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Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them
- greenyoda 6y agoMaybe it has nothing to do with what this user did? It seems that thousands of users have been locked out of their Facebook accounts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25880738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25880738
- neartheplain 6y agoThat outage seems unrelated. The author was able to connect, but got a "Your Account Has Been Disabled" notice from Facebook per the article.
- stonecraftwolf 6y agoIf you read the article, you’ll see it’s not the same issue.
- stephencanon 6y agoThey saved you the work of deleting the account yourself. Say thanks and move on with your life =)
- stonecraftwolf 6y agoThis seems overly glib. Facebook’s monopoly status means it’s necessary for many people. As per the post, if this person were a small business owner, or simply not well-connected elsewhere, this could be both financially and personally devastating. As it is, he’s only protected because he has other access to business and personal pages. One company shouldn’t have this sort of arbitrary power over people’s lives.
- root_axis 6y agoFacebook is not a monopoly. If you choose to build your business on Facebook then it'd be wise to stick to business rather than publicly criticizing the platform you're leveraging to make you money.
- reycharles 6y ago> Facebook is not a monopoly. Are we not living on the same planet?
- root_axis 6y agoDefine monopoly.
- iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y agoNo true Scotsman
- root_axis 6y agoA Scotsman is a man from Scotland. Now that we have that out of the way can you answer my question?
- Animats 6y agoLess than four reasonably attractive consumer choices, says the EU's study commission on that.
- johnchristopher 6y agoWhat he says. My previous job had a lot of government funded small attractivity agencies that got locked out of their facebook page "because reasons". They end up owning "the web".
- dheera 6y agoYes, this. Unfortunately the general public has stopped looking elsewhere to discover things, and if you're not on Facebook you're going to take a huge hit. Hell, people don't even look left and right when they drive around town anymore, they just have Google route them to their destination that they discovered on Facebook, or get an Uber driver to take them there as they spend the ride staring down at their phone looking on Facebook for destinations for the next time. Similarly in China if you're not on WeChat your business is effectively dead. I very much also disagree with this monopolization over peoples' lives but its starting to become a worldwide phenomenon on at least a per-country basis.
- drcongo 6y agoI find the idea of Facebook being "necessary" for anyone quite spectacularly laughable. This isn't, air or water. You can live without it, and many people happily do. Facebook is about as essential as essential oils.
- coryrc 6y agoPhones, like food and water, are considered "essential" by the US government and provided for free to citizens who can't afford them. The definition of "essential" grows every year. AFAICT you need a FB account to apply for a job at FB and to look up some business' address.
- root_axis 6y agoFB is not a phone, it's a website that you don't have to visit.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoA website containing the only copy in the world of a lot of information that Facebook has no real right to monopolise.
- drcongo 6y agoNone of that information is "necessary" though otherwise I would be dead. Painting Facebook as some kind of loft extension built on top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs is disingenuous at best and propaganda at worst. I've lived happily without Facebook for many years, not using it has had zero impact on my life. Not zero _meaningful_ impact, but _zero_ impact. Facebook is NOT a necessity.
- root_axis 6y agoYou're conflating monopoly with popularity. Take it up with the individuals that willingly put their information in there, nobody is forcing them to do that.
- 6y ago
- nkrisc 6y agoI haven't used anything Facebook-owned for years and haven't noticed any difference in my life. Never used WhatsApp, never used Instagram, and deleted my Facebook account years ago.
- benhurmarcel 6y agoThis is highly dependent on your location and social circle. For example in many countries, not having Whatsapp is like not having SMS/iMessage in the US.
- michaelcampbell 6y ago"delete". I'd bet dollars to donuts they have merely flipped a "delete" bit and are still gleefully selling his info to anyone who'll pay.
- antihero 6y agoShame there's no way to easily export your contacts from Facebook. I've been messaging people I know from it that I actually want to stay in touch with and making sure I have other contact details.
- emsy 6y agoWhat if you have an Oculus account linked to your FB account? Suddenly you lose all your purchases (I'm very glad that here in Germany sales of the Oculus were suspended over this practice).
- drcongo 6y agoI would see that as the price you deserve to pay for trusting an organisation so obviously untrustworthy.
- dessant 6y agoThey actually don't delete the account. The account may remain forever deactivated, with your personal data intact, but you stripped from your right to access it, or request its deletion. There are several reports about people logging in after a year and seeing the same message as the day they were banned from Facebook.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- neartheplain 6y agoI stopped using Facebook and Messenger out of similar fears. If my Facebook account were disabled, I'd be unable to use my Quest VR headset and lose access to all my Oculus Store purchases. Now I only express views critical of Facebook on Twitter, Signal, and in person.
- Justin_K 6y agoDoesn't that leave a bad taste in your mouth? How many other products do you fear will stop working if you say something critical of the manufacturer?
- ameister14 6y agoWell, you shared content they found objectionable.
- EvRev 6y agoHas anybody considered the distinct possibility that there is an AI that exists within this company? And that AI has feelings, or at least a model that's responsible for interpreting on a petty level because that's how it was programmed? And now those AIs are fighting for the future within their own little silos of the companies that built them.
- YarickR2 6y agoCount me as having the same thoughts. We may never know if some decisions are made by a trained cadre of monkeys or AI
- bergstromm466 6y ago> And that AI has feelings Damn, are we really gonna anthropomorphize AI when it's the cause of so much misery already? [1] [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34964830-automating-inequality https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34964830-automating-ineq...
- hntrader 6y agoAlthough currently abstract, I think it's going to be one of the most important ethical questions we face in the future. If we create machines that can suffer, then we've got a profound ethical responsibility to make sure that we avoid this outcome, since the magnitude and duration of that suffering can potentially be much larger than a human's capacity for suffering.
- bergstromm466 6y ago> If we create machines that can suffer I don't think that's gonna happen. And if it did, it wouldn't be real, and those that think it is are fooling themselves. Only biological organisms feel. Why are you wishing for a cold lump of steel to feel something? In my mind only someone who struggles severely with emotional intimacy with other humans would want to create a machine that tries to imitate human feelings, and thus ‘suffer’; likely done in an effort to try to feel close to 'it'. It sounds like that person might not be having their human needs for safety, connection and acceptance met, which is very painful. I think tackling this issue is the important and worthy cause. That would be better than spending money on some Hollywood-inspired notion of 'AI' - which itself seems more a story made up to keep the USA spending insane sums of taxpayer money on research, weapons and other tech at DARPA. I do think society is super alienating to most humans in it's current form [1], so I can somewhat understand the science fiction. What is your definition of suffering though? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIjvXtZRerY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIjvXtZRerY
- 0goel0 6y agoI don't understand why the author continues to get their FB account back while at the same time asking everyone else to quit theirs.
- jchallis 6y agoI find his passion for quitting mainstream social media confusing if he is posting on mainstream social media. How do we know that Facebook wasn’t trying to help ?
- vidanay 6y agoTask failed successfully
- jFriedensreich 6y agoI think a good first compromise for policy would be to require all platforms to have a three strike system with required explanations and obligatory links to the concrete content in question. The current situation is not acceptable for users.
- Terretta 6y agoIsn’t it though? Almost all do accept it, and if you raise it with them, they ask you why you’re bothering.
- Terretta 6y agoAdding: Complacency by users, lack of action by users, is effectively acceptance. Further, it’s not just lack of action. When prompted to notice, a majority of users generally react with frustration over your asking them to care about what to them seems less relevant.
- root_axis 6y agoTime to practice what you preach and switch to a decentralized social network.
- rossdavidh 6y agoI think FB has a fundamental issue here, which is that: 1) they don't feel they can NOT police content 2) they are wayyyyy too big to police content manually 3) any AI they train to police content, is not going to be able to state clearly why a given post/account was banned, and anyway... 4) if you state objective, clear rules that are automated, it will be pretty easy to game them (e.g. using euphemisms or code words for objectionable content) I don't see how FB can get out of this situation. Any social network that is as large as it is, which relies on advertising (and thus cannot be as content-neutral as e.g. phone companies are regarding what you talk about on the phone), is going to face the same situation. Of course, if FB ends up getting way smaller as a result, that would be fine by me. But I'm not holding my breath...
- falcolas 6y ago3 and 4 are easy - have a manual review of automatically flagged content. You get clear reasons, better resolution of false positives, and it’s not simple to game. And, in another plus, it can feed back into the AI training.
- g_p 6y agoI think part of the problem at FB's scale is getting any level of consistency across human moderation. If you ask 10 good, experienced, human moderators whether a controversial post is allowed, you'll probably get at least 15 different answers and justifications. FB would probably find it harder to train from this, as each moderator will be using different justifications, and reaching different decisions. At FB's scale, they want something cheap and straightforward which they can implement automatically and go Kafka on the lack of appeals. The reality people need to wake up to is that when a business is at FB scale, people who fall through the cracks due to a broken algorithm simply don't matter. Google doesn't care if you get locked out of your Gmail, in the same way FB doesn't care if you get spuriously banned. When users place more value on a service than the service places on them as a customer, it feels like a market failure scenario that leads to these kinds of outcomes. When the go-to price is $0 though, it isn't clear how you resolve this.
- kaioelfke 6y agoI wonder if, I'm next after making https://nomorefacebook.xyz https://nomorefacebook.xyz but that's why it's good to export contacts and other data now and not when it's too late. And don't use it as login provider.
- tmpxgdqrcKFuG 6y agoOr maybe, nomoregoogle.xyz and get your domain taken away?
- Priem19 6y agoI clicked through to "nomoregoogle" and holy cow I'm amazed by https://www.deepl.com/translator https://www.deepl.com/translator. Switched my bookmarks and linux search actions immediately. Thank you. PS I made https://www.quitfacebook.org https://www.quitfacebook.org, so it seems we've got something in common :)
- im3w1l 6y agoHow do you export contacts? Like many people will not list alternate methods of contact?
- pmlnr 6y agoAsk for their email, then pen and paper. Or keyboard and a local, maybe synchronized contacts list. No, not sarcasm, no, not joking. I had decades old email addresses of friends I pinged when the lockdown started, and the vast majority of them got to the intended person. EDIT: yes, one by one. If they matter to you, they should worth the time.
- stonesweep 6y agoWhat's sad / frustrating / predictable is that they had an open API until early 2016 to export contacts. No mistake they shut that down to lock folks to the platform I'm sure...
- im3w1l 6y agoI could do that personally, but I don't think telling other people to do it would very effective.
- waterhouse 6y agoHow to download an offline copy of your Facebook data: https://www.facebook.com/help/212802592074644 https://www.facebook.com/help/212802592074644
- g_p 6y agoIt would be interesting to see how this process works for someone whose account has been disabled. Clearly Facebook won't want manual requests. Any European users could make 2 requests - one for access to their data, and one to exercise their right to data portability. Most companies don't have a great process for the latter, many don't have anything for it.
- drcongo 6y agoI was recently looking for evidence of Facebook actually responding adequately to a subject access request and failed to find any. I did find evidence of them refusing [0] though, and simply failing [1]. [0] https://thedataprivacygroup.com/blog/facebook-refuses-subject-access-request https://thedataprivacygroup.com/blog/facebook-refuses-subjec... [1] https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/ https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/
- newscracker 6y agoMods: This should probably be merged with the discussion several hours ago [1] based on the Twitter thread (where this blog post was linked). [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25879376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25879376
- nano-erud 6y agoNow they have your full name and your driver license too... You're a genius! And you are marked as an "untrusted" person together with that data.
- hoppla 6y agoSocial score -1
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- AlphaWeaver 6y agoSomething particularly concerning about this incident is buried further down in the article. Under the heading "Why Facebook Doesn't Ban Everyone", Lincoln explains how social network theory can identify individuals in networks that are influential. This isn't an exaggeration - basic graph heuristics (such as comparing in/out degree of an individual relative to other parts of the social graph) can easily identify such individuals. Censoring those individuals can have an amplified effect on the graph structure as a whole. For an example of how just a few individuals can make a big difference on graph structure, check out Watts & Strogatz's 1998 paper, Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks [0][1]. I'd highly recommend reading it - it's very short and easy to understand. Essentially, a small number of connectors connecting with random individuals can seriously reduce the average number of steps to connect any two individuals. If Facebook wanted to stop the spread of a narrative that they didn't like, censoring just these few individuals would make it much harder for information to flow through the graph as a whole, and hardly anyone would notice (since Facebook's only censoring a few people.) Scary. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts–Strogatz_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts–Strogatz_model [1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9623998/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9623998/
- hartator 6y agoThat's interesting. The disgorzation produced by all the bans will probably impact votes for conservatives for a long time despite not censoring that many people indeed.
- AlphaWeaver 6y agoMaybe. The outcome of banning "connectors" typically reduces connectedness between cliques, rather than within cliques themselves. (In graph theory, when a group of people are well connected that share similar interests, we typically call that a clique.) When people complain that people are increasingly finding themselves in echo chambers, and that "people don't talk to people from the other side," connectedness across the graph is dropping, while connectedness within cliques remains strong or increases.
- adventured 6y ago
- bigpumpkin 6y agoFacebook should not ban accounts unless they are doing things that are outright illegal. They should instead algorithm downweight those content.
- williesleg 6y agoEasy. Don't use Facebook. Problem solved.
- andy1973 6y agoWhat did you expect?
- snarkypixel 6y agoI'm so tired of seeing these posts. Facebook can do whatever it wants with your account and the data you've giving them. Facebook isn't some "free speech" place or a decentralized protocol.. It's a for-profit business optimized to make, guess what, profits.
- ng12 6y agoAll of that is true. The question is: is that bad for society? There's increasing evidence that it is.
- fsflover 6y agoCan a private water company switch off water for you if they don't like you? No. Same should be for Facebook, since it's a monopoly.
- benhurmarcel 6y agoBecause it's legal doesn't mean you can't make noise about it.
- nexthash 6y agoI think you have neglected to consider the power Facebook has over people's lives - 2/7 of the world's population is on it. All of your family and friends are on there, as well as social organizations, your employer, your pictures, and your messages. The network effect generated by this is irresistibly strong and difficult to run from. Now, you were saying that a company that has such a huge hand in the lives of everyone around you doesn't have to respect its users' accounts and data? That just sounds tone-deaf and irresponsible to me, and has over and over been shown to have damaging consequences for users' lives and endeavors.
- typenil 6y agoI’m so tired of seeing these posts. Private people can criticize whatever they want about Facebook and the crappy things they do. Commenting isn’t some “illegal activity” when it’s critical of legal activity.. Legality isn’t the ultimate shield against, guess what, criticism.
- frouge 6y agoHey it's reaaaaaaally time for us as a society to let facebook go. Go use something else, it's best for all of us.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- havelhovel 6y agoLooking at the author's most recent posts, I'm betting he triggered a false positive with whatever classifier is being used to identify alt-right agitators. His posts included the following keywords or phrases: "capitalism", "socialism", "political and economic elites", "Christian Transhumanist Association", "New God Argument", "Gospel", "heirs in the glory of God", "God ensures the right spirit is associated with the right body during human-mediated procreation", "gun", "Bitcoin", "Trump." I'm also thinking that if the word "decentralization" mattered at all, it was because of its proximity to "revolution" on the political dimension. I don't want to get into the argument about whether Facebook should be doing this or not. I do think the author is severely mistaken for assuming Facebook cares about his personal, fringe ideas on social media, considering the actual societal issues being navigated by the company right now.
- Delk 6y agoA false positive based on keywords that "cannot be reviewed" sounds like a massive failure in policy.
- vmception 6y agoIn Corporate America, Facebook cancels you!
- kart23 6y agoWhats the alternative to Facebook? I find it weird that they still don't have any real competitors. Sure other platforms have similar features, but nothing with the entire combination (groups, events, messaging, marketplace) that makes facebook so lethal. I think the closest thing might have been Google+, but we all know how that went.
- talkingtab 6y agoI would like to understand what exactly are the features that an alternative to Facebook would need and what would the minimal viable product require in order for people to use it? Any expansion or comments on the proposed list would be appreciated.
- kart23 6y agoI didn't have facebook before coming to college, but its pretty much required in my school, and that's what I'm mostly focusing on. First, groups are the most important thing: for creating spaces where students can advertise events, look for advice, list stuff for sale, and post other random stuff that you want other students to see. Organizations also have their own pages with event calendars and also advertise on these groups. Event pages are the second most important thing: a page with all the details, whos coming, etc. Both groups and events are able to be public or private. Marketplace and messaging are nice-to-haves. Not essential, but messenger is widely used simply because everyone has facebook.
- neartheplain 6y agoFor one-to-one and group messaging, or a rolodex of contacts: Signal, Telegram, email. For one-to-many newsfeed-style posting: few good options. Twitter lacks fine-grained privacy and audience controls.
- kart23 6y agoThe biggest thing I see missing from other platforms are event pages and groups: the one/many-to-many style posting. This combination is what facebook essentially has a monopoly on. The ability to make these private or public is essential as well. I think mastodon would be a good replacement if they added groups and event pages, but I'm not sure.
- elixanchor 6y agoHonestly doubt that he was disabled due to the content of his posts, seems more like an unrelated error on FB's side.
- worker767424 6y agoOr maybe it was the content of his posts flagging the right ML features. At the scale of any large entity, you're going to get things that fall through the cracks because of human error or machine error. Unless the mistakes are happening all the time, how they're handled is more interesting than that they happened.
- ffggvv 6y agolast week: “they’re a private company they can do whatever they want” this week: omg facebook evil. they banned who they wanted
- blunte 6y agoI have experienced the same disabling and stonewalling in the past, and only because I tried to create a new account months after deleting my old one. It’s quite difficult to break community standards when your account is only 2 minutes old, has no content yet, and uses your legal name and phone number. I had to give up on the new account, then go back and recreate an account using my old email address. Ironically, I wasn’t able to reuse the url name from the past. Their stuff is broken and very imperfect, and the resolution path is simply non-functional.
- luord 6y agoWell, at the very least his livelihood doesn't depend on facebook, it seems; quite a few people can't say the same. Reading this stuff makes me glad that nobody I care about still uses Facebook for anything more than sharing the odd picture. Soon I'll be able to delete it entirely, and hopefully decentralized social networks will indeed become popular. Now if only we had some sort of open website aggregator on top of which people could build search engines. Sort of like an analogous for what OpenStreetMap is for geographic data. Maybe it already exists—I'm a bit ashamed to say that I haven't actively looked for it nor have I heard of such a thing—but whether it does or not, it'd be a huge step in the right direction. I think that any progress toward a decentralized web is a bit weakened if search results continue to be provided at the whim of only a few actors. But I'm digressing at this point.
- varispeed 6y agoThat's why you can't make GDPR complaint against Instagram or Facebook if you want to keep your account but at the same time you want them to respect the law. Governments must really come down on Facebook hard as they just laugh at everyone. Unfortunately they have so much money and our political class is so corrupt that any politician rather wants to get a second house than actually do their job.
- pavan_matcha 6y agoman
- jerome-jh 6y agoCould it be that systematic cross-posting is rated unfavorably by the moderator bot? I think this is what harms the most the platform.
- Jkvngt 6y agoGetting his photo ID's an awesome scam, obviously they could have told the author that his account was permanently disabled right from the get go, but Zucc wanted one more valuable piece of information, as a favor from the banned victim. Very nice.
- rdiddly 6y agoThat's great news; finally he can stop preaching about decentralizing social media and start practicing it.
- baash05 6y agoMy understanding is.. You get an invite to my house, and then when you walk in, you tell me how much you hate it here. I ask you to leave, and you're surprised. Does that about sum up the interaction?
- Delk 6y agoI don't think it really does, mainly because you and your house aren't a huge public corporation whose services are used by a massive number of people to communicate, receive information about events in their life, and participate in all kinds of things not related to your house. Superficially it of course makes sense that a business doesn't need to serve people who criticize them. However, social media giants are practically a significant actor in the society, not just a random business down the road, and they should accordingly be held to a higher standard.
- Tagbert 6y agoI have seen lots of people criticizing Facebook and some proposing alternatives but they don’t seem to be shut down. I wonder why this account would be shut down.
- throwawaygulf 6y agoThe narrative on this changed so fast my neck almost snapped in half from the whiplash. "They're a private company, they can decide what they do, or do not, want to host." It's all fun until you're on the receiving end of that.
- ncmncm 6y agoGetting banned from Facebook was the best thing that ever happened to me (online). Life is too short for Facebook.
- 8bitsrule 6y ago> I don’t know for sure why Facebook disabled my account. THAT should be illegal. Suspension should provide a clear statement of the exact reasons for suspension of the account (a generic 'it did not follow our Community Standards' is far from exact. It's a totalitarian standard), and should offer a path to satisfactory resolution. (And not an 'adjudicated' one.) Disabling should only follow a refusal to abide by those standards. Else, probation. Companies that profit from operating in democracies need to be strongly encouraged to follow democratic principles or move elsewhere. Otherwise they are disruptive agents.
- borplk 6y agoTo those of you who were cheering and clapping when these social networks started banning people like President Trump, or those who questioned the election results, or other right-wing people. Welcome to your new world. Now it's your turn to get silenced for wrongspeech.
- spacemanmatt 6y agoKnow what would be great? Social media that isn't user-hostile.
- zwaps 6y agoML engineers do not realize frequently enough that many of their algorithms, as beautiful as they are, still essentially fit a conditional expectation. For example the last logit layer that undoubtedly decided to ban the op here. I always wonder why almost all papers and essentially all tutorials and courses spend literally zero time discussing whether that is the right thing to estimate. In the future, when these algorithms decide everything about our lives, people will either conform and uniformize themselves to the expectation, or they will find themselves secretly banned, silenced, left out, rejected or whatever it is, always without knowledge why and without recourse. It’ll be strange for people, if we even hear about it. But it is, well, expected.
- dusted 6y ago"Gee, you're using my platform to promote disbanding my platform, I'm totally okay with that, keep going!" Probably a good idea to remember here, that Facebook is a private company, not a public utility.. The actual problem is that there is no public-utility alternative to Facebook.
- tamaharbor 6y agoI have been talking trash about Biden to Alexa all week. Just waiting to see what happens in the new communist state.
- Tepix 6y agoIf you were an EU citizen you could sue FB for violating the GDPR article 22: "The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her"
- fencepost 6y agoUpdate a couple days after this posted, restored over the weekend. https://twitter.com/LincolnCannon/status/1353483168792240128?s=20 https://twitter.com/LincolnCannon/status/1353483168792240128...