4 ms·

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 unwor

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.
  - feanaro 6y ago
    And how do you propose to unilaterally and absolutely define what a "bad actor" is?
  - Bedgeseb 6y ago
    You'd fit in perfectly in an oppressive nazi or communist regime.
    - dang 6y ago
      We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
  - alpaca128 6y ago
    How exactly does it help when Facebook tells a bad actor what part of the publicly available guidelines were violated? Why can't Facebook just have a hotline/chat that can verify a user's identity and tell them more, preferrable in less than 5 months of spamming their email? And in the case of a permanent ban the user should at least be able to download all their account data; this feature is already implemented for compliance with GDPR anyway and the online platform wouldn't lose anything by at least not making pictures etc. inaccessible forever.
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    Would you be willing to live in society that has a legal system that works like this?
  - qwerty456127 6y ago
    Some times you might have done/said something bad according to the context of a particular culture or rules of a particular platform (and even inflicted some actual harm or danger on somebody this way) but have no idea what, even after re-reading the rules. I have been banned from a couple of forums/groups and I really have no clue about what might be the reasons but I don't insist there were none.
Aerroon 6y ago
Would it be acceptable if the government set up a regulatory body that could force Facebook et al to communicate why a user was banned? Here's how I imagine it would work: 1. User gets banned by Facebook without an explanation 2. User asks Facebook for an explanation 3. Facebook declines to answer 4. User goes to the government regulatory body with a complaint 5. Regulatory body forces Facebook to provide a reason 6. Facebook tells user what they violated and when Step #5 would allow the regulatory body to require identification to make sure that the user is under their jurisdiction (or you just have to show up in person). This would allow them to identify bad actors and would decrease the chance that the system could be abused. Obviously this should only apply to platforms/services that are beyond a certain size (>1M users?). Also, I wouldn't be surprised if some consumer protection agency doesn't already have powers akin to this.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  I can easily see that being abused to only force an explanation if the one banned is a politician, and the bannee(?) is the same political party as those in charge. Not to mention that the FTC is already a thing.
- joshspankit 6y ago
  I wonder if something similar could be accomplished with a group helping people file specific Freedom Of Information requests. I feel like the reason would have to legally be in there
- roenxi 6y ago
  Acceptable, sure. As burdens go it isn't crazy. Useful/good idea is one for the debate floor. I imagine in this case, for example, Facebook would send Mr. Birch an email telling him that he distributed nude photos via Messenger and they have a 0 tolerance policy towards that. That doesn't really move the situation forward from what is already being publicly written about in an article. It increases the cost of competing with Facebook too, which is probably an own goal given the outcomes the regulation is trying to achieve. There are a lot of things in life that do not need a legislative response. Being banned from Facebook is one of them.
ouid 6y ago
are you saying that it's illegal to regulate facebook?
cutitout 6y ago
> 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. If you don't, you're the bad actor. If specific actions lead to a ban, the way to sidestep that is to not do those actions. If you don't even look at the actions but some BS meta stuff, or have wishy-washy rules you enforce randomly, you're the bad actor.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mancerayder 6y ago
> 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. If an innocent gets banned and there's no explanation or way to reach anyone, you're Josef in The Trial. Have programmers and marketing people in the Valley ever read any Kafka or Orwell?
- mc32 6y ago
  If they have, it would seem they’ve been taken as a template rather than lesson in authority and bureaucracy gone wrong. Or they just ignore the likeness and go about as if nothing.
015a 6y ago
If meeting these requirements is too difficult for your organization, then that's a sign your organization isn't mature enough to take on the responsibility of running this service in the first place. An oil refinery is able to make it another year because they dump all of their waste into the river behind the factory. Proper disposal is expensive and difficult. Is this fine? There's a very valid argument that rules like this would just entrench existing players and hurt startup competition. I'm fine with this. Running globally distributed, massively critical services like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc do, is a similarly massive responsibility. Parler incited an insurrection. Telegram is used to incite violence. Jeeze, plenty of this happens on Facebook & Twitter too. We're far, far past the golden days of scrappy startups deserving to be able to connect the whole planet without consequences. The only reason why the oil refinery metaphor sounds so obvious is because we understand the consequences of dumping toxic waste. We understand them, today. We did not understand them 100 years ago. We lived through the consequences, and built laws to dampen them. The internet is, what, thirty years old? Its a baby. We don't understand its impact on society; we want to believe its positive, but we can't say for sure, and there's a ton of evidence pointing to it being just as negative as positive. GDPR is a step in this direction; it does enable existing players to reinforce their moat against scrappy startups. Its especially harsh when one considers that it happened in Europe, which has almost no homegrown mega-tech sector like the US and China do. But, its still necessary. You're saying we should enable tech companies to act with essential impunity because it would be difficult for them to run their services in a way which is ethical and just. I refuse to sacrifice ethics on the altar of capitalism; I don't care how hard it is, and I don't care how much it costs them. As for the legality: Many things are legal, or illegal, until they aren't. The funny thing about laws are, we make them. They're not etched into a big stone on a mountain, forever static.
- qwerty456127 6y ago
  > If meeting these requirements is too difficult for your organization, then that's a sign your organization isn't mature enough to take on the responsibility of running this service in the first place. Or you just use a wrong business model. In the world of today I can see no reason why Facebook (I mean as a social network, not just as an advertisement and analytics store) could not be a paid service. People pay for Netflix anyway while they would probably choose Facebook if required to choose and keep access to just one of the 2 services.
qwerty456127 6y ago
Whatever. It is known that it often is sufficient to reach a real human at Facebook or Google to find out it was a false positive and unban you. But actually reaching a real human who would check your case consciously and competently is extremely hard - you have to know one personally or pay some agency (the lowest price quote I have seen was $500) and hope for the best. What actually seems going on here (as well as on YouTube with copyright stuff) is a wild misuse of AI technologies. Like if the police was giving people life sentences just because they had a weird accent or suspicious face triggering a neural network signal - perhaps deploying such measures on global scale could help catch a lot of murderers but undoubtedly it would also ruin many innocent people and this can hardly be considered OK. So we don't even have to regulate Facebook in particular, just regulate large-scale AI usage.
0df8dkdf 6y ago
Have you never been involved in an effort to counter spam, either via email or comments? It is often the reason for corporation like fb and google for closing account. It is totally BS. Spam is NOT a big deal compare to censorship. Any competent developer can use Bayesian algorithm to counter spam on a personal level, and the code can be just sitting on the client side. The big problem is these data company won't be able to get your data. Not getting tech support lowers the profit margin for the big corp. However, automation and AI are NOT a replace for good customer support. Get some freaking real humane tech support in relation to the number of active user you have Google/FB. This is one of reason why the world hates you.
handoflixue 6y ago
> 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. It really depends on the level of detail you give, and how timely you are. "You were banned for bot-like activity" and no further clarification at least lets the user know this was definitely in error, and gives actual spammers very little information. "You were banned for bot-like activity due to low activity and engagement" gives spammers a bit more information, but only the really incompetent ones haven't figured that out by now - you might not want to advertise it for the first month or two, but real users might not realize they need to be fairly active after making an account (I'm from the older generation where we'd lurk for a while to observe social norms before commenting) "Your account was banned for posting nudes / racism / etc." actively increases the effectiveness of those policies since now people will be more worried about edge cases and less willing to get near the topic. Since you're using automated tools to catch people, you can also automatically communicate this. If you're really paranoid about bad actors, you could even hold on to that information and only include it in an automated email when someone contacts support (and then only replies to that first automated response actually go to your REAL support process)

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.
- feanaro 6y ago
  And how do you propose to unilaterally and absolutely define what a "bad actor" is?
- Bedgeseb 6y ago
  You'd fit in perfectly in an oppressive nazi or communist regime.
  - dang 6y ago
    We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  How exactly does it help when Facebook tells a bad actor what part of the publicly available guidelines were violated? Why can't Facebook just have a hotline/chat that can verify a user's identity and tell them more, preferrable in less than 5 months of spamming their email? And in the case of a permanent ban the user should at least be able to download all their account data; this feature is already implemented for compliance with GDPR anyway and the online platform wouldn't lose anything by at least not making pictures etc. inaccessible forever.
- dogma1138 6y ago
  Would you be willing to live in society that has a legal system that works like this?
- qwerty456127 6y ago
  Some times you might have done/said something bad according to the context of a particular culture or rules of a particular platform (and even inflicted some actual harm or danger on somebody this way) but have no idea what, even after re-reading the rules. I have been banned from a couple of forums/groups and I really have no clue about what might be the reasons but I don't insist there were none.

Aerroon 6y ago

Would it be acceptable if the government set up a regulatory body that could force Facebook et al to communicate why a user was banned? Here's how I imagine it would work: 1. User gets banned by Facebook without an explanation 2. User asks Facebook for an explanation 3. Facebook declines to answer 4. User goes to the government regulatory body with a complaint 5. Regulatory body forces Facebook to provide a reason 6. Facebook tells user what they violated and when Step #5 would allow the regulatory body to require identification to make sure that the user is under their jurisdiction (or you just have to show up in person). This would allow them to identify bad actors and would decrease the chance that the system could be abused. Obviously this should only apply to platforms/services that are beyond a certain size (>1M users?). Also, I wouldn't be surprised if some consumer protection agency doesn't already have powers akin to this.

colejohnson66 6y ago
I can easily see that being abused to only force an explanation if the one banned is a politician, and the bannee(?) is the same political party as those in charge. Not to mention that the FTC is already a thing.
joshspankit 6y ago
I wonder if something similar could be accomplished with a group helping people file specific Freedom Of Information requests. I feel like the reason would have to legally be in there
roenxi 6y ago
Acceptable, sure. As burdens go it isn't crazy. Useful/good idea is one for the debate floor. I imagine in this case, for example, Facebook would send Mr. Birch an email telling him that he distributed nude photos via Messenger and they have a 0 tolerance policy towards that. That doesn't really move the situation forward from what is already being publicly written about in an article. It increases the cost of competing with Facebook too, which is probably an own goal given the outcomes the regulation is trying to achieve. There are a lot of things in life that do not need a legislative response. Being banned from Facebook is one of them.

ouid 6y ago

are you saying that it's illegal to regulate facebook?

cutitout 6y ago

> 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. If you don't, you're the bad actor. If specific actions lead to a ban, the way to sidestep that is to not do those actions. If you don't even look at the actions but some BS meta stuff, or have wishy-washy rules you enforce randomly, you're the bad actor.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mancerayder 6y ago

> 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. If an innocent gets banned and there's no explanation or way to reach anyone, you're Josef in The Trial. Have programmers and marketing people in the Valley ever read any Kafka or Orwell?

mc32 6y ago
If they have, it would seem they’ve been taken as a template rather than lesson in authority and bureaucracy gone wrong. Or they just ignore the likeness and go about as if nothing.

015a 6y ago

If meeting these requirements is too difficult for your organization, then that's a sign your organization isn't mature enough to take on the responsibility of running this service in the first place. An oil refinery is able to make it another year because they dump all of their waste into the river behind the factory. Proper disposal is expensive and difficult. Is this fine? There's a very valid argument that rules like this would just entrench existing players and hurt startup competition. I'm fine with this. Running globally distributed, massively critical services like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc do, is a similarly massive responsibility. Parler incited an insurrection. Telegram is used to incite violence. Jeeze, plenty of this happens on Facebook & Twitter too. We're far, far past the golden days of scrappy startups deserving to be able to connect the whole planet without consequences. The only reason why the oil refinery metaphor sounds so obvious is because we understand the consequences of dumping toxic waste. We understand them, today. We did not understand them 100 years ago. We lived through the consequences, and built laws to dampen them. The internet is, what, thirty years old? Its a baby. We don't understand its impact on society; we want to believe its positive, but we can't say for sure, and there's a ton of evidence pointing to it being just as negative as positive. GDPR is a step in this direction; it does enable existing players to reinforce their moat against scrappy startups. Its especially harsh when one considers that it happened in Europe, which has almost no homegrown mega-tech sector like the US and China do. But, its still necessary. You're saying we should enable tech companies to act with essential impunity because it would be difficult for them to run their services in a way which is ethical and just. I refuse to sacrifice ethics on the altar of capitalism; I don't care how hard it is, and I don't care how much it costs them. As for the legality: Many things are legal, or illegal, until they aren't. The funny thing about laws are, we make them. They're not etched into a big stone on a mountain, forever static.

qwerty456127 6y ago
> If meeting these requirements is too difficult for your organization, then that's a sign your organization isn't mature enough to take on the responsibility of running this service in the first place. Or you just use a wrong business model. In the world of today I can see no reason why Facebook (I mean as a social network, not just as an advertisement and analytics store) could not be a paid service. People pay for Netflix anyway while they would probably choose Facebook if required to choose and keep access to just one of the 2 services.

qwerty456127 6y ago

Whatever. It is known that it often is sufficient to reach a real human at Facebook or Google to find out it was a false positive and unban you. But actually reaching a real human who would check your case consciously and competently is extremely hard - you have to know one personally or pay some agency (the lowest price quote I have seen was $500) and hope for the best. What actually seems going on here (as well as on YouTube with copyright stuff) is a wild misuse of AI technologies. Like if the police was giving people life sentences just because they had a weird accent or suspicious face triggering a neural network signal - perhaps deploying such measures on global scale could help catch a lot of murderers but undoubtedly it would also ruin many innocent people and this can hardly be considered OK. So we don't even have to regulate Facebook in particular, just regulate large-scale AI usage.

0df8dkdf 6y ago

Have you never been involved in an effort to counter spam, either via email or comments? It is often the reason for corporation like fb and google for closing account. It is totally BS. Spam is NOT a big deal compare to censorship. Any competent developer can use Bayesian algorithm to counter spam on a personal level, and the code can be just sitting on the client side. The big problem is these data company won't be able to get your data. Not getting tech support lowers the profit margin for the big corp. However, automation and AI are NOT a replace for good customer support. Get some freaking real humane tech support in relation to the number of active user you have Google/FB. This is one of reason why the world hates you.

handoflixue 6y ago

> 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. It really depends on the level of detail you give, and how timely you are. "You were banned for bot-like activity" and no further clarification at least lets the user know this was definitely in error, and gives actual spammers very little information. "You were banned for bot-like activity due to low activity and engagement" gives spammers a bit more information, but only the really incompetent ones haven't figured that out by now - you might not want to advertise it for the first month or two, but real users might not realize they need to be fairly active after making an account (I'm from the older generation where we'd lurk for a while to observe social norms before commenting) "Your account was banned for posting nudes / racism / etc." actively increases the effectiveness of those policies since now people will be more worried about edge cases and less willing to get near the topic. Since you're using automated tools to catch people, you can also automatically communicate this. If you're really paranoid about bad actors, you could even hold on to that information and only include it in an automated email when someone contacts support (and then only replies to that first automated response actually go to your REAL support process)