SaskatchewanAshlyn George, who runs the Lost Girl’s Guide to Finding the World travel site, says Meta has taken days to restore her 22,000-follower page after it was mistakenly taken down.’To have it disappear overnight is both sad and frustrating’: Lost Girl’s Guide to Finding the World creatorChris Edwards · CBC News · Posted: Nov 11, 2025 3:50 PM EST | Last Updated: 2 hours agoListen to this articleEstimated 4 minutesThe audio version of this article is generated by text-to-speech, a technology based on artificial intelligence.Ashlyn George says she’s spent days dealing with Meta’s customer service agents after her Facebook page was mistakenly taken down. (Submitted by Ashlyn George)A Saskatchewan content creator says her business has been thrown into turmoil after Facebook unexpectedly deleted her page.Ashlyn George runs the The Lost Girl’s Guide to Finding the World, a travel brand. She says she’s been fighting since Thursday to have her 22,000-follower Facebook page restored after Meta suspended it for breaking its community standards on “impersonation.””The impact is incredibly stressful,” said George. “I’ve spent 13 years sharing adventure stories, photos and writing with my followers, and to have it disappear overnight is both sad and frustrating, and disappointing knowing that it could be gone forever.”George says she’s kept her content consistent and wasn’t impersonating anybody. She doesn’t know why her page was flagged, though she’s dealt with harassment in the past and worries a user might be reporting her account.”I feel a little bit helpless. I mean, there’s an option to appeal, but sometimes the appeal button is there, sometimes it’s not,” she said. The takedown has turned into a days-long saga of dealing with Meta’s customer service program, which is dominated by AI service agents, said George.Her account was reactivated on Friday, then deactivated again later that day, she said. On Saturday, it was reactivated a second time, only to be removed again later that day. As of Tuesday, it remains suspended.George says that until she paid for Meta Verified — a subscription that helps creators prove their profiles are authentic — she could only interact with AI agents, which were not very helpful.”I’ve spoken with quite a few other people who years ago had this happen to them, and they didn’t have that [Meta Verified] option,” she said. “They ended up losing their accounts because they couldn’t reach somebody.”CBC has reached out to Meta for comment on this story and the company’s use of AI in customer service.AI agents will always be ‘problematic’: expertAI service agents, which are significantly more advanced versions of older chatbots that could only respond to certain keywords, have become increasingly common as major AI platforms develop. Nevertheless, David Gerhard, who teaches computer science at the University of Manitoba, says he doubts they will ever reach the level of a human being.”I think that they’re always going to be problematic,” he said. “The inherent technology in large language models that sort of drives this generative AI … makes mistakes,” said Gerhard.”People, I think, will never trust it. As soon as you find out you’re talking to a bot instead of a person, you have a different kind of feeling with it. Because you can’t reason with the bot, you can’t argue with it, you can’t try to make your case.”To get around an AI bot quickly, Gerhard recommends directly asking it to provide a human service agent immediately.”Anybody calling the service wants to talk to a human instead of a robot,” he said.For now, George says she’s able to make do with her website and email list, along with her Instagram account, which remains online. She encourages other content creators to do the same thing, and make sure they have dedicated platforms for their businesses that can’t be easily taken down by a larger platform.LISTEN | Sask. travel blogger says her page was unfairly taken down by Facebook:The 3067:14Sask. travel blogger says her page was unfairly taken down by FacebookAshlyn George, content creator from Saskatchewan, joins The 306 to talk about Facebook “unfairly” blocking her business page.ABOUT THE AUTHORChris Edwards is a reporter at CBC Saskatchewan. Before entering journalism, he worked in the tech industry.
Sask. content creator says she’s frustrated after Facebook mistakenly took down 22,000-follower page
