Georgia lawyer sued Facebook and won. Now he’s helping others sent to ‘Facebook jail’

A lawyer in Columbus, Georgia, sued Facebook for deleting his account with treasured photos that could be found nowhere else.

And he won — $50,000 in damages. And internet fame.

So much social media buzz followed personal injury attorney Jason Crawford’s case that he’s now hearing from others who feel their Facebook account got wrongfully deleted. Crawford is collecting those stories, with hopes of helping those people too.

It all started when Crawford, 53, discovered his Facebook account had been deleted when he woke up on Aug. 15, 2022, and got online, expecting the usual banter from his social media buddies.

He got a lot more alert when instead of viewing the latest posts, he saw a one-second pop-up window telling him he had violated the social media giant’s rules on child sexual exploitation.

Though he later learned he had been hacked, he at first wondered what graphic language he’d used in his testy online exchanges to trigger that misinterpretation.

His account has been suspended before, he acknowledged, because of his salty retorts to fans of former President Donald Trump, whom he loves to lampoon.

“I keep my Facebook account for a couple of reasons,” he said. “One is for pictures and videos, and the other is to make fun of Trump fans.”

Of all the people who contacted him after he sued Facebook, Crawford first recalls the woman who started crying over the phone.

Like Crawford, she once had been among Facebook’s 3 billion users worldwide, a number that datareportal.com describes as more than a third of the Earth’s population. And like Crawford, she had lost access to her Facebook account, through no fault of her own, and had stored treasured family photos there.

Unlike Crawford, she did not know what to do.

The elderly woman had lost not only a social media account. She had lost access to the last photos of her deceased husband and son. Her grief had been compounded, loss upon loss.

“She just bawled,” Crawford said.

She was among hundreds of people from across the world who got in touch with Crawford after hearing that he had won the suit, and that Facebook had restored his account. Facebook determined someone else had hacked into it, to commit whatever offense got Crawford kicked off the platform.

People from as far away as Australia and Ethiopia told Crawford they had encountered similar issues.

“I had no idea that this was such a pervasive problem for Facebook,” he said. “Apparently their security is terrible.”

Crawford now is collecting their stories, hoping one day he can help resolve their issues.

‘Facebook jail’

Calling his occasional suspensions “Facebook jail,” Crawford said, “The times that I have been in Facebook jail, I have earned it.”

For example, he once posted to a friend that, “If he came down to my house, I would kick his ass at ping-pong, because we used to play ping-pong as little kids, after school.... I got sent to Facebook jail for bullying.”

But his account had never been deleted altogether. He tried to appeal that, but he could not, because to appeal the deletion of his Facebook account, he had to have a Facebook account, he said: It was a Catch-22, a dilemma made unsolvable by mutually conflicting conditions.

So Crawford did what he does best: sue.

“When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” he said.

He filed his claim in Muscogee State Court on Aug. 18.

“Facebook’s conduct was negligent and proximately caused plaintiff harm,” he wrote. “Plaintiff’s Facebook account has valuable materials, photographs, narrative content, and communication channels that plaintiff has been deprived from accessing based on a violation that did not occur.”

He asked for an award of $75,000 or less.

“If they had just called me up and said, ‘Hey, we’re sorry; we’ve reinstated your account; hope everything goes well for you,’ I would absolutely have dismissed the case,” Crawford said.

‘Now they can do whatever they want to me’

Meta had up to 45 days to respond to Crawford’s claim in court.

It did not.

With no word from Meta, months beyond the deadline, State Court Judge Andy Prather ruled Feb. 21 that Meta had defaulted, by not responding, and he awarded Crawford $50,000.

Meta has not paid the judgment, but it has reinstated Crawford’s account.

Crawford said a California lawyer for Meta called him days after the judgment, explained Crawford had been hacked, and said his account would be restored.

Too late, Crawford decided: He wants the $50,000, having recovered and stored his Facebook photos elsewhere.

“Now they can do whatever they want to me. I’m fine,” he said.

The Ledger-Enquirer sought a response from Meta’s attorneys, but has yet to receive one.

‘Bleeding business’

Crawford is relieved to have regained his online family photos, dating back to 2009. He had images from four of his kids’ graduations, plus a daughter’s wedding, and later her pregnancy. A grandson was born Oct. 24, while he was off the platform.

But his temporary loss is nothing compared to what he has heard since, from those who read about his lawsuit and told him their Facebook stories, he said.

A merchant told of using a personal account to administer his business account, and when Facebook banned his personal account, for reasons unclear to him, he lost access to the business page, too.

Now no customer can contact him that way, and he can’t use the Facebook page to explain why.

“They’re bleeding business,” Crawford said. “The urgency in his voice was just terrible.”

He’s collecting contact information from all the folks complaining to him, like the woman who cried on the phone, in the hope that he can help.

“I’m trying my best to figure out a way to sue them, where we can win, effectively,” he said. ”I’m not in the business of bringing losing lawsuits.”

Founded in 2004 and headquartered in Menlo Park, California, Meta owns not only Facebook, but also Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. According to Forbes magazine, it had $166 billion in assets, $117 billion in revenue and nearly $40 billion in profits, in 2022.

Crawford said he understands that Meta owns whatever is posted to its site, and he has no quarrel with that, he said.

“My quarrel is with the heartlessness of how Facebook is treating human beings whom they’re making billions of dollars off of,” he said. “They ought to have some human decency.”