You Don't Own Your Social Media. You Rent It.

I opened my first Instagram account in 2011. First semester of Grade 11. Seventeen years old and immediately, completely gone for it.

I don't say that as a fun fact. I say it because I want you to understand what that account was before I tell you what happened to it.

From seventeen to twenty-seven, that account was a living record of my life. Trips and milestones and ordinary Thursdays that felt worth photographing at the time. Friends, relationships, a career slowly becoming real. I posted constantly. When Stories launched I was there on day one. When they added Highlights I spent an entire Sunday organizing mine. I was that person — chronically online before it was a personality type, just genuinely and embarrassingly in love with what social media made possible.

One morning in 2021, I opened the app and I was locked out. 🔒

I still don't have a clean explanation for why. What I know is that when I followed Instagram's pathway to restore access, something broke. The email I'd been using to log in every single day was — according to their backend — wrong. Not wrong as in I mistyped it. Wrong as in their system had a problem and their system had no solution for it. No code could be sent. No account could be recovered. No human being could be reached.

I tried everything. I followed every step. I hit every wall.

Not because I did anything wrong. Because a crack in someone else's system swallowed it whole and nobody at that company was required to care.

I think about it more than I probably let on.

The Bellesa Problem 🚩

That experience rewired something in how I think about this industry. And I've been thinking about it again this week, because of what happened to Bellesa.

If you missed it: Bellesa Boutique — a women's sexual health platform, 700,000 followers, over a decade of stigma-free educational content — had their Instagram account permanently deleted last weekend. No warning. No real appeal pathway.

Their violation? Using the word "clitoris."

A word you learned in health class. Meanwhile, erectile dysfunction ads run completely uninterrupted on the same app — paid, promoted, served to millions — classified as legitimate health content, no flags, no consequences.

The message isn't subtle: men's sexual health is an ad. Women's sexual health is a violation. 🙃

The pattern isn't incompetence, though there's plenty of that too. It's indifference. When it goes wrong for you, you are on your own. There is no phone number. There is no person. There is a form and a loading screen and silence on the other end.

The Honest Position 🎯

I want to say something clearly, because I think my position in this industry sometimes creates a weird assumption.

I am not rooting for Mark Zuckerberg. I'm not rooting for Elon Musk. I never wanted a Meta partnership and I'm not angling for one.

That surprises some people. Social media is my career. Being chronically online is genuinely my professional edge. But the brands I work with don't need a cheerleader for these channels — they need someone who is clear-eyed about what these channels actually are.

They make it as difficult as possible for everyone doing the actual work on their platforms — the strategists, the managers, the small business owner posting at 11pm hoping the algorithm shows up — to do their jobs. And when something goes catastrophically wrong, the response is an automated denial or, if you're lucky, a press inquiry that gets your account quietly restored because a journalist made it embarrassing enough to fix.

I've watched this play out with clients. Accounts hacked because nobody had set up two-factor authentication. Pages wiped. Years of content, community, and commercial momentum gone overnight. And every time, the same awful realization: they built everything on rented land and never thought about what happens when the landlord decides to change the locks. 🔑

The TikTok Warning ⚠️

TikTok is the clearest example this industry has ever produced of exactly what I'm talking about.

TikTok's algorithm genuinely changed what was possible. Discovery-first, reach regardless of follower count, the ability for a brand to go from nothing to something in a week — it was unlike anything that had existed before and brands leaned in hard. Some went all the way in.

A woman who built her company on her stovetop making candles told reporters that between 90 and 98 percent of her revenue came either directly or indirectly from TikTok. Sitting on a platform she didn't own.

Earlier this year, that platform nearly ceased to exist in the United States overnight. Not because of a hack. Not because anyone violated a policy. Because of an act of government.

There was no appeal. No contingency. Just: what is your plan if this is gone tomorrow morning?

Most brands had no answer.

And it is not unique to TikTok. In 2013, hackers broke into the Associated Press's Twitter account and posted a single fake tweet — bombs at the White House, the president injured. The Dow dropped 150 points before anyone could correct the record. $136 billion in stock market value, evaporated temporarily by one post from an account that the AP thought they controlled.

In 2020, the accounts of Obama, Biden, Gates, Musk, and dozens of others were simultaneously compromised in the largest coordinated hack in Twitter's history. The channel was the attack surface. The people on it had no warning and no control.

This is the environment. This has always been the environment. Most brands just don't think about it until something goes wrong.

So What Do You Actually Do? 🛠️

Start with the stuff you know you should have already done. Two-factor authentication on every account — go set it up after you finish reading this if it isn't on. A secondary admin on every channel, someone trusted, someone whose access doesn't depend on yours — because if your account gets compromised and the credentials get changed, you need another door in and most people don't have one.

But the thing that actually determines whether your brand survives something like this is whether you've built any audience that truly belongs to you. Your Instagram following belongs to Instagram. Your TikTok community belongs to TikTok. Your email list belongs to you. It's the only one that survives if a channel goes down, gets bought, gets banned, or decides that your vocabulary is a community standards violation. Build it like your business depends on it — because one day it might.

What Stays With Me 🪞

I came back to all of this after losing my Instagram in 2021. It changed how I operate and it changed how I advise every client I've worked with since. Because losing that account — a decade of my life, gone through a crack in someone else's system — made something permanently and viscerally clear.

Social media channels are the most powerful broadcast infrastructure that has ever existed. Using them well is still one of the best things a brand can do. I believe that. It is literally my whole career.

But you are renting the tower. You do not own it.

The channels set the terms, change the terms, and enforce the terms arbitrarily — sometimes with no logic you can identify, sometimes with all the logic in the world and still the wrong outcome. A women's health community gets erased for a medical term while ED ads run beside the news. A government moves to ban an entire platform with a month's notice. An AI system wrongfully accuses someone of something horrifying and denies the appeal before a human being could have even read the file.

None of that is coming to fix itself.

If your primary channel disappeared tomorrow — what survives?

That's the one I'd start with. ✊

The Sunday Social goes out every week. If this one was worth your time, pass it on to someone who needs to hear it.