Social media on the Internet. I live outside my country of origin where I do not have many friends and where very few people can speak my mother tongue or even English. I have been using the Internet since the year 1991 and Social media since 2007, now it is more than a decade. It has helped me to keep in touch with my family, including my old mother, childhood friends, classmates at schcool, university and several shorter courses that I have attended. It has helped me to tighten re.ations with my cousins, second cousins and other more distant relatives.

I have been sharing a lot of information there, including results of family history studies, genealogical research. I have been keeping in touch with other expats, including my countrymen in this country. Social media, particular one site, has been an important part of my daily life for over a decade now.

Then suddenly, my account was disabled. To have it enabled again, I was asked to show a photo of video of my face. They said I have broken the community rules but they never told me what rule and how I have broken. They just gave a link to community standards and asked me to judge myself what my crime is. I was not give a way to defend my self, nobody was there to listen to my explanation or apology. This happened several time since December 2020. Sometimes I was just asked to change my password or enter a security code sent to my email or phone. Then, one day in January 2021 I was given an option to verify my account using a security code sent to my phone. I was offered 3 different numbers, all in different countries. None of them were active any more but they have been numbers of a prepaid card that I had been using a short time in countries where I had lived or travelled during my nomad years from 2010 to 2017. I even couldn't remember listing those numbers in the settings of my profile. They did not offer me my current telephone number even though I think I had used it to log in. There was no button to offer a way to verify my acount in another way or tell them about wrong phone numbers on the page.

They just told me that I will have 30 days to verify my account and that they may not enough staff for verification of accounts, in what case they would be sorry ... my account will be permanently removed anyway.