I'd guess that amongst my friendship group around 5-10% of people have been affected by this. This is disproportionately high - a suburban soccer mom is far more likely to never see anyone have problems with their fb account. But amongst certain populations this is a real problem and can put people at risk.

Fb has decided that the increase in value from 99% of users is worth the pain for 1%, and that the network effect will keep the 1% in line. They're probably right. On the other hand, fb got a foothold in the market through 1% of the population who are college students, an alternative social network could get a foothold through the queer or other communities that fb is ignoring.

It's real. It happens all the time. I have seen it again and again.

Searching "facebook blocked" suggests that it's a common problem.

It happened to a lot of Facebook meme pages.[0]

[0]: https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/the-zuckening-mark-zuckerbe...

Germany and France do this regularly for what they consider "hate speech" (for example retweeting newspaper articles about attacks by migrants). Germany has just installed a law that allows imposing multi million EUR fines on companies for repeatedly violating requests to delete user content that violates these fuzzy criteria.

There's a huge influx of German users to gab.ai because of this.