NEW YORK - Every day, Mr Mark S. Zuckerberg receives hundreds of friend requests, phone calls seeking tech support to unlock accounts, and letters with complaints, demands and suggestions to improve Facebook.

The irony is that Mr Zuckerberg, a bankruptcy lawyer in Indianapolis for the past 38 years, gets regularly blocked from his own personal and business accounts on the social media site founded by his near-namesake – and he has not been able to get the company to solve the problem.

So last week, Mr Zuckerberg filed a lawsuit accusing Facebook’s parent company Meta of negligence and breach of contract after continually deactivating his business account “for unjust and improper reasons”.

Though the reason is singular: The site’s algorithm repeatedly flagged his accounts as “fake” because he is not the social media tycoon Mark E. Zuckerberg.

Mr Mark S. Zuckerberg’s suit, which does not specify monetary damages, says Meta made “false accusations of ‘impersonating a celebrity’ and not using an ‘authentic name’”.

The two Zuckerbergs are not related.

Mr Zuckerberg, the consumer bankruptcy lawyer, contends that the suspensions – at least four of which he has documented in the past eight years – have disrupted his office’s business while costing him thousands in advertising and an untold number of clients who never learnt of his practice.

His personal account has been suspended at least five times, he said. But he said that these examples are only the ones he can prove, and that it has surely been more than 10 times, between his two accounts. The first time it happened was in 2011.

“I’m trying to be reasonable,” Mr Zuckerberg said from his office in downtown Indianapolis on Sept 9. “I just want to be left alone. I’ve got better things to do than fight with Meta. I’d rather just be attending to my clients, and then joining my family. But I don’t know how else to make them stop.”

Facebook’s accusations stuck, even after the lawyer provided verification documents, like his professional licence. He said he continued to lose access for months at a time. A recent suspension lasted six months.

A Meta spokesperson said this week: “We have reinstated Mark Zuckerberg’s account, after finding it had been disabled in error. We appreciate Mr. Zuckerberg’s continued patience on this issue and are working to try and prevent this from happening in the future.”

Mr Zuckerberg said the lawsuit was already successful, in a way, because he got his Facebook business page back up, after four months of appeals “going nowhere”.

As far as damages, he wants Meta to pay for his lawyers’ fees; his information technology team, which handles his online advertising and has additional work each time he has had to go through Facebook’s lengthy appeals process; and US$11,000 (S$14,000) that he said he spent on Facebook ads that he said were a waste.

Though the lawsuit is giving Mr Zuckerberg and his law practice media attention around the world, he said he would much rather be talking about bankruptcy than Facebook.

“I want them to promise that they really, really will fix it this time,” he said. “Which I don’t know if they can.” NYTIMES

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