16 ms·

Tell HN: My wife was banned from WhatsApp without reason or recourse

205 points by tempestn 4y ago

Like many people, my wife and I use WhatsApp to keep in touch with various family and friends who prefer that platform. I actually use it more than she does—she basically just chats with close family and a few friends from highschool. A few days ago, she opened the app to find the message, > This account is not allowed to use WhatsApp > Chats are still on this device. This didn't make any sense, as she only uses it to chat with family and friends and certainly hadn't broken any terms. Found the option to appeal and submitted that. A day later, the app now says > This account cannot use WhatsApp > We've completed our review and found this account's activity goes against WhatsApp's terms of service There's no way she's actually broken any terms, so it appears this is some kind of mistake, but given the speed of the "review", I doubt any human has actually looked at it. She's tried contacting them via their contact page, but given the review is already "complete", I'm not too hopeful. Our only guess as to what could have caused this is that a week or so before the ban she received a spam message sent to a giant group and marked it as spam. Perhaps somehow all numbers in that group ended up associated with the spamming? Regardless, pretty frustrating situation since she has a couple of long-running chats with family and friend groups that she can no longer participate in. Always fun to be at the whims of the algorithm. Posting in case there's anything to the connection between marking a message as spam and getting blocked (maybe it's safer to just mute spam messages instead), as well as on the off chance someone from Facebook ends up reading this and can help.

Ava433 4y ago
samstave 4y ago
- trollied 4y ago
  What actually needs to happen is a proper federated system (akin to the existing telecoms system) that is regulated in the same way worldwide. XMPP is great. It should have ended up being the new SMS in my opinion, but telcos wouldn't have been able to make money off it, so it never happened. Enter Apple with imessage. The game changed somewhat. But it still left the Android gulf. If Apple and Google sorted things out message-wise (can't see this happening) we might get there, but then you're still left with the billions of people that have simpler phones that use whatsapp because that's all they can actually use (whatsapp became prolific because of its tiny J2ME roots on tiny cheap phones in 3rd world countries). I guess I was trying to point out that you need to look at the bigger picture. How would you police a free service with hundreds of millions of users without a shitload of automation? How would you pick the "innocent" people out very very quickly by using a human to review, given there are probably hundreds of thousands of such requests a day? It's not an easy problem.
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  Damn man, maybe just take a break from social media? I agree with the sentiment but Twitter and Reddit aren't worth this much anger.
  - samstave 4y ago
    Reddit and twitter are watersheds in this space. These subjects need to be discussed and not by dinosaurs who have been in congress before the internet even existed.
    - ShamelessC 4y ago
      Sure, if you think platforms where elite influence and popular opinions are "free speech", be my guest. Really though, you'd probably change more actual minds (rather than just finding others who agree with your opinions already) on a literal soapbox. I do agree that these platforms should have (mostly) been regulated out of existence long before the term "cancelled" was popular.
      - samstave 4y ago
        The fact that you and the other person above are not commenting on the insane (literally) complex and nuanced basis of corruption through the decades speak to your arogance of superiority... Have you been following politics since the 80s? I have. I dont give a shit what you may say about the current situation, due to the fact that I doubt highly you have tracked politicians through decades. Let me name two, just for course, actually three... Dick Cheney. John McCain. John Kerry. What do all of these folks have in common from the mid seventies through the mid nineties... And we wont talk about their personal corruptions... but what ties all three of these scumbags together through the ages? (let me give you a couple hints... BCCI and the term Khashoggi (or keating) -- Not the dismembered journalist... his older relative)
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - 4y ago
SnowHill9902 4y ago
Damn. Would you mind stating your country? I had only heard about this when invited to a spam group by malice with CP.
- tempestn 4y ago
  We're in Canada.
  - ayewo 4y ago
    Is it possible that in one of those groups, kids photos were shared? Perhaps the algorithm somehow classified the photos being shared as CP?
    - tempestn 4y ago
      She's probably shared photos of our kids with her parents and that kind of thing, but nothing that would reasonably be classified as CP (obviously) - although who knows what could cause a false positive. She did receive that spam group message though, and has gotten others in the past; anything could've been in there.
rajup 4y ago
> Our only guess as to what could have caused this is that a week or so before the ban she received a spam message sent to a giant group and marked it as spam. Hmm that's mildly concerning if that's the reason. My acquaintance got a similar spam message yesterday and they marked it as spam as well. No account closures yet though...
TekMol 4y ago
I often wish that there was a law that says the larger a company is, the higher the standards it has to be held to. So a billion dollar company that locks out a user and does not correctly and quickly handle an appeal would get a giant fee that really hurts.
- nojito 4y ago
  Talk about a massive slippery slope.
- adastra22 4y ago
  This is usually the case, although through the form of safe-harbor exclusions which allow smaller companies to get away with more.
  - actually_a_dog 4y ago
    If this is the "usual" case, why do we never hear about big companies ever getting any kind of regulatory fine that actually hurts?
    - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      A fine for what? Meta has no obligations to provide service to anyone other than their advertisers who've purchased such service.
- themitigating 4y ago
  Why does the size of the company matter?
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    Resources available (fiat and people) for meeting regulatory requirements and the relative burden imposed by regulation. There are regulatory risk and compliance teams (finance specially, but also in other spaces) larger than most startups, with mid to high 8 figure budgets. Meta can afford meeting regulatory requirements imposed by nation states.
irthomasthomas 4y ago
[flagged][dead] so I vouched for it. Hope you get some help. I try and keep a spare account going for times like this but it's not always possible or convenient.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  The [flagged] [dead] epidemic on HN seems to be going crazy. The number of well formed opinions I’ve seen recently flagged just because they’re out of the HN ideal is crazy
  - slaw 4y ago
    There are also comments that disapper, yet still visible at user's comments history.
    - Cpoll 4y ago
      Is that different than 'dead' comments (only visible if 'showdead: yes' in settings)?
      - slaw 4y ago
        These comments are not visible with showdead:yes. They are detached from article.
        dahart 4y ago
        The difference between flagged-dead items and detached items is that flagging is done by the community for any reason, while detaching is done by moderators to fix specific problems. Flagging might be gamed but usually isn’t from what I’ve seen, and HN actively tries to detect gaming. OTOH, moderation is always done manually and thoughtfully. (And, most importantly, there is a human who will listen to appeals about either.)
    - daedalus_f 4y ago
      Interesting, I've not read about that on the various lists of HN undocumented features like [1], not that that means it does not happen. Do you have an example? [1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#second-chance-pool https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#second...
daanlo 4y ago
I emailed the support@ email in a different scenario (my phone was stolen) and got help fairly quickly (within 24h). If that doesn‘t help shoot me a DM and I might be able to ask a friend that works at whatsapp about it.
- tempestn 4y ago
  She just got a reply from the support email: > ##- WhatsApp Support -## Hi, Our system flagged your account activity as a violation of our Terms of Service and banned your phone number. Your account will remain banned as a result of the violation. We recommend carefully reviewing the “Acceptable Use of Our Services” section of our Terms of Service to learn more about the appropriate uses of WhatsApp and the activities that violate our Terms of Service. You can learn more about how to use WhatsApp responsibly in this Help Center article. Please keep in mind, WhatsApp reserves the right to enforce its policies in accordance with its Terms of Service. If your friend can help, that'd be great. My email is in profile. Thanks.
  - tempestn 4y ago
    And a new reply: > Hi, We have reason to believe your account activity has violated our Terms of Service and decided to keep your account banned. We received a large number of complaints about your account and to protect our users' privacy, we won't disclose the nature of the complaints. Unfortunately, responses to this email thread won't be read. Unless her parents are complaining about her account, this is nuts. There's no conceivable way there could be a large number of complaints about an account that doesn't actually write to anyone besides family and close friends. Increases my suspicion that it's related to that spam group message. Likely there were a bunch of complaints about that thread, and somehow her account got rolled into the ones that were banned, despite doing nothing besides blocking the chat as spam.
    - kklisura 4y ago
      > We received a large number of complaints about your account > Our only guess as to what could have caused this is that a week or so before the ban she received a spam message sent to a giant group and marked it as spam. Each person in that group marked each other as spam? I wonder if other people in that group ended up banned as well.
trhway 4y ago
May be the algorithm calculated that blocking just that one innocent account would save the Earth from a future catastrophe.
- inopinatus 4y ago
  “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is a warning, not a how-to guide.
  - GWBullshit 4y ago
    Lathe of Heaven has to be one of my all-time favorite ANYTHING book. When it was recommended to me, at first I thought it was a bad joke or something because the first few chapters were so "middle school-ish" in quality. Towards the end I both wanted to find out what happened next and stop reading altogether because I didn't want the story to end. The closest thing I found to the experience was the anime Space Dandy where the first few episodes were excruciatingly painful to watch in a "WTF is this crap?!?" disbelief sort of way ... only to progress very quickly to be one of the best entertainment experiences I can remember in a long time.
jtode 4y ago
[flagged]
cvccvroomvroom 4y ago
Commercial "social" media and chat apps are allowed to do whatever they want without any reason or process. If people had any sense, they would use subscriber-funded, employee co-op, nonprofit services. "Free" commercial apps aren't free or dependable.
- tempestn 4y ago
  The problem in this case is network effects. I prefer not to use whatsapp, but if I want to chat with people who are on whatsapp, that's what I need to use.
  - zaik 4y ago
    That's why the XMPP standard was invented: Interoperability even if you use a different IM provider. Unfortunately almost no one seems to care about standards compliance when choosing their messaging app.
    - cvccvroomvroom 4y ago
      Yeap. Gtalk did XMPP for a while until it became another walled garden.
  - cvccvroomvroom 4y ago
    That's ceding to a popularity catch-22 from a view of learned helplessness, assuming an individual has no power, which is untrue. Network effects bring all sorts of new apps to the fore, one user at a time. Good and better things are difficult and take time. It's people who shrug and reinforce the hegemony who are at fault.
bashinator 4y ago
This is what happens when basic forms of communication are products instead of utilities.
- psyfi 4y ago
  This, I think I might be on of few people who uses XMPP with his wife
- usrn 4y ago
  And that's what happens when only products can trigger push notifications on most people's phones.
GWBullshit 4y ago
Sorry this happened to your wife. I actually can't for the life of me figure out why there's no business model to address this, as it is a common enough type of occurrence on numerous social media platforms; some examples I've personally encountered: - Friend put in Facebook jail for being tagged in what Facebook found to be an offensive post; people tagged in the post were also put in FB jail, yet ironically the original spamming poster never was - Friend put in Facebook jail for reporting a clear violation of Facebook's terms of service to Facebook, meanwhile nothing happened to the violator's account - Myself having been put in FB jail because of a picture of a statue that showed side-boobage; meanwhile "artistic photography" FB pages featuring full, shaven frontal nudity (among other things) were allowed to persist - Myself having been flagged by FB's "new Ai" during the outbreak of Covid for an "offensive post" ... because I put up a music video that feature zero nudity/sexuality/violence/racism/sexism, yet it supposedly "went against community standards" - During the period the previous account was flagged by FB Ai, it was flagged again and I got a message that "Our records indicate you were previously flagged in the recent past, and being flagged in the recent past is now a flaggable offense in itself, so we're giving you another month in FB jail" - While in FB jail, got another message that "I violated the conditions of FB jail (not even sure how this is technically possible) by posting more content "against community standards" (while ALL features of my account were disabled for a month), and so no we're taking this account offline" Lost EVERYTHING including a contacts list built up over the course of years Recent Reddit incident where Reddit spam filters mistakenly identified my own posts on my own subreddit that were crosslinked NOWHERE as "spam", resulting in the subreddit being banned (and losing shit-tons of info on the subreddit); Reddit agreed that this was done "in error" but has so far failed to help retrieve any of the lost data on the subreddit ... Considering how many similar stories I've come across in my research and how important our social media lives/data/contact lists are ... I would GLADLY either: 1.) Pay a reasonable fee for services with an actual liability clause/customer service contact number OR 2.) Pay for some intermediary service that would take up complaints and find a way to get through to social media companies and be like, "WTF?!?" on behalf of their customers
- coredog64 4y ago
  I can see a scrappy group of ex (or even current) Meta employees creating a service using their inside knowledge.
yieldcrv 4y ago
now that every iphone has two sim card slots, and its so ubiquitous instead of having to get some random HTC Obsolete, I just add a new line to my cell phone plan I'm aware of all the phone number workarounds possible, most of which are VOIP, some of which are using internet hosted real cell phone numbers that forward you access codes, but at this point I can just afford another line. VOIP numbers are getting randomly banned everywhere, and the internet hosted numbers have already been used for a lot of services. definitely consider just getting a new phone number. they told me to "recognize my privilege" and so, calling all folks with a little financial privilege! get another phone line.
swayvil 4y ago
The fundamental problem here is that there's a guy squatting in the middle of the communications pipeline deciding who gets to talk and who doesn't. Of course that's going to go bad, for several unavoidable reasons. Any filtering needs to be managed at the level of me, the guy reading the stuff. I think this is clear. But maybe I'm wrong.
rglullis 4y ago
60 comments in the discussion already and no one is slightly curious about what kind of investigation they can do, if the messages are end-to-end encrypted? OP: any chance your wife's phone was sim-swapped or cloned? I believe that this is the only thing that could trigger an alarm. Also, just drop WhatsApp if you can. Install Element on your phone and ask your wife to do the same, if you want you can sign up for a 14-day trial on Communick [0], or just use the free service from matrix.org [1] [0]: https://communick.com https://communick.com [1]: https://app.element.io https://app.element.io
- treme 4y ago
  why stop there? get them to install linux on their pc, help them tunnel through Tor and setup pgp for them.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    Baby steps... Baby steps... Seriously, though. My mother, well in her 60's and far from being a tech-savvy person, managed to install Element and login to her account simply by following the instructions on the email I sent her when I signed her up. The whole thing with saving recovery key is a bit confusing, but not a showstopper. I don't get why people need to act like they can't even try a different service.There was life before WhatsApp, there can be life without it. Worst case scenario, you tried something new.
  - GWBullshit 4y ago
    Yeah, no. You even so much as search for TOR on a search engine, you're on a list. You go to their site, you're on another list. You click the "download" part of the page, you're on another list. You click "download", you're on another list. You open up the package in your downloads folder, you're on another list. You install the package contents, you're on another list. You run it, you're on another list. People who never gave much thought to who developed TOR and believe it offers "privacy" have got to be among some of the most naive tech users to exist.
    - 4y ago
drited 4y ago
If in the EU try a GDPR request for her personal data. I did that once when hit with a similar situation with no reason given for refusal of service from a faceless corporation. The request resulted in a human looking at the situation (because they had to in order to give me my data). They reinstated the service after realising a mistake had been made.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Facebook ignores the GDPR and gets away with it: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/ https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/
aboringusername 4y ago
If you're in the EU you have a right not to be subjected to automated decision making. You can visit this URL [1] and get in touch with their DPO - they must conduct a human review and can look at all of the data and either reinstate your account or explain why it was banned. I have used this process successfully to overturn automated decision making as if they refuse you can complain to your data authority if you have one. [1]: https://www.whatsapp.com/contact/forms/3022366361353546/ https://www.whatsapp.com/contact/forms/3022366361353546/
Ansil849 4y ago
> banned from __________ without reason or recourse That's the risk we all run when using services owned by others. The unfortunate takeaway is that you cannot trust other people.
- _vertigo 4y ago
  This strikes me as unnecessarily defeatist
  - Ansil849 4y ago
    > This strikes me as unnecessarily defeatist How so? I think it's just a realist view. What alternative would you suggest?
    - stazz1 4y ago
      if they want users they gotta fix it ;)
cal5k 4y ago
This exact thing happened when I created a Facebook account so I could see our company's Facebook ads. It was a brand new account, no activity at all, and now I can't see or manage our ads even though they're running. It's awful. This is why I would never, ever buy a product that requires a Facebook account to use it (coughOculuscough).
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  yeah, if you go out of your way to break the social graph, facebook will ban you quickly under the excuse of "spammers also do this". one way around this is to send a few friend requests (and get them accepted) during your first signin session.
- donohoe 4y ago
  Yeah, created a FB account for same reason (manage ads and org page). It is not usable anymore.
- GWBullshit 4y ago
  Can you imagine back in the day when Libra was a thing and they actually thought people were going to trust them with their real money that would have been used to purchase it? Likewise, I still for the life of me can't figure out why people still use PayPal after the endless "I just logged on and they told me my account and funds were frozen/It's been 6+ months of trying to unfreeze my PayPal funds and still no luck". Like if there was actual illegal activity, you'd imagine they'd report it (as required by law) and some government entity would freeze the funds; instead PayPal just does so and does who knows what with the money in the meantime, interest-free.
m3kw9 4y ago
Could be someone spoofed her number and so bad things
NullPrefix 4y ago
How do you know that she didn't violate terms of service? It's a mile long document, I doubt you have read it. I didn't read it either, but still, just because she's using it to keep in touch with friends & family doesn't mean she didn't violate ToS.
- tempestn 4y ago
  You're right; I haven't read the whole document. But I doubt it prohibits anodyne conversations with family members. And they explicitly said that a large number of people have complained about her account, and the ban stems from that.
dirtyid 4y ago
Somewhat related, anyway for Whatsapp gDrive backups to be restored to another account / phone#? I'm less afraid of Whatsapp ban since it's trival though still annoying to circumvent.
simonblack 4y ago
Companies live or die on the size of their clientele. Companies have to earn the right to your custom. If they don't shape up, make them ship out. Remove your custom from their income. As Vlad said the other day :"You're either sovereign, or you're colonised. There is no other situation." Don't be colonised. Tell all the bastard companies to just piss off.
otterley 4y ago
Most likely, her account tripped an abuse detection system. Of course, WhatsApp is not going to disclose how the system works (not even to disclose which factors were used to make the decision), because that will allow abusers to more easily circumvent it. Heaven knows there are enough spammers using WhatsApp. If it’s worth that much to you, hire an attorney to send a letter demanding an explanation and restoration of service. You’d be surprised what can happen when a company’s legal team gets wind of a problem.
bloody-crow 4y ago
My wife got banned from Apex Legends, a game she's invested quite a bit of time and money into. The ban says it's allegedly for cheating, and she's never cheated in her life, doesn't have any software that can even remotely be considered cheating, or did anything that could be misconstrued as cheating. In fact, she's pretty bad at the game and her stats are quite low, so there isn't even a chance she's been reported for cheating for being super good or anything. She's also appealed and got the ban confirmed and by the "manual review" process, whatever that means. It's doubly frustrating cause she's got quite a bit of money invested in the cosmetic items in the game that she no longer can access.
dissent 4y ago
As of 2022 I have so far refused to install Whatsapp on principle. We deserved federated IM and 10 years ago we almost had it with XMPP. To me Whatsapp were the antithesis of this, by binding IM to mobile numbers and phones and making it an entirely closed system. By blurring the lines between themselves and SMS, they made using their platform ubiquitous. iMessage is much the same - people don't even know the difference between it and SMS. We've all been robbed.
dorkwood 4y ago
Instagram banned my account without reason. Or rather, they turned off my ability to interact with the account. The account is still there. People can view my photos. At this point I would just like the account removed, but there's no way for me to do it. If I log in on my PC it tells me to log into the app to regain access to my account. If I log into the app on iOS, I get a black screen. On Android I also get a black screen, but I can also navigate through the menu. Every menu item either gives me an error saying something like "challenge required" or takes me to the same message I see on PC. I've tried all the online guides I can find, but none of them seem to have my specific problem. Is there any way to remove an Instagram account without going through the usual channels?
- palerdot 4y ago
  > Is there any way to remove an Instagram account without going through the usual channels? It is amusing how times have changed that a highly technical person seeks help in a highly technical forum for things as basic as removing an account. We are truly entering interesting times.
joaogfarias 4y ago
Another reason to use decentralized messaging. Any service which depends on a single point will be fragile to this point wishes and weaknesses.
fritigern 4y ago
https://telegram.org/ https://telegram.org/

205 points by tempestn 4y ago

Ava433 4y ago

samstave 4y ago

trollied 4y ago
What actually needs to happen is a proper federated system (akin to the existing telecoms system) that is regulated in the same way worldwide. XMPP is great. It should have ended up being the new SMS in my opinion, but telcos wouldn't have been able to make money off it, so it never happened. Enter Apple with imessage. The game changed somewhat. But it still left the Android gulf. If Apple and Google sorted things out message-wise (can't see this happening) we might get there, but then you're still left with the billions of people that have simpler phones that use whatsapp because that's all they can actually use (whatsapp became prolific because of its tiny J2ME roots on tiny cheap phones in 3rd world countries). I guess I was trying to point out that you need to look at the bigger picture. How would you police a free service with hundreds of millions of users without a shitload of automation? How would you pick the "innocent" people out very very quickly by using a human to review, given there are probably hundreds of thousands of such requests a day? It's not an easy problem.
ShamelessC 4y ago
Damn man, maybe just take a break from social media? I agree with the sentiment but Twitter and Reddit aren't worth this much anger.
- samstave 4y ago
  Reddit and twitter are watersheds in this space. These subjects need to be discussed and not by dinosaurs who have been in congress before the internet even existed.
  - ShamelessC 4y ago
    Sure, if you think platforms where elite influence and popular opinions are "free speech", be my guest. Really though, you'd probably change more actual minds (rather than just finding others who agree with your opinions already) on a literal soapbox. I do agree that these platforms should have (mostly) been regulated out of existence long before the term "cancelled" was popular.
    - samstave 4y ago
      The fact that you and the other person above are not commenting on the insane (literally) complex and nuanced basis of corruption through the decades speak to your arogance of superiority... Have you been following politics since the 80s? I have. I dont give a shit what you may say about the current situation, due to the fact that I doubt highly you have tracked politicians through decades. Let me name two, just for course, actually three... Dick Cheney. John McCain. John Kerry. What do all of these folks have in common from the mid seventies through the mid nineties... And we wont talk about their personal corruptions... but what ties all three of these scumbags together through the ages? (let me give you a couple hints... BCCI and the term Khashoggi (or keating) -- Not the dismembered journalist... his older relative)
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - 4y ago

SnowHill9902 4y ago

Damn. Would you mind stating your country? I had only heard about this when invited to a spam group by malice with CP.

tempestn 4y ago
We're in Canada.
- ayewo 4y ago
  Is it possible that in one of those groups, kids photos were shared? Perhaps the algorithm somehow classified the photos being shared as CP?
  - tempestn 4y ago
    She's probably shared photos of our kids with her parents and that kind of thing, but nothing that would reasonably be classified as CP (obviously) - although who knows what could cause a false positive. She did receive that spam group message though, and has gotten others in the past; anything could've been in there.

rajup 4y ago

> Our only guess as to what could have caused this is that a week or so before the ban she received a spam message sent to a giant group and marked it as spam. Hmm that's mildly concerning if that's the reason. My acquaintance got a similar spam message yesterday and they marked it as spam as well. No account closures yet though...

TekMol 4y ago

I often wish that there was a law that says the larger a company is, the higher the standards it has to be held to. So a billion dollar company that locks out a user and does not correctly and quickly handle an appeal would get a giant fee that really hurts.

nojito 4y ago
Talk about a massive slippery slope.
adastra22 4y ago
This is usually the case, although through the form of safe-harbor exclusions which allow smaller companies to get away with more.
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  If this is the "usual" case, why do we never hear about big companies ever getting any kind of regulatory fine that actually hurts?
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    A fine for what? Meta has no obligations to provide service to anyone other than their advertisers who've purchased such service.
themitigating 4y ago
Why does the size of the company matter?
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Resources available (fiat and people) for meeting regulatory requirements and the relative burden imposed by regulation. There are regulatory risk and compliance teams (finance specially, but also in other spaces) larger than most startups, with mid to high 8 figure budgets. Meta can afford meeting regulatory requirements imposed by nation states.

irthomasthomas 4y ago

[flagged][dead] so I vouched for it. Hope you get some help. I try and keep a spare account going for times like this but it's not always possible or convenient.

bowsamic 4y ago
The [flagged] [dead] epidemic on HN seems to be going crazy. The number of well formed opinions I’ve seen recently flagged just because they’re out of the HN ideal is crazy
- slaw 4y ago
  There are also comments that disapper, yet still visible at user's comments history.
  - Cpoll 4y ago
    Is that different than 'dead' comments (only visible if 'showdead: yes' in settings)?
    - slaw 4y ago
      These comments are not visible with showdead:yes. They are detached from article.
      - dahart 4y ago
        The difference between flagged-dead items and detached items is that flagging is done by the community for any reason, while detaching is done by moderators to fix specific problems. Flagging might be gamed but usually isn’t from what I’ve seen, and HN actively tries to detect gaming. OTOH, moderation is always done manually and thoughtfully. (And, most importantly, there is a human who will listen to appeals about either.)
  - daedalus_f 4y ago
    Interesting, I've not read about that on the various lists of HN undocumented features like [1], not that that means it does not happen. Do you have an example? [1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#second-chance-pool https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#second...

daanlo 4y ago

I emailed the support@ email in a different scenario (my phone was stolen) and got help fairly quickly (within 24h). If that doesn‘t help shoot me a DM and I might be able to ask a friend that works at whatsapp about it.

tempestn 4y ago
She just got a reply from the support email: > ##- WhatsApp Support -## Hi, Our system flagged your account activity as a violation of our Terms of Service and banned your phone number. Your account will remain banned as a result of the violation. We recommend carefully reviewing the “Acceptable Use of Our Services” section of our Terms of Service to learn more about the appropriate uses of WhatsApp and the activities that violate our Terms of Service. You can learn more about how to use WhatsApp responsibly in this Help Center article. Please keep in mind, WhatsApp reserves the right to enforce its policies in accordance with its Terms of Service. If your friend can help, that'd be great. My email is in profile. Thanks.
- tempestn 4y ago
  And a new reply: > Hi, We have reason to believe your account activity has violated our Terms of Service and decided to keep your account banned. We received a large number of complaints about your account and to protect our users' privacy, we won't disclose the nature of the complaints. Unfortunately, responses to this email thread won't be read. Unless her parents are complaining about her account, this is nuts. There's no conceivable way there could be a large number of complaints about an account that doesn't actually write to anyone besides family and close friends. Increases my suspicion that it's related to that spam group message. Likely there were a bunch of complaints about that thread, and somehow her account got rolled into the ones that were banned, despite doing nothing besides blocking the chat as spam.
  - kklisura 4y ago
    > We received a large number of complaints about your account > Our only guess as to what could have caused this is that a week or so before the ban she received a spam message sent to a giant group and marked it as spam. Each person in that group marked each other as spam? I wonder if other people in that group ended up banned as well.

trhway 4y ago

May be the algorithm calculated that blocking just that one innocent account would save the Earth from a future catastrophe.

inopinatus 4y ago
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is a warning, not a how-to guide.
- GWBullshit 4y ago
  Lathe of Heaven has to be one of my all-time favorite ANYTHING book. When it was recommended to me, at first I thought it was a bad joke or something because the first few chapters were so "middle school-ish" in quality. Towards the end I both wanted to find out what happened next and stop reading altogether because I didn't want the story to end. The closest thing I found to the experience was the anime Space Dandy where the first few episodes were excruciatingly painful to watch in a "WTF is this crap?!?" disbelief sort of way ... only to progress very quickly to be one of the best entertainment experiences I can remember in a long time.

jtode 4y ago

[flagged]

cvccvroomvroom 4y ago

Commercial "social" media and chat apps are allowed to do whatever they want without any reason or process. If people had any sense, they would use subscriber-funded, employee co-op, nonprofit services. "Free" commercial apps aren't free or dependable.

tempestn 4y ago
The problem in this case is network effects. I prefer not to use whatsapp, but if I want to chat with people who are on whatsapp, that's what I need to use.
- zaik 4y ago
  That's why the XMPP standard was invented: Interoperability even if you use a different IM provider. Unfortunately almost no one seems to care about standards compliance when choosing their messaging app.
  - cvccvroomvroom 4y ago
    Yeap. Gtalk did XMPP for a while until it became another walled garden.
- cvccvroomvroom 4y ago
  That's ceding to a popularity catch-22 from a view of learned helplessness, assuming an individual has no power, which is untrue. Network effects bring all sorts of new apps to the fore, one user at a time. Good and better things are difficult and take time. It's people who shrug and reinforce the hegemony who are at fault.

bashinator 4y ago

This is what happens when basic forms of communication are products instead of utilities.

psyfi 4y ago
This, I think I might be on of few people who uses XMPP with his wife
usrn 4y ago
And that's what happens when only products can trigger push notifications on most people's phones.

GWBullshit 4y ago

Sorry this happened to your wife. I actually can't for the life of me figure out why there's no business model to address this, as it is a common enough type of occurrence on numerous social media platforms; some examples I've personally encountered: - Friend put in Facebook jail for being tagged in what Facebook found to be an offensive post; people tagged in the post were also put in FB jail, yet ironically the original spamming poster never was - Friend put in Facebook jail for reporting a clear violation of Facebook's terms of service to Facebook, meanwhile nothing happened to the violator's account - Myself having been put in FB jail because of a picture of a statue that showed side-boobage; meanwhile "artistic photography" FB pages featuring full, shaven frontal nudity (among other things) were allowed to persist - Myself having been flagged by FB's "new Ai" during the outbreak of Covid for an "offensive post" ... because I put up a music video that feature zero nudity/sexuality/violence/racism/sexism, yet it supposedly "went against community standards" - During the period the previous account was flagged by FB Ai, it was flagged again and I got a message that "Our records indicate you were previously flagged in the recent past, and being flagged in the recent past is now a flaggable offense in itself, so we're giving you another month in FB jail" - While in FB jail, got another message that "I violated the conditions of FB jail (not even sure how this is technically possible) by posting more content "against community standards" (while ALL features of my account were disabled for a month), and so no we're taking this account offline" Lost EVERYTHING including a contacts list built up over the course of years Recent Reddit incident where Reddit spam filters mistakenly identified my own posts on my own subreddit that were crosslinked NOWHERE as "spam", resulting in the subreddit being banned (and losing shit-tons of info on the subreddit); Reddit agreed that this was done "in error" but has so far failed to help retrieve any of the lost data on the subreddit ... Considering how many similar stories I've come across in my research and how important our social media lives/data/contact lists are ... I would GLADLY either: 1.) Pay a reasonable fee for services with an actual liability clause/customer service contact number OR 2.) Pay for some intermediary service that would take up complaints and find a way to get through to social media companies and be like, "WTF?!?" on behalf of their customers

coredog64 4y ago
I can see a scrappy group of ex (or even current) Meta employees creating a service using their inside knowledge.

yieldcrv 4y ago

now that every iphone has two sim card slots, and its so ubiquitous instead of having to get some random HTC Obsolete, I just add a new line to my cell phone plan I'm aware of all the phone number workarounds possible, most of which are VOIP, some of which are using internet hosted real cell phone numbers that forward you access codes, but at this point I can just afford another line. VOIP numbers are getting randomly banned everywhere, and the internet hosted numbers have already been used for a lot of services. definitely consider just getting a new phone number. they told me to "recognize my privilege" and so, calling all folks with a little financial privilege! get another phone line.

swayvil 4y ago

The fundamental problem here is that there's a guy squatting in the middle of the communications pipeline deciding who gets to talk and who doesn't. Of course that's going to go bad, for several unavoidable reasons. Any filtering needs to be managed at the level of me, the guy reading the stuff. I think this is clear. But maybe I'm wrong.

rglullis 4y ago

60 comments in the discussion already and no one is slightly curious about what kind of investigation they can do, if the messages are end-to-end encrypted? OP: any chance your wife's phone was sim-swapped or cloned? I believe that this is the only thing that could trigger an alarm. Also, just drop WhatsApp if you can. Install Element on your phone and ask your wife to do the same, if you want you can sign up for a 14-day trial on Communick [0], or just use the free service from matrix.org [1] [0]: https://communick.com https://communick.com [1]: https://app.element.io https://app.element.io

treme 4y ago
why stop there? get them to install linux on their pc, help them tunnel through Tor and setup pgp for them.
- rglullis 4y ago
  Baby steps... Baby steps... Seriously, though. My mother, well in her 60's and far from being a tech-savvy person, managed to install Element and login to her account simply by following the instructions on the email I sent her when I signed her up. The whole thing with saving recovery key is a bit confusing, but not a showstopper. I don't get why people need to act like they can't even try a different service.There was life before WhatsApp, there can be life without it. Worst case scenario, you tried something new.
- GWBullshit 4y ago
  Yeah, no. You even so much as search for TOR on a search engine, you're on a list. You go to their site, you're on another list. You click the "download" part of the page, you're on another list. You click "download", you're on another list. You open up the package in your downloads folder, you're on another list. You install the package contents, you're on another list. You run it, you're on another list. People who never gave much thought to who developed TOR and believe it offers "privacy" have got to be among some of the most naive tech users to exist.
  - 4y ago

drited 4y ago

If in the EU try a GDPR request for her personal data. I did that once when hit with a similar situation with no reason given for refusal of service from a faceless corporation. The request resulted in a human looking at the situation (because they had to in order to give me my data). They reinstated the service after realising a mistake had been made.

Nextgrid 4y ago
Facebook ignores the GDPR and gets away with it: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/ https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/

aboringusername 4y ago

If you're in the EU you have a right not to be subjected to automated decision making. You can visit this URL [1] and get in touch with their DPO - they must conduct a human review and can look at all of the data and either reinstate your account or explain why it was banned. I have used this process successfully to overturn automated decision making as if they refuse you can complain to your data authority if you have one. [1]: https://www.whatsapp.com/contact/forms/3022366361353546/ https://www.whatsapp.com/contact/forms/3022366361353546/

Ansil849 4y ago

> banned from __________ without reason or recourse That's the risk we all run when using services owned by others. The unfortunate takeaway is that you cannot trust other people.

_vertigo 4y ago
This strikes me as unnecessarily defeatist
- Ansil849 4y ago
  > This strikes me as unnecessarily defeatist How so? I think it's just a realist view. What alternative would you suggest?
  - stazz1 4y ago
    if they want users they gotta fix it ;)

cal5k 4y ago

This exact thing happened when I created a Facebook account so I could see our company's Facebook ads. It was a brand new account, no activity at all, and now I can't see or manage our ads even though they're running. It's awful. This is why I would never, ever buy a product that requires a Facebook account to use it (coughOculuscough).

yieldcrv 4y ago
yeah, if you go out of your way to break the social graph, facebook will ban you quickly under the excuse of "spammers also do this". one way around this is to send a few friend requests (and get them accepted) during your first signin session.
donohoe 4y ago
Yeah, created a FB account for same reason (manage ads and org page). It is not usable anymore.
GWBullshit 4y ago
Can you imagine back in the day when Libra was a thing and they actually thought people were going to trust them with their real money that would have been used to purchase it? Likewise, I still for the life of me can't figure out why people still use PayPal after the endless "I just logged on and they told me my account and funds were frozen/It's been 6+ months of trying to unfreeze my PayPal funds and still no luck". Like if there was actual illegal activity, you'd imagine they'd report it (as required by law) and some government entity would freeze the funds; instead PayPal just does so and does who knows what with the money in the meantime, interest-free.

m3kw9 4y ago

Could be someone spoofed her number and so bad things

NullPrefix 4y ago

How do you know that she didn't violate terms of service? It's a mile long document, I doubt you have read it. I didn't read it either, but still, just because she's using it to keep in touch with friends & family doesn't mean she didn't violate ToS.

tempestn 4y ago
You're right; I haven't read the whole document. But I doubt it prohibits anodyne conversations with family members. And they explicitly said that a large number of people have complained about her account, and the ban stems from that.

dirtyid 4y ago

Somewhat related, anyway for Whatsapp gDrive backups to be restored to another account / phone#? I'm less afraid of Whatsapp ban since it's trival though still annoying to circumvent.

simonblack 4y ago

Companies live or die on the size of their clientele. Companies have to earn the right to your custom. If they don't shape up, make them ship out. Remove your custom from their income. As Vlad said the other day :"You're either sovereign, or you're colonised. There is no other situation." Don't be colonised. Tell all the bastard companies to just piss off.

otterley 4y ago

Most likely, her account tripped an abuse detection system. Of course, WhatsApp is not going to disclose how the system works (not even to disclose which factors were used to make the decision), because that will allow abusers to more easily circumvent it. Heaven knows there are enough spammers using WhatsApp. If it’s worth that much to you, hire an attorney to send a letter demanding an explanation and restoration of service. You’d be surprised what can happen when a company’s legal team gets wind of a problem.

bloody-crow 4y ago

My wife got banned from Apex Legends, a game she's invested quite a bit of time and money into. The ban says it's allegedly for cheating, and she's never cheated in her life, doesn't have any software that can even remotely be considered cheating, or did anything that could be misconstrued as cheating. In fact, she's pretty bad at the game and her stats are quite low, so there isn't even a chance she's been reported for cheating for being super good or anything. She's also appealed and got the ban confirmed and by the "manual review" process, whatever that means. It's doubly frustrating cause she's got quite a bit of money invested in the cosmetic items in the game that she no longer can access.

dissent 4y ago

As of 2022 I have so far refused to install Whatsapp on principle. We deserved federated IM and 10 years ago we almost had it with XMPP. To me Whatsapp were the antithesis of this, by binding IM to mobile numbers and phones and making it an entirely closed system. By blurring the lines between themselves and SMS, they made using their platform ubiquitous. iMessage is much the same - people don't even know the difference between it and SMS. We've all been robbed.

dorkwood 4y ago

Instagram banned my account without reason. Or rather, they turned off my ability to interact with the account. The account is still there. People can view my photos. At this point I would just like the account removed, but there's no way for me to do it. If I log in on my PC it tells me to log into the app to regain access to my account. If I log into the app on iOS, I get a black screen. On Android I also get a black screen, but I can also navigate through the menu. Every menu item either gives me an error saying something like "challenge required" or takes me to the same message I see on PC. I've tried all the online guides I can find, but none of them seem to have my specific problem. Is there any way to remove an Instagram account without going through the usual channels?

palerdot 4y ago
> Is there any way to remove an Instagram account without going through the usual channels? It is amusing how times have changed that a highly technical person seeks help in a highly technical forum for things as basic as removing an account. We are truly entering interesting times.

joaogfarias 4y ago

Another reason to use decentralized messaging. Any service which depends on a single point will be fragile to this point wishes and weaknesses.

fritigern 4y ago

https://telegram.org/ https://telegram.org/