The message lands on a Tuesday you thought was still a Monday, a single gray sentence dropped into the inbox you only opened to look for a coupon code: your account has been suspended for violating community guidelines. No courtroom, no jury, just a digital guillotine that took three clicks to drop and will take three months to lift—if you are lucky, if the appeal is read by human eyes, if the moon is in the correct phase. One moment you are scheduling posts that celebrate a new product, the next you are a ghost with a million followers who can see you but can’t hear you speak. The inventory is real, the payroll is real, the rent is real, yet the storefront that accounted for forty percent of discovery has vanished into the same nowhere that holds deleted spam and broken hyperlinks. This is not a catastrophe; it is the ordinary weather of the attention economy, and you forgot to pack an umbrella because yesterday the sky was blue.
The platforms court you first. They send cheery onboarding emails that address you by the first name you only let your mother use, promising reach, community, conversion, virality—words that sound like love songs to a founder who has just realized that building the thing was the easy part. You pour photography, captions, customer testimonials, and half your waking hours into the feed, and for a while the graph tilts up and to the right, the most seductive diagonal in modern commerce. Then the algorithm changes, or a moderator in a cubicle on another continent mistakes your handmade soap for a controlled substance, or a competitor weaponizes the report button, or the platform simply decides it prefers video over still images and overnight your engagement drops farther than the value of a cryptocurrency meme. You are not a partner; you are a tenant, and the landlord can repaint the walls or evict you on a whim.
Eviction feels personal but it is statistical. The terms of service are written in the same cheerful font as the birthday reminders, yet they reserve the right to terminate “at any time, for any reason or no reason.” You agreed to this in order to open the account, the same way you agree to gravity in order to walk downstairs. The difference is that gravity publishes no quarterly updates. Social platforms do, and every update is a small rewrite of the laws of physics you rely on to keep cash registers ringing. One morning the explore page stops surfacing skincare because the company pivoted to gaming; another morning the link-in-bio becomes a paid feature; another morning the account that took five years to cultivate is gone because the profile photo included a bare shoulder and the bot interpreted flesh as pornography. Each change is announced in a blog post that begins with the word excitement, and each excitement is a reminder that your business is a houseguest in someone else’s house, sleeping on a couch that can be moved, sold, or set on fire while you are still drooling on the pillow.
The instinct is to plead, to send polite emails explaining that you never spammed, never posted hate speech, never used the forbidden herb in any photograph. Sometimes a human writes back, sometimes an auto-reply thanks you for your patience, most often silence expands like fog until you realize you are negotiating with a cloud. Meanwhile the ads you prepaid are still running, because billing and moderation live on different continents inside the same company, and only one of them answers the phone. Revenue dips, panic rises, and you finally understand that the word platform really means thin ice: thick enough to skate on until it isn’t. The fall is not malice; it is simply the moment when your weight intersects with the warming climate of someone else’s quarterly earnings report.
The only insurance is multiplicity. Not the cheerful multi-platform presence marketing gurus recommend so you can “meet customers where they are,” but a hardened redundancy plan that treats every channel as potentially flammable. You post on three social networks, sure, but you also maintain an email list you can export, a podcast hosted on a server you pay for, a text-message community routed through a provider that answers the phone, a print catalog mailed to addresses you own. Each additional channel is another fire escape, another lung, another lottery ticket against the day when the platform that once delivered forty percent of your traffic delivers instead a blank page and a shrug. The work is exhausting, duplicative, mathematically offensive to anyone who grew up believing one good hammer was enough. But the internet is not a toolbox; it is a weather system, and weather demands both raincoat and sunscreen, boots and umbrella, sometimes in the same afternoon.
Redundancy feels paranoid until the day it saves you. Then it feels like the most obvious precaution in the world, like keeping a spare tire in the trunk or a second kidney under the ribs. The customers who followed you to the second platform tell their friends the story of the ban, and the story becomes a minor legend of customer service because you answered every message within an hour even while appealing the suspension. Sales on the remaining channels spike, not because the product improved but because the narrative did: people like rooting for the business that refuses to die when the landlord changes the locks. You realize, almost too late, that being randomly banned is not a detour from the marketing plan; it is part of the marketing plan, a plot twist that proves the protagonist can survive the cliffhanger.
Eventually the original account is restored, no explanation given, the way a power outage ends without announcing why the lights went dark. You post a cautious hello, like a prisoner stepping into daylight, but you no longer dance on the platform with the same abandon. The graphs climb again, but you keep exporting the follower list every Sunday night, the way coastal homeowners keep plywood in the garage during hurricane season. You have learned the lesson the platforms will never print in their welcome kits: attention is a borrowed car, shiny and full of gas, returned whenever the algorithm wants it back. Drive it hard, but always keep a second set of keys, a second car, a second road, because the only thing more expensive than paying for all that insurance is discovering you need it and never bought it in the first place.
