Joseph Kosednar, a retired engineer, spent five years developing a speed-control pedal for a large jewelry-making machine.

Kosednar, 73, had previously sold jewelry -- handmade wire-wrapped pendants and crystals -- on Etsy and at local flea markets. When the fees on Etsy became too high, he focused on building a customer base and audience on Instagram and Facebook. By the end of April, he was ready to start advertising his new pedal, named The Armadillo, in earnest.

He purchased ads on his Facebook page, Joe’s Jems Creations. Within days, he received a notification that unusual activity was detected on his account, making it unusable for him.

Kosednar, who lives in University City, Missouri, had no idea what had happened.

“I kept trying to reinstate my account,” he said. “I sent letters and emails to everyone at Facebook. Anything I sent to them was like sending them to a black hole.”

No one from Meta ever responded.

Kosednar is part of a much bigger trend of people whose accounts have been locked or shut down by Meta, without any apparent violation and no recourse to reclaim their social media identities, personal histories or business platforms.

Jill Lee, director of operations for 100th Monkey, a digital marketing firm in St. Louis, says that over the past year and a half, they have taken on at least a dozen cases from clients in similar situations trying to get relief from Meta.

Most of the company's clients do business on Facebook, and losing that platform can be disastrous for their livelihoods. The company has spent months working with their ad representatives, trying to get some accounts restored.

“(Meta) can’t give a solid reason for things like this happening,” Lee said. From her perspective, it looks like they are using AI to shut down a proliferation of hackers, and many innocent people are getting caught in the dragnet. Other accounts were shut down because they were hacked.

Meta did not respond to inquiries for this column.

In August, Kosednar thought his troubles were finally over. He received a notification on his Instagram and Facebook accounts that they had been suspended erroneously, and that he would be able to use them again.

His relief was short-lived.

He placed a new ad for his pedal. Again, it led to his account being shut down. Desperate for answers and unable to sell the products he had already ordered, he filed a suit against Meta in small-claims court in St. Louis County. He is seeking $5,000 in damages.

A 2024 report on the tech site Engadget explained that many similarly affected Meta users have been forced to turn to small-claims courts as a de facto customer service hotline. Since you can’t call or email any customer service department at Meta, ordinary users have taken the $1.7 trillion tech behemoth to court to try to get their accounts restored and recoup some damages.

Out of the five individuals highlighted in the Engadget report, three recovered their accounts, one received financial damages and another won a cash settlement from Meta. Other legal service startups have reportedly seen significant increases in cases like this against Meta.

Some people who have lost their platforms have appealed to their state attorneys general for help. The sheer volume of these requests prompted a coalition of 41 state AGs to write a letter to the company stating: “We refuse to operate as the customer service representatives of your company.”

It’s outrageous that small business owners and ordinary folks have to square up against a trillion-dollar company that refuses to invest in customer service. When a consumer product wrongly targets its users and causes material harm, it needs to be held accountable. Meta encourages small businesses and creators to conduct business using its sites, but the fine print of the terms of service states that Meta can arbitrarily shut accounts down and leave creators without recourse.

As for Kosednar, he is giving up on his dream of selling his invention to jewelry makers.

“I’m closing up shop,” he said. “I have nothing.”

We all know how wrong polls and pundits can be. They underestimated the popularity of the current president’s first successful run for office in 2016. Pundits were dead wrong about a “Red Wave” of GOP voters that never materialized in the 2022 midterms. In the last presidential election, several polls of swing states were off base.

That recent history is partly why I remained so cautiously hesitant about the possibility of Zohran Mamdani -- a Muslim of South Asian heritage; a 34-year-old immigrant from Uganda; a former state assemblyman -- winning the New York City mayoral election. He was an unlikely candidate running against a political dynasty, with billionaires wildly throwing millions against him and with barely any support from the Democratic establishment and leadership.

But my doubts were rooted in something bigger than the power brokers lined up against him. Unlike Mamdani, a millennial who was 10 years old in 2001, I was in my late 20s when the horror of 9/11 changed us all and the world around us.

I can viscerally remember the trauma of that day as both an American, fearing for my relatives and fellow Americans who worked in the Twin Towers, and as a Muslim, fearing the backlash against our entire community. A brief moment of unity in the immediate aftermath was followed by years of hateful attacks and targeted policies and harassment. It opened the floodgates for the GOP to use Muslims as their scary bogeyman, especially during an election year, which is when the fears of impending “Shariah law” cynically reappear.

When the anti-Muslim attacks against Mamdani ramped up -- disgusting and dishonest smears that he would cheer another 9/11, that he was a terrorist who should be deported, that he was a threat simply because of his faith -- it tapped into a familiar anxiety among American Muslims in my generation. The bigotry was so open and oddly nonsensical. They called him a radical Islamo-Marxist Communist who would implement Shariah law, even though communism rejects religion and Mamdani has always been openly progressive and liberal.

But I had seen this show before, and I internalized the message: Racist political attacks don’t have to make sense or be connected to reality. They just have to provoke primal emotions of fear and anger to work. Trumpism ascended on the politics of grievance, fear, division and exclusion.

Could this relentlessly positive, charismatic young man talking about compassion and unity and affordability overcome that?

Clearly, he did, and with a mandate that was a stunning rebuke to the fearmongers.

The first Muslim mayor of NYC was elected by a diverse coalition of native-born Americans and immigrants, across religious, ethnic and racial backgrounds. In fact, Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller, a self-described “liberal Zionist” Jew, who grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis, was critical to Mamdani’s success in the primary.

Mamdani’s victory required hundreds of thousands of Jewish voters rejecting the idea that criticism of Israel’s war crimes is antisemitic. It took NYC’s affluent voters recognizing that the city can’t thrive unless its workers can afford to live there. It took New Yorkers who have lived in the city for generations embracing the belief that immigrants make us stronger, and that together we can stand up against an aspiring authoritarian. More than 2 million New Yorkers cast ballots and picked a different vision for the city than it’s ever had.

I don’t know if Mamdani will be able to deliver on all his policy proposals, but I know that running free buses in Kansas City since 2020 hasn’t turned it into a communist hellscape. I know that 50 years of trickle-down economics giving tax cuts and corporate welfare to the wealthiest hasn’t helped the middle class in America. And I can see that sending troops and masked federal agents into American cities against its own citizenry looks like tyranny, not democracy.

I don’t pray as much as I should, but I woke up before dawn on Election Day to say a special prayer. I prayed for better leaders who wanted to serve all their constituents; who believed in the worth and dignity of all people; who wanted to better the lives of the most vulnerable and stand up for justice. I prayed that a majority of New Yorkers would see through the tsunami of lies and bigotry.

When Mamdani was declared the winner with more than 50% of the vote, I felt a kind of hope and optimism that has felt out of reach for years. In his acceptance speech, he said: "I am young ... I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this."

In that moment, I saw a different future of possibilities in this country.

New Yorkers took a chance on a young, untested Muslim man to lead them during these divisive, difficult times, and it healed something deep inside of me.

It felt like a prayer answered, a hope ignited.

Nearly a hundred dancing guests spilled out of a white tent and into the streets of a quiet Midwestern subdivision on a Wednesday night. I wondered how long before someone called the cops.

Sippie, the bride, dripping in gold and wearing a hot pink lehenga, hopped in the back of a pickup. One of her relatives, dancing with a large, lighted pot on her head, led a parade of guests waving glow sticks and their bouncing arms over their heads.

The bride’s father, Neetu, is a college friend of my husband’s. In fact, my husband remembers dancing at one of Neetu’s wedding celebrations decades ago. Now, we were at our first Sikh Punjabi jaggo, a prewedding celebration with booming bhangra music, ebullient folk dances and an abundance of food and drink.

I’ve attended more than a hundred weddings -- 111, to be exact. Many of them have featured diverse traditions across South Asian cultures. But this was the first time I’d been part of a processional like Sippie’s jaggo.

Jaggo literally means “wake up,” and the event is meant to wake up the neighbors to let them know a wedding is coming up and to spread joy through the community. That’s good and well in India, I thought. But I was a bit nervous about the reception this merry band of revelers -- men in colorful turbans and women with vibrant, phulkari dupattas -- would get in a buttoned-up suburb of St. Louis.

It was 8 p.m. on a school night, after all.

Sippie quickly stepped down from the truck bed, saying she wanted to properly dance. She joined her relatives, who were competing in an informal dance contest between her mother’s and father’s sides. A trend in South Asian weddings involves elaborately choreographed and rehearsed dance performances by the family and friends. My husband and I have been included in a few group dance numbers at other weddings, proving that skill and talent aren’t prerequisites to participate.

But this dance-off was different. This was an exuberant, unrehearsed jubilee -- a mix of immigrants, their children and grandchildren, unapologetically taking up space in America in a way that has lately felt less welcome.

I met one of the many cousins who had traveled from out of town to attend the wedding. She explained that the host family gives advance notice to their neighbors about this boisterous tradition. As we walked, a car drove up behind the gathering. One of the guests walked beside the vehicle, parting the crowd to create a path for the driver to cross. The partygoers cheered the driver through.

A few residents came out on their driveways to wave and clap along with the wedding guests. On the march back to the house, I noticed another driver sitting patiently in his car for the procession to pass. Neetu and his wife were talking and laughing with their neighbor and urging him to come to their house and join them for dinner and drinks.

Watching that moment unfold felt restorative. When our political leaders are fomenting division and fear of difference, neighbors across this country still appreciate one another’s joy even when the celebrations look completely different from their own.

Back inside the tent, women of all ages began a series of traditional dances and songs. It unleashed an unbridled joy followed by a surprise dance number. Neetu and his wife, Pinky, performed to a poignant song about a daughter leaving her parents’ home.

It’s the beginning of an emotional farewell, which will continue in ceremonies and parties over several days, until her departure. Sippie’s face beamed watching her parents.

For Punjabis, dancing is a love language.

That night, it was understood by everyone within earshot.