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> Unfortunately, for safety and security reasons, we can’t provide additional information as to why your account was disabled. We appreciate your understanding,

• deepsun 6y ago
  What do you mean outlawed? Facebook.com is private commercial property, they can define rules and decide which customers they work with. The only thing they cannot do is restrict users by categories, protected by law. The solution is to decentralize and connect our own facebooks.
  • qwerty456127 6y ago
    Facebook.com is not a simple private commercial property anymore. It obviously has other attributes which make it different from any other. It's too influential and too important for too many people.
    • root_axis 6y ago
      Fortnite is also important to a lot of people, that doesn't make it actually important.
      • username90 6y ago
        Facebook acts as an identity provider similar to gmail. That is pretty different from Fortnite, losing your account could mean you lose access to tons of important sites.
        • root_axis 6y ago
          I'd argue as a general rule that there are no important websites that require Facebook to access your account. Also, you can typically use an e-mail to recover access to an account that you used social media to authenticate with.
          • bsder 6y ago
            > I'd argue as a general rule that there are no important websites that require Facebook to access your account. Many local governments, for example, use Facebook and no other mechanism nowadays. I don't agree with this but that is reality. Until you change reality, you have to deal with it.
            • wyclif 6y ago
              I'm in the Philippines, and the local electric co-op does not have its own domain, but a Facebook Page. You cannot find out who to contact without the information on this page. Essentially a public utility prefers to use Facebook than to spend time and money developing their own site. Now, this is bad for many reasons, but the point is in many parts of the developed world, people do think of Facebook as the internet.
              • qwerty456127 6y ago
                This makes me think Facebook and alike websites should be legally forced to randomly blackout particular countries for months once a year so people would learn to avoid relying on them.
      • wernercd 6y ago
    • silverpepsi 6y ago
      So in other words, a company that does too well and is too successful at making a product popular should lose the same basic property rights and freedom of association every other person and organization is given under the constitution, as punishment for their success
      • colejohnson66 6y ago
        To be fair, anti-trust laws are based on that principle. There's nothing inherently wrong (or illegal) with having a billion users, but a company that takes advantage of that power is a bad thing.
      • qwerty456127 6y ago
        Perhaps. Id this gives them too much power over too many people. Facebook isn't something everyone uses just because it's fun. It's the standard way to communicate, the standard way to identify yourself and the major political medium for common people.
  • kevingadd 6y ago
    How would you actually ensure that they aren't (for example) banning customers of a protected race or other class if they refuse to provide any information on why a user was banned? All you can do is act on faith if their policies are secret and their decisions are also secret. This is less far-fetched than you might imagine. TikTok moderators were ordered to prevent disabled users from appearing in feeds [1], which in practice is blatant discrimination against a protected class - but you'd never know about it directly since even if you figured out you were hidden from feeds, why would they answer unless they were forced to? [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/2/20991843/tiktok-bytedance-platform-disabled-autism-lgbt-fat-user-algorithm-reach-limit https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/2/20991843/tiktok-bytedance...
  • lukifer 6y ago
    1. Due to network effects, there's an argument that some types of online services are natural monopolies [0], and should be regulated the way we do for electricity, water, etc. There are reasonable arguments against such regulation (in any domain); but it's potentially within the purview of the state to set "rules of the road" for the market, which in this context could mean digital due process, algorithmic transparency, interoperability, etc. 2. While I don't disregard Barry Goldwater's argument against the Civil Rights Act [1], the fact is that right now we do actively interfere in the marketplace to mandate transactions not be constrained by "protected categories": race/gender/creed/etc. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to proactively extend this protection to include political alignments or even epistemic opinions. (One of the things I find most curious about CRA, is that while most of its categories are "immutable characteristics", one's faith is more a matter of choice than genetics. If I claimed my religion was "I worship $POLITICAL_PARTY", would it then be protected? What is the scope of what defines a "faith"? In a neighboring FB banning instance [2], Lincoln Cannon even describes how his inciting post advocating decentralization derives from his Mormon beliefs.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1964/06/19/archives/text-of-goldwater-speech-on-rights.html https://www.nytimes.com/1964/06/19/archives/text-of-goldwate... [2] https://lincoln.metacannon.net/2021/01/facebook-disabled-my-account-after-i-criticized-them.html https://lincoln.metacannon.net/2021/01/facebook-disabled-my-...
  • ransom1538 6y ago
    Strawman here: Let's say there was a large corporation that owned an airline. Can they not you on the airline because you are a spanish matador? Airlines leak into our tax system: we protect the air space, fund traffic control, etc. This is where I get pissed off. If you are this large you are no longer a "private commercial property".
    • deepsun 6y ago
      Don't know why you're downvoted, your comment is definitely interesting.
  • CogitoCogito 6y ago
    > What do you mean outlawed? Facebook.com is private commercial property, they can define rules and decide which customers they work with. The only thing they cannot do is restrict users by categories, protected by law. It's pretty clear the GP wants to change the laws to make such actions by Facebook illegal. Facebook is private of course, they still have to follow the law. Are you saying you don't know specifically what the change in the laws would be (of course we can't expect the GP to have all the details worked out) or do you not understand the concept that we as a society can change the law to regulate Facebook's actions?
• Sebb767 6y ago
  > Every action of this kind should be accompanied with clear and very specific (including time and date) specification of the reason. I can see Facebooks side of this - when you give a specific reason, you open yourself up to a lot of counter-arguments, possibly outraging news articles for a bad formulation or a not fully specific reasoning and you give intel to spammers on how you detected them. Additionally, having service reps find and cite the exact violated terms costs a lot of time and it would not even matter - FB is free to ban you if it wants, the specific reasoning would be more of a FYI. And, of course, in cases like this, where the ban was presumably unjustified or unnecessary, this is rather cruel. I fully agree. But on the other hand, FB bans probably hit bots 99% of the time and, even if not, are usually justified [0]. Opening up such a large attack surface and spending large amounts of money for the few cases where it hits a innocent (?) person is just not viable, and, as bad as it is, I can understand Facebook here. The moral of the story is, as mentioned in the article, that the actual error was to rely on Facebook. [0] I have obviously no hard data on this, but if this would happen a lot, it would be quite bad press. So I'm very sure that FB would tackle this problem if users would actually become scared of a false ban.
  • baybal2 6y ago
    > FB bans probably hit bots 99% of the time Greatly doubt that given overt spam being so prevalent.
    • colejohnson66 6y ago
      Confirmation bias. If, hypothetically, 99% of bots were banned and there's enough lingering, you would doubt it to be true. Although, I tend to agree with you about spam prevalence. I've reported dozens of spam/scams/fake accounts and almost every time, I'm told that the post/account "doesn't violate [their] community standards."
  • CogitoCogito 6y ago
    > I can see Facebooks side of this - when you give a specific reason, you open yourself up to a lot of counter-arguments, possibly outraging news articles for a bad formulation or a not fully specific reasoning and you give intel to spammers on how you detected them. If the counter-arguments are reasonable, then Facebook _should_ be attacked. > Additionally, having service reps find and cite the exact violated terms costs a lot of time and it would not even matter - FB is free to ban you if it wants, the specific reasoning would be more of a FYI. I think the implicit implication is that Facebook should _not_ legally be allowed to ban you only if it wants. I would personally get behind such legislation. Sure if Facebook were just a social platform that's one thing, but it is tied to other services (e.g. Oculus) and is an identity provider for many other services. I don't believe Facebook should be able to have it both ways.
• pwinnski 6y ago
  Have you never been involved in an effort to counter spam, either via email or comments? Leaving aside how incredibly illegal your proposal is, it's also unworkable and would make the internet worse if even attempted. If I have to communicate to every bad actor how I identified them as a bad actor, that only helps them sidestep my prevention mechanisms. I'm sure it can be frustrating to face a blank wall, but fortunately, Facebook is a waste of time that nobody should be using anyway.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
    I dislike the direction for society you are proposing. Each bad actor should absolutely know how and why they are identified as a bad actor. How else could they possibly even attempt to defend themselves as not bad actors. The same kind of idiocy is allowed in banks now under the guise of BSA. The only difference is, banks typically face much harder restrictions and are actually heavily regulated. For that reason, I believe the parent's post makes more sense than a blanket 'it is too hard for us to do it'. In short, you are proposing that we penalize good actors for actions of bad actors for no other reason that it creates inconvenience for a platform. That is not acceptable.
    • jccooper 6y ago
      Well, the good actors misclassified as bad actors should be told, so they can fix it. The bad actors should be told nothing, because that only helps them become more effective bad actors. How you differentiate, I dunno. That's the problem.
      • my123 6y ago
        You suppose that a bad actor at one point will always stay a bad actor in the future.
      • A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
        I am not certain this is the actual problem though. It is not about misclassification. It is about the underlying system. Would you argue that a person accused of crime X should be told nothing about the nature of their transgression? To me it sounds very problematic.
• cosmodisk 6y ago
  >What kind of %#*& customer service is this that it takes over five months to even try to get ahold of a real human being to help with a problem!!!! This is horrible. If you aren't buying ads on FB, you aren't a customer,no matter how you look at it.
  • qwerty456127 6y ago
    Is there a good alternative to Facebook where you actually are a customer and treated accordingly? I don't mind paying a reasonable subscription to access a social network if it really satisfies me.
• dleslie 6y ago
  Outlawed?! Facebook is not an essential service; it is not a monopoly; and access to it is not a human right. By freedom of association, Facebook ought to be able to drop users arbitrarily as they see fit.
  • vixen99 6y ago
    You are correct but there's an interesting question here with ramifications worth thinking through. Would we stick to this view if 90% of the world's population used it instead of the current 34%? Is there any % at which we might question your three statements? And if selected, why that figure? Seems odd that one person, a single smart lucky entrepreneur, would continue to be the moral arbiter for postings by its users irrespective of any view taken by democratically-elected governments anywhere. Of course one trusts that soon, alternatives will arise and allow those who want to, to jump ship.
    • wizzwizz4 6y ago
      Alternatives have been around for decades: https://friendi.ca/ https://friendi.ca/ People can't jump ship because of network effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect That's why you see mass exoduses, like what happened with WhatsApp; there's no interoperability between Facebook and the rest of the social media space, so you lose contact with nearly every Facebook user when you leave Facebook. You can put up with a lot when it's the only way to talk to your family.
  • ssivark 6y ago
    By the same standard of freedom of association, users should have a say over whether Facebook collects any data about them I.e. no shadow profiles, and ability to sever one’s relationship with Facebook and purge all data.
  • tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
    > Facebook is not an essential service; it is not a monopoly Depending on your social circles, it de facto is, and refusing to use it or being refused from it will result in being excluded from real-life social events.
• simplecto 6y ago
  That is a bit uncharitable to call users stupid in this context. From the story it seems that there is not even a warning before the rug is completely pull out and burned.
• drewmol 6y ago
  mbasic.facebook.com <- (you can use messages feature w/o app)
• UnpossibleJim 6y ago
  |Nevertheless users who are stupid enough to actually rely on Facebook without having backup communication channels and backup picture storage just have to be educated about this is stupid. Whenever somebody says they want to communicate via the Messenger I don't even consider this because this is just insane, even to install this app is crazy. Sadly, too many people say this nowadays.| This isn't necessarily the issue now that Facebook has linked their hardware platform (Occulus) to your Facebook account.
  • qwerty456127 6y ago
    I'm glad they did it right before I've almost bought Occulus - so I just am not buying it (even though I actually have a Facebook account I occasionally use - like once in some years).
    • UnpossibleJim 6y ago
      I wanted an Occulus and was considering getting one when they dropped this nugget of BS. I dropped my Facebook account years ago and am not reupping my account, so .... No Occulus for me =/
• goatinaboat 6y ago
  Every action of this kind should be accompanied with clear and very specific (including time and date) specification of the reason. GDPR gives you the right to have any algorithmic decision explained, people just need to start using it and complaining to the commissioners.
• HenryBemis 6y ago
  > also have several family members that I can only get in contact with through Facebook. This is a key failure imho. You find a long lost cousin, classmate, friend. First thing I would do is say "hey, what's your number" or "let's jump on a skype call" (come on, almost everyone has skype). Basically establish an 'independent' communication channel.