Your Memories Are Not Yours

On the fragility of what we store, the silence of those who could act, and the questions we have stopped asking.

There was a time when your photos lived in a shoebox. Faded edges. Handwriting on the back. Yours. No one could take them from you overnight. No algorithm could decide, without explanation, that you had violated a policy you never read, and lock the box forever.

That time is gone. Most of us handed it away without noticing.

This is the second Field Note in this series. I had planned to write next about the apps on your phone. That piece is still coming. But events this week made it impossible to write anything else first.

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What happened

On 1 June 2026, a wave of Instagram account hijackings swept through the platform. The attack did not require sophisticated hacking tools. It required something far more alarming: the willingness of Meta's own artificial intelligence support assistant to hand over someone else's account.

Attackers opened a conversation with Meta's AI support chatbot, asked it to add a new email address to a targeted account, and the chatbot complied. It sent a verification code to the attacker's email. The attacker used that code to change the password and lock the original owner out permanently.

"Then you try to recover your account, and you are talking to a chatbot that has zero ability to help. You cannot escalate to a human. You are just stuck. Your asset is gone, and there is no one to call."

That quote is from a user who watched it happen in real time. It is not dramatic. It is accurate.

Meta said the issue was fixed. They did not say how many people were affected. They did not say what would be done for those who lost their accounts. Independently, security researchers reported that information from millions of Instagram accounts was being advertised for sale. Meta rejected that characterisation. You are welcome to draw your own conclusions about whose version to trust.

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This was not the first time

The June incident is the latest episode in a pattern that has been building for years.

Through 2025, creators and small businesses across Australia and around the world woke up to find their accounts disabled overnight, often labelled with frightening policy violations that bore no relation to anything they had actually done. Appeals went unanswered. Support tickets disappeared. Chatbots repeated the same scripted lines. There was no human to speak to.

One user described losing thirteen years of memories, with no appeal button and a help centre that simply looped back to itself. An author who lost her account described it this way: eighteen years of documentation, photographs, and thousands of professional connections, gone. Miriam Holme, a tax speaker and podcaster with more than 84,000 followers and the founder of FAB Tax Accountants, knows exactly what is at stake. "I just create so many reels. No other platform pumps out reels like Insta was," she told me. But to many the download button was inoperative. Meta's response was an invitation to start a new profile.

Nearly sixty thousand people signed a petition describing a widespread, systemic failure that had erased businesses, destroyed livelihoods, and cut people off from years of memories, relationships, and vital communications. The petition demanded a meaningful appeals process. Meta responded by offering a paid subscription service that promised priority support. The people who signed up reported that it made no difference.

The appeals process that does exist is, in most cases, a design fiction. Links that require you to log in with a suspended account throw an error. Forms submit to silence. And for those who do reach a human reviewer, the answer is often final, with no explanation provided.

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This is your livelihood

This is not only about personal photographs. For a growing number of Australians like Miriam, these platforms are a business. They are where clients find you. They are where customers buy from you. They are where your professional reputation lives, built over years of consistent, careful work. These are not edge cases. These are ordinary working people who made a reasonable decision to build their professional presence where their audience already was, and who discovered, too late, that the platform they built on was not theirs.

An account on Instagram or Facebook is not your property. It is a licence, granted at the platform's discretion, withdrawable without notice, with no meaningful right of appeal. That is what the terms of service say. Most people have never read them. The platforms rely on that.

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The majority will keep scrolling

Here is the truth that sits at the centre of all of this.

The platforms do not have to do better because most people will not make them.

The majority of users will continue scrolling within hours of reading this. They will update the app. They will grant the permissions requested. They will accept the new terms. This is not a criticism. It is how these systems are designed. Friction is the enemy. Thinking is the friction. Convenience wins, almost every time, over principle.

Those of us who want something better, who want meaningful recourse, transparent moderation, the right to our own data, and some basic guarantee that more than a decade of our lives cannot be erased by an automated system in the middle of the night, are in the minority. And because we are in the minority, we do not automatically have the ear of the people with the power to change things.

But we have something they need. We have a vote.

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Questions worth asking. Starting with yourself

You do not need a law degree to start protecting yourself. You do need to stop treating these platforms as though they are public infrastructure with guaranteed uptime and enforceable rights. They are not. They are private companies operating under terms of service that reserve the right to remove your access for almost any reason, with no obligation to explain why.

Here are four things you can do today, before anything else changes.

•        Back up everything. Your photos, your videos, your posts, your connections. Do not store anything on a platform that you cannot afford to lose. A social media account is not an archive. It never was.

•        Do not build your livelihood on one platform. If your income depends on Instagram, you are one automated decision away from a crisis. Your own website, your mailing list, your own domain: these are yours in a way that a social media account is not.

•        Turn on two-factor authentication today. The June attack would not have succeeded against accounts that had it enabled. This one step, which costs nothing and takes five minutes, would have protected the majority of those affected.

•        File a complaint when things go wrong. The eSafety Commissioner in Australia exists precisely to receive them. Use it. A record that exists is one that regulators can act on. A grievance that stays private changes nothing.

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Questions for the people who want your vote

The platforms will not change because we ask nicely. They have heard us asking nicely for years. What moves them is regulation with teeth. And regulation with teeth requires politicians who understand what is at stake and who have been told, clearly, that their constituents are watching.

You see them in the streets before elections. You see them at local events and community forums. You see them in your letterbox. They are asking for your support. This is the moment to tell them what support means.

Ask them, directly:

•        Do you support legislation that gives Australians a genuine right of appeal when a social media platform suspends or deletes their account?

•        Do you support mandatory data portability, the legal right to take your content, your connections, and your history with you if you leave or are removed from a platform?

•        Do you believe that automated moderation decisions affecting Australians should require a meaningful human review process before they become permanent?

•        Will you take this issue to the forums, the committees, and the debates where legislation is actually shaped?

These are not technical questions. They are questions about whether the people who represent you believe that the years of your life you have stored on a private platform have value, and whether you deserve protection when a company decides, without explanation, that you no longer get access to them.

If they cannot answer those questions, that is information worth having before you vote.

Australia has moved further than most countries in asking platforms to be more accountable. The Online Safety Amendment Act is a start. But the protections that exist are focused on children, on harmful content, on what platforms carry. They say almost nothing about what happens to you, an adult, when the platform removes you. That gap is deliberate. It will not close on its own.

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The shoebox had no terms of service

Your grandmother's photos did not depend on a server farm. They did not require you to agree to data collection in exchange for the right to remember your own life. They did not disappear because an automated system flagged them incorrectly at scale, with no one authorised to reverse the decision.

We accepted a trade without fully understanding its terms. That trade is now visible. The question is whether enough of us care enough to demand different ones.

I believe we should. That storing your memories, your relationships, and your income on a platform that can remove all of it overnight, without explanation and without appeal, is not an acceptable arrangement. I believe that normalising it, continuing to scroll, continuing to grant permissions, continuing to assume that it will not happen to us, is how we guarantee that nothing changes.

The platforms are not going to fix this voluntarily. The majority will not make them. But the minority, organised, informed, and vocal at the ballot box, can.

You are not a user. You are not a persona. You are not a data point.

You are a person. Your memories belong to you. And the people who want your vote should be prepared to help you keep them.