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Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

415 points by simonbackx 4y ago

paintman252 4y ago
This is why massive companies like Meta and Alphabet needs to be nationalised. They simply have too much power over lives of billions. This article is just another reminder of this. At scale that Meta operates, this algorithmically decided domain blockings mean nothing to them, but everything to hundred's of non-profits. There need to be legally mandated protections so things like this never happen again.
- invalidusernam3 4y ago
  I don't think nationalisation is the answer, imagine the additional layer of bureaucracy dealing with a government entity. Large companies like Facebook need to be regulated by the government, there needs to be laws in place for stuff like this.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    The European Union finally did it with the Digital Market Act. The law enforces access to market place and interoperability between messaging platforms. I’m surprised we don’t hear much about it here. My guess is that American companies like to pretend it doesn’t matter in case it gave idea to US customers and silently fight it in courts in Europe.
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
  Don't nationalise them, break them up. A state monopoly is preferable to a private monopoly, but in this case there's no reason we have to have a monopoly. Facebook and Google do too many things.
  - paintman252 4y ago
    >Facebook and Google do too many things. Google? Definitely. Meta? Not really. All Meta has is two social networks and one messaging service. They haven't really experienced huge success in anything else. They MAY hit big in VR/AR space, but that's yet to be determined.
    - bilekas 4y ago
      Just did a check to see their subsidiaries and they actually have way more than I expected : https://inspirationfeed.com/what-companies-does-facebook-own/ https://inspirationfeed.com/what-companies-does-facebook-own...
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - xphos 4y ago
      They still would definitely met the standard of a monopsony if not a monopoly. Its scary that an enormous number of people start and stop the information searching at google or those two social networks. I think its an oversimplification to say that just breaking them will solve the issue but they definitely handle a governmental level of power in terms of social after effects, which is why nation states target them for fake news.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        Which market are they a monopsony (only one buyer) in?
    - eppp 4y ago
      On one hand you say they are so important they need to be nationalized and on the other you dismiss them as almost a couple of trivial apps. Which one is it?
    - capableweb 4y ago
      Facebook is approaching 100 acquisitions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Meta_Platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... Feels like a lot and not just three entities. Additionally, Facebook primarily does acquisitions as a form of hiring, according to Mark Zuckerberg himself. They buy the company so they can get the employees to come and work at Facebook.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    Communications platforms naturally become a monopoly. The biggest platform is the most useful one because you can talk to most people on it, so people prefer to join the biggest platform and it gets bigger.
    - ydlr 4y ago
      That is easily fixed with legislation. We now have multiple phone companies that all interoperate. No reason we can't require the same from our many facebooks.
  - causi 4y ago
    Oh, for the days when you got banned from one website and you just went to a different website.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Nationalisation wouldn't fix it. There are plenty of rules and procedures in every nation which screw over random 'little guys'... For example, "oh, you have a disability and can't work? Here, have some state support. Oh - we just found you helped look after your neighbours children once. That counts as work. Therefore you lied to us. Thats fraud. All your state support will now be withdrawn."
  - warbeforepeace 4y ago
    Look how well the US government handled the small business loans during covid. It wasn't the small businesses really getting them.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  I haven't seen much information on how the GDPR's Article 22 right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated means is going in these scenarios. I hear a lot about other provisions, but Article 22 seems like an important experiment.
- indymike 4y ago
  > This is why massive companies like Meta and Alphabet needs to be nationalised. No. Giving this additional power to the government will not have the outcome you want. When something becomes too powerful, the solution is not to further concentrate that power into less accountable hands.
  - kyleyeats 4y ago
    It might be the only way to make Facebook worse.
  - psychoslave 4y ago
    Nationalization is not necessary more concentration and less many accountable hands. Well, it depends on the governance obviously. If you talk some autocratic regime, where the king proclaimed "I am the state", that fits your description for sure. On the other hand, if you are looking at a direct democracy regime, you could hardly make the power more pervasive, and every citizen has to carry its part of accountability on every social matter.
    - indymike 4y ago
      > Well, it depends on the governance obviously. Three reasons why nationalization is a bad idea: * Power disparity. As it is, Facebook is destroying people and business without any accountability. Now we hand that to the state who: * Has all the incentive to destroy anything that competes, and the government has the ultimate way to do it: just outlaw the competition. If you think the product is bad today, imagine how fantastic it will be in 10 years of no competition. * Has all the incentive to make people use it. So, it becomes oppressive and horrible and the government decides, hey, let's make everyone use this thing for essential services like payments and democracy! All in all, nationalization of a social network is one of the worst directions we can take, regardless of politics. It's just a bad idea.
      - polygamous_bat 4y ago
        > the government has the ultimate way to do it: just outlaw the competition > So, it becomes oppressive and horrible and the government decides, hey, let's make everyone use this thing for essential services like payments and democracy These things can only fly in a non functioning democracy, which, while the US is coming dangerously close to, is not there yet.
- is_true 4y ago
  Would you be ok with the chinese or argentinian government running Alphabet or Meta? I don't think most government are better than any corporation.
  - psychoslave 4y ago
    Last time I checked, free access to education, care and protection against many abuses where provided by governmental organisms. "government are better than any corporation" (or its reverse) means nothing if you don’t provide some specific topics and possible metrics to evaluate them. Also, not all government and corporations behaves in the very same way.
    - is_true 4y ago
      Sorry, don't have time to show you that most governments do shitty things to people all the time.
- Xeoncross 4y ago
  I know sub-optimal government is the default solution to all issues, but man, they are terrible with the monopolies they do control like healthcare, public education and infrastructure.
- onion2k 4y ago
  There need to be legally mandated protections so things like this never happen again. Such protection for websites would be an implicit protection for Meta's de facto monopoly on text-based social media. What needs to happen is for these sorts of bans to still happen, but for the public to understand the impact of those bans and move away from a single website for all their social media needs if they want to see posts from everyone. Competition in the space would fix the problem. It'd mean the impact of a ban is massively diminished, and that companies are incentivized not to issue unwarranted bans because their users would go somewhere else. While both users and advertisers have no real choice where to go Meta will hold on to their monopoly.
- rrwo 4y ago
  > This is why massive companies like Meta and Alphabet needs to be nationalised. Nationalised by what country? US? UK? France? Russia? Saudi Arabia? India? China? Would we have country-specific and isolated social media and search engines? Even in nominally free western countries, do you really want the government controlling what can be in a search engine or posted on social media?
- bachmeier 4y ago
  Paul Romer has offered a proposal: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/nobel-laureate-paul-romer-how-curb-big-techs-power https://news.uchicago.edu/story/nobel-laureate-paul-romer-ho...
- stall84 4y ago
  I'd be in favor of trust-busting them into smaller entities before nationalization .. While nationalization might work for smaller western European countries, it isn't going to work in a political machine the size of the united states
- laundermaf 4y ago
  You’re placing way too much trust in the government, the same agency held hostage by a private company that forbid them to automatically calculate the taxes owed by its citizens. Plus why what the government do with a social network? They’d still need to moderate it — at atrocious prices at that.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Nah. Just make providing free services then blatantly fucking people over who rely on them a very risky thing to do. Like "attractive nuisance" laws that can make you liable if some kid you've never seen before drowns in a pool on your property if you didn't take reasonable measures to keep a kid from wandering into the pool. Or various regulations that make certain demands on businesses that open up physical spaces to the public (like stores or malls or whatever). Separately I'd also like to see us outlaw the kind of data collection & retention that lets Facebook's business model exist, but I do think making it so offering free services doesn't absolve you of all responsibility is something we should do, too, and is more directly relevant to this.
- smileysteve 4y ago
  So the government, for and by the people can have a money drain that is used for disinformation and cyber bullying? Just delete Facebook, it's not worth it.
base 4y ago
I don't have a specific solution for you, but I also run a domain with some thousands of subdomains and is always a fight to not be banned from Google, Meta, internet operators etc. Sometimes is enough one bad actor under one of your subdomains to have a full ban on the whole domain. What I suggest is for your and your clients to contact Meta through the Business Center support. Their support for paying clients is much better. I would also recommend you become a Meta Business Partner if Facebook/Instagram is important for your SaaS.
- jefftk 4y ago
  > Sometimes is enough one bad actor under one of your subdomains to have a full ban on the whole domain. If you're running independent subdomains where a bad actor on one should not affect the reputation of the rest, you probably should add your domain to the public suffix list: https://publicsuffix.org https://publicsuffix.org
  - simonbackx 4y ago
    Thanks, I didn't know about that list. I'll try that!
    - hirsin 4y ago
      Note that adding your domain to the PSL changes how browsers interact with it, so don't do it lightly. In particular, no more cookies for the parent domain.
- notacoward 4y ago
  > Their support for paying clients is much better. Perhaps worth it in this situation, but isn't that basically paying protection money? "Nice domain you've got there. Shame if anything happened to it."
  - bluGill 4y ago
    If you are using their services for something important you should pay for it. I use fastmail not gmail for this reason: email is too important for me to risk on an account I don't pay for. I don't pay for youtube, because I don't care if they go out of business. I probably would pay for facebook if possible (but only if they make it FACEbook - not political memes, offensive jokes, and cat pictures) as it is a good way to keep in touch with distant friends.
midislack 4y ago
First thing I always wonder with these, what did your customer(s) do wrong?
- Maxious 4y ago
  > ThreatExchange (aka TX or TE) is used by multiple companies to share signals on a variety of topics intended to prevent real world harm. Some examples of how TX is currently used include sharing malware, phishing scams, and terrorism signals with the goal of helping all participating organizations tackle these problems based on their terms of service. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/threat-exchange/getting-started/ https://developers.facebook.com/docs/threat-exchange/getting...
- simonbackx 4y ago
  Good question! I would also like to know the answer. I've scanned through our sites and couldn't find any malicious content... My guess is that the block was automated, and might have been caused by a fake spam report. There can be some competition between non-profits (e.g. two scouting groups in the same local area). Maybe they started to report each other as a joke.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    A large percentage of users use the "report spam" button as an unsubscribe/delete button in their email client.
    - tialaramex 4y ago
      Right, from a user's point of view labelling it "Spam" has the same effect as when you put letters unread on that pile by the door, "I don't want to read this". Should they? Doesn't matter. Years back we even had users who were paying us to send them specific emails and would mark it as spam. The use of "users marked this as spam" as a signal is a cheap but lousy shortcut and it's bad news that we became reliant upon it.
  - tarranoth 4y ago
hexo 4y ago
Sue the f* out of them.
snowwrestler 4y ago
Why not use full domains for a service like this? Instead of client.your domain.tld, register client-your domain.tld. This would prevent one bad actor from nuking your whole business. Yes it has a cost, but it’s like $10 a year for a new domain, which I bet pales in comparison to other direct costs of running a SaaS.
- simonbackx 4y ago
  Yes, that is a possibility. But we only charge $59 per year, so there is not much room for extra costs.
- seszett 4y ago
  They provide webshops for 60€/year and a .be or .nl domain costs 15€/year, so 25% of that. That's a lot.
  - chrisan 4y ago
    Here is our 60/year plan with a sub domain. We can't control the fact Facebook/Google/whatever might ban you because of a bad acting neighbor Or here is our 75/year plan which includes a domain to ensure you don't run into problems with social media
  - sigio 4y ago
    A .nl domain name costs < $5... be probably <$10, but still.
- schroeding 4y ago
  Apart from the cost, this would allow bad actors to reregister domains, once a shop is expired, though. Subdomains do not.
  - snowwrestler 4y ago
    This is true. But this risk should probably be weighed against the risk of a bad customer getting your entire root domain deny-listed.
chris_wot 4y ago
Meta has form. They did this to hundreds of Australian non-profits when they were trying to get leverage over the Australian government.
danpalmer 4y ago
Fun story. At my previous company we had "Sign in with Facebook" – whatever your opinions on it are, it was probably the right thing for the company at that time. Facebook decided to "audit" us to make sure we were doing sign in right. The tested it incorrectly, told us we were at fault and needed to fix it, and gave us 2 weeks to do so. We scrambled to figure out what the issue was, only to find after they eventually replied to our emails (all they told us up-front was "it doesn't work") that they had tried to use a sign-in only button to sign-up, similar on many websites, not at all for our flow and not something it was possible for us to do. We explained this and they dropped the audit. 2 weeks later, they audited us again, failed us again, and gave us a deadline to fix it. We replied pointing to the previous case and explaining again why it was working. We never heard back. 2 weeks later, they audited us again, failed us again, and gave us a deadline to fix it. We replied asking what the hell was happening (politely). We never heard back. 1 week later "Sign in with Facebook" stopped working with no other warning. We opened a support case, we emailed our ads account manager, we emailed our previous ads account manager as the first was on holiday, and all we got was "we're looking into it, but it looks legit, fix it". I asked for a call and explained that the current user experience for users was that they would click "Sign in with Facebook" and see an error saying "Facebook is currently not working, please sign in another way", and that the only way we had to resolve this was to email all our Facebook auth'd users a password reset with an explanation that Facebook sign in no longer worked, and to then remove the feature from our site. "Ah. Ok yeah let me see what I can do". It was working about 2 hours later, and we weren't audited again in the rest of the time I was at the company.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- simonbackx 4y ago
  There are so many stories like this, it is crazy! Thank you for sharing this.
  - 998244353 4y ago
    One quite perplexing common theme is "thing gets flagged -> thing gets resolved by a human as a false positive or whatever -> two weeks later, thing gets flagged again with no change, presumably by an automated system". If the flagging is done by a human, is there really no "case file" that records the previous flags and why they were false positives? If it is done by an automated system, why is it allowed to flag things that a human has already cleared with no change?
pilgrimfff 4y ago
Buy a handful of alternative domains that redirect to your primary (you could stand up a minimal url shortener on each domain). Even if you get unblocked this time, it could easily happen again. Until there’s systematic reform to this nonsense, you just have to work around it with redundancy. If they’re going to treat you like a scammer, work around it like the scammers do.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  I believe the facebook crawler will crawl redirects, such that a URL that results in a redirect to a blocked domain is still going to get blocked. (Even if it were a satisfactory solution to say "message all your customers and tell them they have to start using the new domain for ticket sales, including for events that are already promoted with ongoing ticket sales" which of course it isn't, although I follow you that it would be perhaps better than nothing).
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jrochkind1 4y ago
Are there any US grounds for a lawsuit when this happens? I can't think of any, but it seems like there should be, right? Not a lawyer, but who wants to write a memo on it? I guess it's actually the same thing as the social media "Free speech" wars... meta has the first ammendment right to deny service to whomever they want for whatever they want (sans discirmination against protected classes), they can legally decide to ruin this company's business just cause they don't like them, even if it wasn't an accident? Yeah, the problem is facebook is too powerful, they aren't just any random business choosing not to work with you.
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
Are any of the sites using FB events/analytics? It depends on what the non-profit sites are doing, but the Facebook rules for prohibited domains [1] seem to include what a lot of non-profits may do: "Predominantly target or serve an audience likely to have suffered from mental, emotional, financial or physical harm, or facing severe economic hardship that directly affects housing, food security or freedom." I'm guess if a single one of your non-profit sites does all the sites would be blocked. Apart from pleading with FB, using domains for each would be a better solution to stop this happening the next time rules change or one of your sites does something not allowed [1] https://www.facebook.com/business/help/851247612299604?id=188852726110565 https://www.facebook.com/business/help/851247612299604?id=18...
- kragen 4y ago
  It sounds like what you're saying is that FB prohibits community organizers, labor organizers, and charity from using FB analytics — which honestly is maybe not a bad idea, because analytics amounts to a serious privacy leak, one which could especially negatively impact vulnerable populations.
- Thorrez 4y ago
  That page says that if you have such a site, FB will stop collecting analytics/tracking data from the site. It doesn't say FB will block posts mentioning the site.
mlatu 4y ago
someday we will organize and block back but until then...
rvz 4y ago
This is the problem. They are not giving any reasons other than a 'TOS' violation and won't tell you why or ignore you if you try appealing it. The same happened to someone on Twitter and the very same thing happened to those on PayPal. Before any big tech appeasers and bootlickers reply and attempt to defend this rubbish with 'private platform' nonsense or 'you knew you violated the TOS', in each of these cases do you know specifically why they got blocked as well? [0] [1] [2] [0] https://twitter.com/llsceptics/status/1567658400573448192 https://twitter.com/llsceptics/status/1567658400573448192 [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/09/21/paypal-shuts-account-parents-group-campaigned-keep-schools-open/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/09/21/paypal-shuts-acc... [2] https://twitter.com/flipper_zero/status/1567194641610465281 https://twitter.com/flipper_zero/status/1567194641610465281
NKosmatos 4y ago
Another day and again another complaint about lack of proper (human) support from a big company. When are we all going to realize that Facebook, Apple, Google and all the big names use automated moderating and they don't want to allocate resources for proper moderation? They're not going to put in place a proper resolution mechanism and they don't care about the average user that got his/her email banned, page deleted or app removed. I'm sure they're checking the numbers and the false positives/negatives are not that many that would require for these big companies to put something in place so as to not lose profit. Let's all of us stop complaining and accept the current situation or even better find a cheap solution to real human moderation :-)
- CharlesW 4y ago
  Apple is nothing like Facebook and Google in this respect. One of the reasons I gladly pay a premium for Apple products is that I can talk with a human, over the phone or at an Apple Store.
  - UnpossibleJim 4y ago
    Doing business as a software developer through the Apple store is a different beast. Putting in tickets to see why your software failed can be a nightmare if it isn't a glaring mistake. They may treat their customers well, but they don't always treat their devs with the same respect. EDIT: I will note, it has been a few years since I've submitted to the app store, so I hope things have changed.
    - realusername 4y ago
      It hasn't changed, I'm basically treating the whole platform as legacy now and "best effort". And I'm only talking about the normal process, good luck if you happen to have a buggy developper account which loops during the sign-in...
    - NonNefarious 4y ago
      Apple is a scummy, back-stabbing business "partner." Everyone from small-time developers to publicly-traded companies gets screwed by Apple burying their apps (or simply not showing them at all) in searches that spell the publisher's name exactly right. They lie about app discovery to developers, lie about it to judges, and lie to the users doing the searches. However, the public hysteria over "big tech" should not be dragging Apple into everything, because developers are essentially the only aggrieved party. Unlike Google and Meta, Apple is not the gatekeeper to the Internet for millions of people. And I can almost always get a human being on the phone or chat from Apple, which today is truly worthy of praise.
bks 4y ago
We had a similar issue but not identical which led us to deploying all customers on a subdomain or their own domain. Rather than theirBusinessName.OurDomain.com people switched to shop.theirBusinessName.com and we used DNS cnames to point back to our servers. We issued LetsEncrypt certificates automatically using Caddy and it works remarkably well for us. It also led us to become a paid LetsEncrypt sponsor and we have been for the past 4 years.
- bombcar 4y ago
  This is the way to do it. And if you're charging anything reasonable for SaaS service consider just registering a domain for your customers if they can't figure out how to delegate a subdomain CNAME.
marban 4y ago
On another note, does anyone have experience with getting unblocked by Bing? Domain was blocked from the day of registration and has 100% legit content, yet I'm getting 'URL cannot appear on Bing'.
nicgrev103 4y ago
Similar experience I used to run a graduation photography company, we did professional graduation photos half the price of the 'officail' providers (who pay a huge commission to the university, but don't get me started on that). We promoted our service with facebook events and advertised said events. One year without warning or explination they Facebook just deleted all our events (we would travel from one uni to another over the summer). I frantically tried to get a response from facebook. I never got one. I sued in small claims court and they settled the case (not before being very threatening through high paid lawyers and trying to dodge the case altogether) they never did explain what had happend or why. Ultimately it's partly the reason I shut the company down, facebook was our channel, without certainty we could host events and promote them it made no business sense to invest in the company.
- kragen 4y ago
  Did they undelete your events as part of the settlement?
  - nicgrev103 4y ago
    Negative, as with all legal action it took months and by then the graduations were long past.
  - blahyawnblah 4y ago
    I'm not sure small claims would do something like that
    - kragen 4y ago
      Parties to a lawsuit can propose to do anything they want in a settlement.
jmull 4y ago
My guess is there’s a “sheeps-clothing.stamhoofd.shop”. Since the users’ shops are hosted on a subdomain, one bad acting user can cause the whole domain to get blamed. Meta’s enforcement bots have, of course, zero nuance or understanding of this kind of thing. I doubt they would care about trampling small non-profits in any case.
pmontra 4y ago
Did anybody ever sued a FAANG for this sort of things (or the ToS that allow them) and got a ruling?
- nullc 4y ago
  It doesn't matter what the rules say-- these companies have legal departments better funded than those of states. They can just tie you up in expensive litigation for the rest of their life. They're largely immune to oversight by the courts as a result, which is presumably a part of why they behave this way.
tarranoth 4y ago
I have a suspicion that your domain name (stamhoofd = head of the tribe, tribal leader translated from dutch) is likely getting flagged due to some natural language processing thing flagging it as offensive language. I would not be surprised that it is indeed a fully automated process deciding that your site's domain name is potentially harmful for their "brand" to support.
Roark66 4y ago
I'm sorry to hear of the op's troubles with meta, but this "No fake-news, crypto-currencies, violence, porn, or illegal activities... " is a very strange sentence. Why would the author lump "crypto currencies" along with fake-news, violence and porn? Of course this doesn't take away from the validity of their claim and I wish this stupid shadowban is lifted. Also I hope (at least in Europe) we can get some laws passed that force large online service providers like FB to act responsibly (past record of attempts to regulate the Internet by our beaurocrats and its results notwithstanding).
- MBCook 4y ago
  My guess is there is a TON of scamming related to crypto. All those comments on Twitter or YouTube (for example) pretending to be someone important trying to get people to send a little to get a lot as a “bonus for readers” or something like that. Plus scam coins, etc. It’s probably far easier for them to just say “none of that” until it gets easier to tell the good from the bad.
  - nullc 4y ago
    The irony is that the platforms are still flooded with crypto scams, I know on twitter and youtube at least they don't even respond to reports on them 99% of the time-- even when it's the same obvious scam messaged reposed twenty times in a short interval--, but then they'll capriciously ban legitimate material because it mentioned bitcoin. It's not hard to imagine that a lot of these companies are now using outsourced 'moderation' where the moderators themselves are the scammers, intentionally permitting scams and intentionally flagging legit stuff. But sadly the truth is probably more boring, indifference instead of intrigue.
- kortilla 4y ago
  They all land in moral gray areas for different people. Some people view porn as far less damaging to society than crypto (at least how crypto has been primarily used YTD). “fake news” is can very easily be abused to mean “news that doesn’t agree with my world view”. “Violence” is vague but would coverage of what’s happening in Ukraine be put there?
iamleppert 4y ago
If you’re going to be running a service like this you absolutely need to have multiple TLD’s and some automation to detect when they have been blocked.
simonbackx 4y ago
Our domain just has been unblocked, thank you everyone for your support! I'm soooo happy right now!
- jrmg 4y ago
  Did they give you any explanation as to what happened, or why they chose to review the block (probably because of this attention…)? I’m not sure how to ask this in an answerable way, but did they ask you not to talk about what happened and/or how it got resolved?
anderspitman 4y ago
It's worth remembering what the long-term solutions to these types of issues are. For Facebook: decentralized social networks built on open protocols. For the ISP: normalizing the use of VPNs (through a local server) for all internet traffic. Yes there are tradeoffs. I'm personally happy to make them.
- tremon 4y ago
  For society: making de-facto public infrastructure public again.
- zpthree 4y ago
  how exactly can a decentralized network do better at moderation than a centralized one?
  - anderspitman 4y ago
    By giving users the tools to moderate their own content. If you're peering with an instance that seems to pass on a lot of bad/dangerous content, then block the instance. You can use public blocklists on your instance if you want, but it should be your choice. Also, it should be noted that blocklists are not a solution for things like phishing. Things like MFA and WebAuthn are the solution.
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
This sounds ok. But what does the META terms say about this business setup? There are many platforms you can't do this on including the major mobile app stores.
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415 points by simonbackx 4y ago

This is why massive companies like Meta and Alphabet needs to be nationalised. They simply have too much power over lives of billions. This article is just another reminder of this. At scale that Meta operates, this algorithmically decided domain blockings mean nothing to them, but everything to hundred's of non-profits. There need to be legally mandated protections so things like this never happen again.

invalidusernam3 4y ago
I don't think nationalisation is the answer, imagine the additional layer of bureaucracy dealing with a government entity. Large companies like Facebook need to be regulated by the government, there needs to be laws in place for stuff like this.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  The European Union finally did it with the Digital Market Act. The law enforces access to market place and interoperability between messaging platforms. I’m surprised we don’t hear much about it here. My guess is that American companies like to pretend it doesn’t matter in case it gave idea to US customers and silently fight it in courts in Europe.
TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
Don't nationalise them, break them up. A state monopoly is preferable to a private monopoly, but in this case there's no reason we have to have a monopoly. Facebook and Google do too many things.
- paintman252 4y ago
  >Facebook and Google do too many things. Google? Definitely. Meta? Not really. All Meta has is two social networks and one messaging service. They haven't really experienced huge success in anything else. They MAY hit big in VR/AR space, but that's yet to be determined.
  - bilekas 4y ago
    Just did a check to see their subsidiaries and they actually have way more than I expected : https://inspirationfeed.com/what-companies-does-facebook-own/ https://inspirationfeed.com/what-companies-does-facebook-own...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - xphos 4y ago
    They still would definitely met the standard of a monopsony if not a monopoly. Its scary that an enormous number of people start and stop the information searching at google or those two social networks. I think its an oversimplification to say that just breaking them will solve the issue but they definitely handle a governmental level of power in terms of social after effects, which is why nation states target them for fake news.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Which market are they a monopsony (only one buyer) in?
  - eppp 4y ago
    On one hand you say they are so important they need to be nationalized and on the other you dismiss them as almost a couple of trivial apps. Which one is it?
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Facebook is approaching 100 acquisitions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Meta_Platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... Feels like a lot and not just three entities. Additionally, Facebook primarily does acquisitions as a form of hiring, according to Mark Zuckerberg himself. They buy the company so they can get the employees to come and work at Facebook.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Communications platforms naturally become a monopoly. The biggest platform is the most useful one because you can talk to most people on it, so people prefer to join the biggest platform and it gets bigger.
  - ydlr 4y ago
    That is easily fixed with legislation. We now have multiple phone companies that all interoperate. No reason we can't require the same from our many facebooks.
- causi 4y ago
  Oh, for the days when you got banned from one website and you just went to a different website.
londons_explore 4y ago
Nationalisation wouldn't fix it. There are plenty of rules and procedures in every nation which screw over random 'little guys'... For example, "oh, you have a disability and can't work? Here, have some state support. Oh - we just found you helped look after your neighbours children once. That counts as work. Therefore you lied to us. Thats fraud. All your state support will now be withdrawn."
- warbeforepeace 4y ago
  Look how well the US government handled the small business loans during covid. It wasn't the small businesses really getting them.
ceejayoz 4y ago
I haven't seen much information on how the GDPR's Article 22 right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated means is going in these scenarios. I hear a lot about other provisions, but Article 22 seems like an important experiment.
indymike 4y ago
> This is why massive companies like Meta and Alphabet needs to be nationalised. No. Giving this additional power to the government will not have the outcome you want. When something becomes too powerful, the solution is not to further concentrate that power into less accountable hands.
- kyleyeats 4y ago
  It might be the only way to make Facebook worse.
- psychoslave 4y ago
  Nationalization is not necessary more concentration and less many accountable hands. Well, it depends on the governance obviously. If you talk some autocratic regime, where the king proclaimed "I am the state", that fits your description for sure. On the other hand, if you are looking at a direct democracy regime, you could hardly make the power more pervasive, and every citizen has to carry its part of accountability on every social matter.
  - indymike 4y ago
    > Well, it depends on the governance obviously. Three reasons why nationalization is a bad idea: * Power disparity. As it is, Facebook is destroying people and business without any accountability. Now we hand that to the state who: * Has all the incentive to destroy anything that competes, and the government has the ultimate way to do it: just outlaw the competition. If you think the product is bad today, imagine how fantastic it will be in 10 years of no competition. * Has all the incentive to make people use it. So, it becomes oppressive and horrible and the government decides, hey, let's make everyone use this thing for essential services like payments and democracy! All in all, nationalization of a social network is one of the worst directions we can take, regardless of politics. It's just a bad idea.
    - polygamous_bat 4y ago
      > the government has the ultimate way to do it: just outlaw the competition > So, it becomes oppressive and horrible and the government decides, hey, let's make everyone use this thing for essential services like payments and democracy These things can only fly in a non functioning democracy, which, while the US is coming dangerously close to, is not there yet.
is_true 4y ago
Would you be ok with the chinese or argentinian government running Alphabet or Meta? I don't think most government are better than any corporation.
- psychoslave 4y ago
  Last time I checked, free access to education, care and protection against many abuses where provided by governmental organisms. "government are better than any corporation" (or its reverse) means nothing if you don’t provide some specific topics and possible metrics to evaluate them. Also, not all government and corporations behaves in the very same way.
  - is_true 4y ago
    Sorry, don't have time to show you that most governments do shitty things to people all the time.
Xeoncross 4y ago
I know sub-optimal government is the default solution to all issues, but man, they are terrible with the monopolies they do control like healthcare, public education and infrastructure.
onion2k 4y ago
There need to be legally mandated protections so things like this never happen again. Such protection for websites would be an implicit protection for Meta's de facto monopoly on text-based social media. What needs to happen is for these sorts of bans to still happen, but for the public to understand the impact of those bans and move away from a single website for all their social media needs if they want to see posts from everyone. Competition in the space would fix the problem. It'd mean the impact of a ban is massively diminished, and that companies are incentivized not to issue unwarranted bans because their users would go somewhere else. While both users and advertisers have no real choice where to go Meta will hold on to their monopoly.
rrwo 4y ago
> This is why massive companies like Meta and Alphabet needs to be nationalised. Nationalised by what country? US? UK? France? Russia? Saudi Arabia? India? China? Would we have country-specific and isolated social media and search engines? Even in nominally free western countries, do you really want the government controlling what can be in a search engine or posted on social media?
bachmeier 4y ago
Paul Romer has offered a proposal: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/nobel-laureate-paul-romer-how-curb-big-techs-power https://news.uchicago.edu/story/nobel-laureate-paul-romer-ho...
stall84 4y ago
I'd be in favor of trust-busting them into smaller entities before nationalization .. While nationalization might work for smaller western European countries, it isn't going to work in a political machine the size of the united states
laundermaf 4y ago
You’re placing way too much trust in the government, the same agency held hostage by a private company that forbid them to automatically calculate the taxes owed by its citizens. Plus why what the government do with a social network? They’d still need to moderate it — at atrocious prices at that.
yamtaddle 4y ago
Nah. Just make providing free services then blatantly fucking people over who rely on them a very risky thing to do. Like "attractive nuisance" laws that can make you liable if some kid you've never seen before drowns in a pool on your property if you didn't take reasonable measures to keep a kid from wandering into the pool. Or various regulations that make certain demands on businesses that open up physical spaces to the public (like stores or malls or whatever). Separately I'd also like to see us outlaw the kind of data collection & retention that lets Facebook's business model exist, but I do think making it so offering free services doesn't absolve you of all responsibility is something we should do, too, and is more directly relevant to this.
smileysteve 4y ago
So the government, for and by the people can have a money drain that is used for disinformation and cyber bullying? Just delete Facebook, it's not worth it.

base 4y ago

I don't have a specific solution for you, but I also run a domain with some thousands of subdomains and is always a fight to not be banned from Google, Meta, internet operators etc. Sometimes is enough one bad actor under one of your subdomains to have a full ban on the whole domain. What I suggest is for your and your clients to contact Meta through the Business Center support. Their support for paying clients is much better. I would also recommend you become a Meta Business Partner if Facebook/Instagram is important for your SaaS.

jefftk 4y ago
> Sometimes is enough one bad actor under one of your subdomains to have a full ban on the whole domain. If you're running independent subdomains where a bad actor on one should not affect the reputation of the rest, you probably should add your domain to the public suffix list: https://publicsuffix.org https://publicsuffix.org
- simonbackx 4y ago
  Thanks, I didn't know about that list. I'll try that!
  - hirsin 4y ago
    Note that adding your domain to the PSL changes how browsers interact with it, so don't do it lightly. In particular, no more cookies for the parent domain.
notacoward 4y ago
> Their support for paying clients is much better. Perhaps worth it in this situation, but isn't that basically paying protection money? "Nice domain you've got there. Shame if anything happened to it."
- bluGill 4y ago
  If you are using their services for something important you should pay for it. I use fastmail not gmail for this reason: email is too important for me to risk on an account I don't pay for. I don't pay for youtube, because I don't care if they go out of business. I probably would pay for facebook if possible (but only if they make it FACEbook - not political memes, offensive jokes, and cat pictures) as it is a good way to keep in touch with distant friends.

midislack 4y ago

First thing I always wonder with these, what did your customer(s) do wrong?

Maxious 4y ago
> ThreatExchange (aka TX or TE) is used by multiple companies to share signals on a variety of topics intended to prevent real world harm. Some examples of how TX is currently used include sharing malware, phishing scams, and terrorism signals with the goal of helping all participating organizations tackle these problems based on their terms of service. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/threat-exchange/getting-started/ https://developers.facebook.com/docs/threat-exchange/getting...
simonbackx 4y ago
Good question! I would also like to know the answer. I've scanned through our sites and couldn't find any malicious content... My guess is that the block was automated, and might have been caused by a fake spam report. There can be some competition between non-profits (e.g. two scouting groups in the same local area). Maybe they started to report each other as a joke.
- bombcar 4y ago
  A large percentage of users use the "report spam" button as an unsubscribe/delete button in their email client.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    Right, from a user's point of view labelling it "Spam" has the same effect as when you put letters unread on that pile by the door, "I don't want to read this". Should they? Doesn't matter. Years back we even had users who were paying us to send them specific emails and would mark it as spam. The use of "users marked this as spam" as a signal is a cheap but lousy shortcut and it's bad news that we became reliant upon it.
- tarranoth 4y ago

hexo 4y ago

Sue the f* out of them.

snowwrestler 4y ago

Why not use full domains for a service like this? Instead of client.your domain.tld, register client-your domain.tld. This would prevent one bad actor from nuking your whole business. Yes it has a cost, but it’s like $10 a year for a new domain, which I bet pales in comparison to other direct costs of running a SaaS.

simonbackx 4y ago
Yes, that is a possibility. But we only charge $59 per year, so there is not much room for extra costs.
seszett 4y ago
They provide webshops for 60€/year and a .be or .nl domain costs 15€/year, so 25% of that. That's a lot.
- chrisan 4y ago
  Here is our 60/year plan with a sub domain. We can't control the fact Facebook/Google/whatever might ban you because of a bad acting neighbor Or here is our 75/year plan which includes a domain to ensure you don't run into problems with social media
- sigio 4y ago
  A .nl domain name costs < $5... be probably <$10, but still.
schroeding 4y ago
Apart from the cost, this would allow bad actors to reregister domains, once a shop is expired, though. Subdomains do not.
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  This is true. But this risk should probably be weighed against the risk of a bad customer getting your entire root domain deny-listed.

chris_wot 4y ago

Meta has form. They did this to hundreds of Australian non-profits when they were trying to get leverage over the Australian government.

danpalmer 4y ago

Fun story. At my previous company we had "Sign in with Facebook" – whatever your opinions on it are, it was probably the right thing for the company at that time. Facebook decided to "audit" us to make sure we were doing sign in right. The tested it incorrectly, told us we were at fault and needed to fix it, and gave us 2 weeks to do so. We scrambled to figure out what the issue was, only to find after they eventually replied to our emails (all they told us up-front was "it doesn't work") that they had tried to use a sign-in only button to sign-up, similar on many websites, not at all for our flow and not something it was possible for us to do. We explained this and they dropped the audit. 2 weeks later, they audited us again, failed us again, and gave us a deadline to fix it. We replied pointing to the previous case and explaining again why it was working. We never heard back. 2 weeks later, they audited us again, failed us again, and gave us a deadline to fix it. We replied asking what the hell was happening (politely). We never heard back. 1 week later "Sign in with Facebook" stopped working with no other warning. We opened a support case, we emailed our ads account manager, we emailed our previous ads account manager as the first was on holiday, and all we got was "we're looking into it, but it looks legit, fix it". I asked for a call and explained that the current user experience for users was that they would click "Sign in with Facebook" and see an error saying "Facebook is currently not working, please sign in another way", and that the only way we had to resolve this was to email all our Facebook auth'd users a password reset with an explanation that Facebook sign in no longer worked, and to then remove the feature from our site. "Ah. Ok yeah let me see what I can do". It was working about 2 hours later, and we weren't audited again in the rest of the time I was at the company.

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simonbackx 4y ago
There are so many stories like this, it is crazy! Thank you for sharing this.
- 998244353 4y ago
  One quite perplexing common theme is "thing gets flagged -> thing gets resolved by a human as a false positive or whatever -> two weeks later, thing gets flagged again with no change, presumably by an automated system". If the flagging is done by a human, is there really no "case file" that records the previous flags and why they were false positives? If it is done by an automated system, why is it allowed to flag things that a human has already cleared with no change?

pilgrimfff 4y ago

Buy a handful of alternative domains that redirect to your primary (you could stand up a minimal url shortener on each domain). Even if you get unblocked this time, it could easily happen again. Until there’s systematic reform to this nonsense, you just have to work around it with redundancy. If they’re going to treat you like a scammer, work around it like the scammers do.

jrochkind1 4y ago
I believe the facebook crawler will crawl redirects, such that a URL that results in a redirect to a blocked domain is still going to get blocked. (Even if it were a satisfactory solution to say "message all your customers and tell them they have to start using the new domain for ticket sales, including for events that are already promoted with ongoing ticket sales" which of course it isn't, although I follow you that it would be perhaps better than nothing).

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jrochkind1 4y ago

Are there any US grounds for a lawsuit when this happens? I can't think of any, but it seems like there should be, right? Not a lawyer, but who wants to write a memo on it? I guess it's actually the same thing as the social media "Free speech" wars... meta has the first ammendment right to deny service to whomever they want for whatever they want (sans discirmination against protected classes), they can legally decide to ruin this company's business just cause they don't like them, even if it wasn't an accident? Yeah, the problem is facebook is too powerful, they aren't just any random business choosing not to work with you.

helsinkiandrew 4y ago

Are any of the sites using FB events/analytics? It depends on what the non-profit sites are doing, but the Facebook rules for prohibited domains [1] seem to include what a lot of non-profits may do: "Predominantly target or serve an audience likely to have suffered from mental, emotional, financial or physical harm, or facing severe economic hardship that directly affects housing, food security or freedom." I'm guess if a single one of your non-profit sites does all the sites would be blocked. Apart from pleading with FB, using domains for each would be a better solution to stop this happening the next time rules change or one of your sites does something not allowed [1] https://www.facebook.com/business/help/851247612299604?id=188852726110565 https://www.facebook.com/business/help/851247612299604?id=18...

kragen 4y ago
It sounds like what you're saying is that FB prohibits community organizers, labor organizers, and charity from using FB analytics — which honestly is maybe not a bad idea, because analytics amounts to a serious privacy leak, one which could especially negatively impact vulnerable populations.
Thorrez 4y ago
That page says that if you have such a site, FB will stop collecting analytics/tracking data from the site. It doesn't say FB will block posts mentioning the site.

mlatu 4y ago

someday we will organize and block back but until then...

rvz 4y ago

This is the problem. They are not giving any reasons other than a 'TOS' violation and won't tell you why or ignore you if you try appealing it. The same happened to someone on Twitter and the very same thing happened to those on PayPal. Before any big tech appeasers and bootlickers reply and attempt to defend this rubbish with 'private platform' nonsense or 'you knew you violated the TOS', in each of these cases do you know specifically why they got blocked as well? [0] [1] [2] [0] https://twitter.com/llsceptics/status/1567658400573448192 https://twitter.com/llsceptics/status/1567658400573448192 [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/09/21/paypal-shuts-account-parents-group-campaigned-keep-schools-open/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/09/21/paypal-shuts-acc... [2] https://twitter.com/flipper_zero/status/1567194641610465281 https://twitter.com/flipper_zero/status/1567194641610465281

NKosmatos 4y ago

Another day and again another complaint about lack of proper (human) support from a big company. When are we all going to realize that Facebook, Apple, Google and all the big names use automated moderating and they don't want to allocate resources for proper moderation? They're not going to put in place a proper resolution mechanism and they don't care about the average user that got his/her email banned, page deleted or app removed. I'm sure they're checking the numbers and the false positives/negatives are not that many that would require for these big companies to put something in place so as to not lose profit. Let's all of us stop complaining and accept the current situation or even better find a cheap solution to real human moderation :-)

CharlesW 4y ago
Apple is nothing like Facebook and Google in this respect. One of the reasons I gladly pay a premium for Apple products is that I can talk with a human, over the phone or at an Apple Store.
- UnpossibleJim 4y ago
  Doing business as a software developer through the Apple store is a different beast. Putting in tickets to see why your software failed can be a nightmare if it isn't a glaring mistake. They may treat their customers well, but they don't always treat their devs with the same respect. EDIT: I will note, it has been a few years since I've submitted to the app store, so I hope things have changed.
  - realusername 4y ago
    It hasn't changed, I'm basically treating the whole platform as legacy now and "best effort". And I'm only talking about the normal process, good luck if you happen to have a buggy developper account which loops during the sign-in...
  - NonNefarious 4y ago
    Apple is a scummy, back-stabbing business "partner." Everyone from small-time developers to publicly-traded companies gets screwed by Apple burying their apps (or simply not showing them at all) in searches that spell the publisher's name exactly right. They lie about app discovery to developers, lie about it to judges, and lie to the users doing the searches. However, the public hysteria over "big tech" should not be dragging Apple into everything, because developers are essentially the only aggrieved party. Unlike Google and Meta, Apple is not the gatekeeper to the Internet for millions of people. And I can almost always get a human being on the phone or chat from Apple, which today is truly worthy of praise.

bks 4y ago

We had a similar issue but not identical which led us to deploying all customers on a subdomain or their own domain. Rather than theirBusinessName.OurDomain.com people switched to shop.theirBusinessName.com and we used DNS cnames to point back to our servers. We issued LetsEncrypt certificates automatically using Caddy and it works remarkably well for us. It also led us to become a paid LetsEncrypt sponsor and we have been for the past 4 years.

bombcar 4y ago
This is the way to do it. And if you're charging anything reasonable for SaaS service consider just registering a domain for your customers if they can't figure out how to delegate a subdomain CNAME.

marban 4y ago

On another note, does anyone have experience with getting unblocked by Bing? Domain was blocked from the day of registration and has 100% legit content, yet I'm getting 'URL cannot appear on Bing'.

nicgrev103 4y ago

Similar experience I used to run a graduation photography company, we did professional graduation photos half the price of the 'officail' providers (who pay a huge commission to the university, but don't get me started on that). We promoted our service with facebook events and advertised said events. One year without warning or explination they Facebook just deleted all our events (we would travel from one uni to another over the summer). I frantically tried to get a response from facebook. I never got one. I sued in small claims court and they settled the case (not before being very threatening through high paid lawyers and trying to dodge the case altogether) they never did explain what had happend or why. Ultimately it's partly the reason I shut the company down, facebook was our channel, without certainty we could host events and promote them it made no business sense to invest in the company.

kragen 4y ago
Did they undelete your events as part of the settlement?
- nicgrev103 4y ago
  Negative, as with all legal action it took months and by then the graduations were long past.
- blahyawnblah 4y ago
  I'm not sure small claims would do something like that
  - kragen 4y ago
    Parties to a lawsuit can propose to do anything they want in a settlement.

jmull 4y ago

My guess is there’s a “sheeps-clothing.stamhoofd.shop”. Since the users’ shops are hosted on a subdomain, one bad acting user can cause the whole domain to get blamed. Meta’s enforcement bots have, of course, zero nuance or understanding of this kind of thing. I doubt they would care about trampling small non-profits in any case.

pmontra 4y ago

Did anybody ever sued a FAANG for this sort of things (or the ToS that allow them) and got a ruling?

nullc 4y ago
It doesn't matter what the rules say-- these companies have legal departments better funded than those of states. They can just tie you up in expensive litigation for the rest of their life. They're largely immune to oversight by the courts as a result, which is presumably a part of why they behave this way.

tarranoth 4y ago

I have a suspicion that your domain name (stamhoofd = head of the tribe, tribal leader translated from dutch) is likely getting flagged due to some natural language processing thing flagging it as offensive language. I would not be surprised that it is indeed a fully automated process deciding that your site's domain name is potentially harmful for their "brand" to support.

Roark66 4y ago

I'm sorry to hear of the op's troubles with meta, but this "No fake-news, crypto-currencies, violence, porn, or illegal activities... " is a very strange sentence. Why would the author lump "crypto currencies" along with fake-news, violence and porn? Of course this doesn't take away from the validity of their claim and I wish this stupid shadowban is lifted. Also I hope (at least in Europe) we can get some laws passed that force large online service providers like FB to act responsibly (past record of attempts to regulate the Internet by our beaurocrats and its results notwithstanding).

MBCook 4y ago
My guess is there is a TON of scamming related to crypto. All those comments on Twitter or YouTube (for example) pretending to be someone important trying to get people to send a little to get a lot as a “bonus for readers” or something like that. Plus scam coins, etc. It’s probably far easier for them to just say “none of that” until it gets easier to tell the good from the bad.
- nullc 4y ago
  The irony is that the platforms are still flooded with crypto scams, I know on twitter and youtube at least they don't even respond to reports on them 99% of the time-- even when it's the same obvious scam messaged reposed twenty times in a short interval--, but then they'll capriciously ban legitimate material because it mentioned bitcoin. It's not hard to imagine that a lot of these companies are now using outsourced 'moderation' where the moderators themselves are the scammers, intentionally permitting scams and intentionally flagging legit stuff. But sadly the truth is probably more boring, indifference instead of intrigue.
kortilla 4y ago
They all land in moral gray areas for different people. Some people view porn as far less damaging to society than crypto (at least how crypto has been primarily used YTD). “fake news” is can very easily be abused to mean “news that doesn’t agree with my world view”. “Violence” is vague but would coverage of what’s happening in Ukraine be put there?

iamleppert 4y ago

If you’re going to be running a service like this you absolutely need to have multiple TLD’s and some automation to detect when they have been blocked.

simonbackx 4y ago

Our domain just has been unblocked, thank you everyone for your support! I'm soooo happy right now!

jrmg 4y ago
Did they give you any explanation as to what happened, or why they chose to review the block (probably because of this attention…)? I’m not sure how to ask this in an answerable way, but did they ask you not to talk about what happened and/or how it got resolved?

anderspitman 4y ago

It's worth remembering what the long-term solutions to these types of issues are. For Facebook: decentralized social networks built on open protocols. For the ISP: normalizing the use of VPNs (through a local server) for all internet traffic. Yes there are tradeoffs. I'm personally happy to make them.

tremon 4y ago
For society: making de-facto public infrastructure public again.
zpthree 4y ago
how exactly can a decentralized network do better at moderation than a centralized one?
- anderspitman 4y ago
  By giving users the tools to moderate their own content. If you're peering with an instance that seems to pass on a lot of bad/dangerous content, then block the instance. You can use public blocklists on your instance if you want, but it should be your choice. Also, it should be noted that blocklists are not a solution for things like phishing. Things like MFA and WebAuthn are the solution.

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

This sounds ok. But what does the META terms say about this business setup? There are many platforms you can't do this on including the major mobile app stores.

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