existed.
- The conversations. Direct messages are where enquiries, bookings and half your customer service live. They go too.
- The proof. For a lot of small operators the page is the portfolio. Losing it means losing the evidence you can do the work.
- Any way to recoup it. No contract, no service level, no compensation. You were never the customer.
That last one is the crux. On a free platform you are not a client with rights — you are a user under terms that can be changed and enforced automatically. That isn't a scandal, it's just the deal. The mistake is not noticing you took it.
What owning your website actually gives you
A website is not magic and it doesn't replace social. What it does is put the foundations somewhere nobody can switch off:
- The domain. Registered to you, renewable by you, transferable by you. This is the single most important asset in your online presence and the one most often held by somebody else — see who actually owns your domain.
- The content. Files on hosting you control, backed up, exportable, yours to move.
- The email list. The only audience you genuinely own. A list of people who asked to hear from you cannot be deleted by a moderation system.
- Search presence. Rankings accrue to your domain over years. That equity is yours, not rented.
- The record. Your work, your prices, your history, in a form you can prove and back up.
So use social — but use it as a road, not a house
I am not telling anyone to delete their Instagram. Social is genuinely good at what it is good at: reach, immediacy, showing personality, and finding people who were never going to search for you. For a community group it may be the only realistic way to reach parents on a Saturday morning.
The distinction that matters is distribution versus storage. A road takes people to your place. You do not build your house on the road.
In practice:
- Publish the real thing on your own site first, then link to it from social. The gallery, the price list, the results, the event calendar — the canonical copy lives at your domain.
- Keep your own copy of everything you post. Photos and video off the phone and into storage you control. Both Meta platforms let you download your data — do it, and put a reminder in the calendar to do it again.
- Move people to something you own. An email list is unfashionable and it still works. It is also the only channel that survives an account closure.
- Never let one person hold the keys. More than one admin, on accounts tied to a business email address you control, not someone's personal one.
- Put your contact details somewhere permanent. If your only phone number is in an Instagram bio, it disappears with the bio.
For a club or volunteer group specifically: a simple site with the calendar, results, contacts and photo policy costs very little and cannot be closed by an automated review at four in the morning.
The honest version of the risk
This is unlikely to happen to you. Most accounts run for years without incident, and I'd rather not trade in fear.
But it is worth thinking about the shape of the risk rather than the odds. It is low-probability, sudden, total, and — this is the important part — you have no way back. Those are exactly the risks worth spending a small amount of money to avoid, in the same way you insure a building you will probably never need to claim on.
A domain and a modest website is a genuinely small annual cost against losing a decade of work with nobody to ring.
Where to start
If you already have a site, the useful question is whether it's actually carrying its weight — is the real content there, or is it a brochure while everything meaningful happens on Facebook? The free website audit takes about fifteen seconds and needs no sign-up.
If you don't have one, or the one you have is long past it, that's what I do. And if you're not certain who currently holds your domain — genuinely, a lot of people aren't — you can now hold and manage domains in your own account, with the transfer code available to you at any time.
Related reading
- Who actually owns your client's domain?
- Order, renew and manage domains from your launchpad
- Email deliverability: how to stop landing in spam
- What I've been building — and what it means for you