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Meta just suspended the Facebook account of Neal Stephenson
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- SLHamlet 1y ago"Today in 'you can’t make this stuff up,' Meta has suspended my Facebook account because they suspect me of impersonating someone noteworthy"
- roscas 1y ago[flagged]
- wafflemaker 1y agoThere is a whole world out there, full of people who call Wi-Fi the internet. Nearly all of them do many things better than you, and most of them wouldn't treat you with contempt just because you find small talk difficult, can't swim or can't dress well on a tight budget. Think about what kind of image your present to them and if it's really how you would like them to see you. Just honestly.
- pc86 1y agoIt may not be how they want to present themselves, but it's clearly how they are.
- michaelbuckbee 1y agoAs someone in the burbs + middle america, Facebook still has a frustrating grip on many of the community social communications which tend to take place in private Facebook groups (Girl Scouts, community HOA, etc.)
- SLHamlet 1y agoThis is not an anomaly, by the way. I've interviewed many multiple Meta staffers (including senior leaders), and can find little evidence that leadership actually read "Snow Crash" and/or even cared about virtual worlds. Even after spending tens of billions claiming they were building the Metaverse. Some background: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2025/05/horizon-worlds-meta-horizon-problems.html https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2025/05/horizon-worlds-meta-horizo...
- wmf 1y agoMeta's recent strategy is more reminiscent of Rainbows End.
- roscas 1y ago[flagged]
- SirFatty 1y agoYou forgot to finish up the comment with mention of someone being a boomer.
- bsenftner 1y agoThey are still quoting Fountainhead and thinking they are intellectuals.
- SlowTao 1y agoA few years back Chris Hedges did a showshow/podcast or something and he was forced to finally read in depth a lot more Rand. I love his defeated responded of "It is amazing just how pedestrian those books are. There is nothing interesting in them.". Hedges is always worth listening to even if you won't always agree but he does make doomers look like utopian optimists.
- mchusma 1y agoI think anyone who says there is nothing interesting in Rand either didn’t read it or is acting in bad faith. Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead are uniquely fascinating even if you don’t agree with her stance. Chris Hedges is a self reported socialist. So makes sense they would not like books negative on socialism. But you can be a socialist and still engage with competing thoughts. Just like a capitalist can review Marx and admit the ideas are important/interesting.
- VWWHFSfQ 1y agoAnd then went straight over to X, another social media silo, to post that his other social media account at the other silo was banned. What a world we live in.
- petcat 1y agoMegacorp turf wars. It's silos all the way down.
- jasonvorhe 1y agoThere's always nostr.
- echelon 1y agoThat's designed for nerds. Like Matrix and the other platforms that will never see mainstream adoption because they lack product management and crazy distribution. Normie design and hyper distribution always win.
- jasonvorhe 1y agoGood to know. Didn't know I was following this many nerds over there.
- timeon 1y agoReminds me Shadowrun.
- lemonberry 1y agoI loved this game! I still have the original rulebook. That my AD&D 2nd ed. books, Star Frontiers and Gamma World boxed sets may be my most prized possessions.
- debo_ 1y ago
- AIorNot 1y agowell its obvious a rogue AI at Meta has gained awareness and just fired the first shot of the simulacrum wars by taking out Stephenson.
- dekhn 1y ago"Preliminary Roko Enforcement"
- anthem2025 1y agoThe key was spending 14 billion to hire a guy who hasn’t actually built AI
- zelias 1y agoClearly the counter-AI that counteracts the ban happy AI isn’t in place yet
- uz3snolc3t6fnrq 1y agocan't wait for ai juries, 12 different ai models by different companies & they all have to reach the same conclusion, but one of them is a 300m parameter 2 bit quantized model and keeps hallucinating, causing an eternal hung jury
- simpaticoder 1y agoOn one level this is amusing. But what if both accounts are owned by the same person impersonating Neal Stephenson? My understanding was that he was not on any social media. Did that change at some point?
- gpm 1y agoAssuming https://nealstephenson.com/social-media.html https://nealstephenson.com/social-media.html is real, he has social media accounts (linked from that page). That domain has been registered since 2000, it's probably real. It links to a google plus account, it's probably not updated promptly.
- SLHamlet 1y agoThat Facebook page is the one managed by his publisher. He also has (had?) a personal one he used that just got suspended.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- perihelions 1y agoWhat an ironic error to happen to a creator of cyberpunk dystopia. And also to Mr. Stephenson.
- gtirloni 1y agoHow would one go about suing in cases like this?
- chihuahua 1y agoYou would start by reading the complete terms and conditions of service. Somewhere in there is a paragraph that states that your account can be suspended and/or terminated at any time for any reason, or no reason. Then you find the paragraph that limits you to mandatory arbitration. You conclude that you're wasting your time if you attempt to sue anyone over this. Eventually you realize that you're better off without a FB account.
- tialaramex 1y agoFor any legal action you should find a lawyer. Many lawyers will be happy to meet briefly with someone to figure out what they can do for you or if they should point you to somebody else. In this case such a meeting is likely to be very brief indeed, the chance of success is negligible and the likely costs are sky high.
- kitd 1y agoIIRC Sharon Stone got suspended on Bumbl for impersonating Sharon Stone.
- jdlshore 1y agoFor people missing the irony here, the term “metaverse,” that Meta is named after, was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 book “Snow Crash.” In the book, the metaverse is a VR version of the internet with an emphasis on accurate sword fights and realistic facial expressions.
- neilv 1y agoCEO: "Bring me the head of whomever is responsible for this metaverse fiasco!" :)
- VoidWhisperer 1y ago"Uh.. that would be you, Mr. Zuckerberg"
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Animats 1y agoI was really hoping for a Snow Crash movie. That project has been in development hell for years. Instead, we got Ready Player One, which is like Snow Crash for dummies. There's a trailer for a low-budget version of Snow Crash.[1] It's awful. I don't hold out much hope for that project. Snow Crash is about a conspiracy between a media baron and a televangelist to take over the world. That would upset a lot more people now than in 1992. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8WYiYcaRY4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8WYiYcaRY4
- chipsrafferty 1y agoReady Player One was terrible. The secret that was hidden for years was discovered by someone just trying to drive backwards on a racing map that tons of people play every day? I get that it's hard to drive the map backwards, but come the fuck on, gamers would discover that in the first week.
- copacopab 1y agoI have been locked out of my account for 5+ months -- and customer support has been a Kafkaesque nightmare. I am still locked out. (Oh, and I've spent $1M+ in paid META ads...)
- ralphington 1y agoYou seem to have funded your own demise
- copacopab 1y agoHaha... it's crazy. And I have friends at META who've been trying to help, and they themselves get in a customer support hell as well. It's wild. $1.9T company.
- SlowTao 1y agoNot surprising. The larger the company the more complex it typically gets at all levels. Probably take 7 months of paperwork to swap a light globe.
- rpdillon 1y agoYeah, I've been locked out of Meta for a couple of years, just stopped VR altogether because getting the account back turned into a new hobby that I never asked for. Just moved on.
- NKosmatos 1y agoThe problem with all big companies nowadays... Getting to a real (competent) support person that can help is almost impossible :-(
- iammjm 1y agoI've opened a ticket with Microsoft regarding a M365 Business account and an actual person called me within an hour and fixed my issue right away, and I am not even exaggerating here. It was a trivial issue and I am not claiming it's always like this, but it CAN be like this.
- cloudwalk9 1y agoBusiness account though. Everyone else is just a waste of time to provide support to. I'm a regular consumer who bought a Dell Precision laptop (which still kicks ass btw, to their credit for all their faults) and they bent over backwards because I purchased through their business side. A shipping delay got me a 100 dollar discount, and another hiccup got me 150 dollars to spend at Dell. Bought a business grade 4K monitor from them that also kicks ass and has imperceptible latency in CS:GO/CS2 with the laptop. Sometimes even in a bleak corporate world there can be good customer service. It's the exception rather than the rule too often.
- GlenTheMachine 1y agoI called MS support once because some random dude managed to get my son's account registered under his "family", and then locked my son out of being able to update his own machine. The MS support guy literally tried to get me to password crack the random dude's account. Like, he wanted me to help him guess the guy's password so we could log in as him and change his family settings. That was the only "help" he could provide.
- ViscountPenguin 1y agoThe Microsoft family/organisation situation is fucking ridiculous. If you somehow get enrolled in either, good luck ever ridding your device of it. For literal years after leaving university, my windows install was still linked to my uni despite multiple attempts to fix it. All this, because I logged in using my university Microsoft account once.
- diego 1y agoMeta has extremely opaque account policies. For example, I bought the Meta Raybans a month ago. It kept telling me the AI features were not available in my region, even though I am in San Francisco. I joined Facebook in 2006, and I have used my account for the Oculus headset without a problem. But no matter what I did, the AI function of the Raybans wouldn't work. I ended up creating a brand new account just for that, and it worked fine. No idea why it would work with a brand new account and not with my old account in good standing, never suspended or warned about anything.
- uz3snolc3t6fnrq 1y agomy best guess is, you could've connected from a different ip once 10 years ago and it improperly geolocated that ip as being in a tiny country and now it thinks you're secretly from that country even though you've been accessing the site from a US ip forever. it's the only plausible reason i can really think of. unless they set up a "country estimation" ai or a similar newfangled system and it's convinced for some reason you're actually not american. it's too out there but you never know
- lazide 1y agoSome GEOIP databases are rotting, near as I can tell. I’ve got a proxy on random machine in a OVH DC in Oregon. Always properly geo-located to Oregon - until a few months ago. Now YouTube insists I’m in France. Which is quite entertaining, ads wise.
- michalpleban 1y agoI have recently had a need to create an Instagram account. I logged in from my home IP and it was recognized as coming from Vietnam (my home IP has been the same since 2016, always with the same ISP). Everything was in Vietnamese and I had to spend half an hour figuring out how to switch it back to English. But in the home feed I still got only Vietnamese influencers, and there was nothing in the settings to change that. I got assigned to Vietnam for life. Well, I did nothing with the account except setting up the profile and following some people. Then I logged in to the account on my phone, which of course is not from Vietnam. Bam, account suspended for violating the TOS. I appealed, after one day got a message that the ban was upheld because I did violate the TOS. I guess no Instagram for me. That's probably for the better.
- VincentEvans 1y agoLast time meta blocked my account was because I gave away free framing lumber after demolishing my poorly framed basement. Somehow it got flagged and that was that. Thankfully I don’t give a damn, and now never will. Ps: some couple happily picked up 100 or so 2x4 studs of various lengths to build a greenhouse for their garden with.
- viraptor 1y agoI got blocked for sending a post asking if anyone wants to grab a lunch when I'm back in (location).
- b112 1y agoTangential, but a decade ago I lost my original Amazon account, because I bought bandages. Yes bandages. I'd had it for 5 years, no excess returns, no issues. I click add and go to checkout... banned. Some reasons about religious icons flashed on my screen. It was red cross bandages ffs! And why ban me, and not the seller?!? Calls, emails resulted in confused but unhelpful people.
- adastra22 1y agoThey must have assumed it was a scam, like those Nigerian prices offering free gold.
- epgui 1y agoI believe I have accumulated two moderation strikes on my Facebook account for (relatively politely) calling out posts for being racist/xenophobic. Both cases my comments were flagged as promoting hate, ironically. The appeal mechanism is a joke: you press a button, and two seconds later you get a notification saying your appeal was reviewed and denied.
- pesus 1y agoI got a week long ban for calling someone out for being a Nazi. The person openly praising Hitler did not get banned at all. At the time I thought it was mere incompetence, but in hindsight, it seems more like intentional malice.
- AceJohnny2 1y ago"Shoot the messenger!"
- bachmeier 1y agoAre you implying that being banned from Facebook is a bad thing?
- qualeed 1y agoI'm pretty sure they are implying that it might be a bad policy to not ban nazis.
- bryanrasmussen 1y agoeven if you would think people should be happy about being banned, they always get annoyed https://medium.com/luminasticity/facebook-deleted-my-account-after-i-posted-about-delicious-cranberry-muffins-abeecbe25f09 https://medium.com/luminasticity/facebook-deleted-my-account...
- pesus 1y agoDepends on the reason. I'm saying that banning someone for calling out a Nazi and not banning the Nazi is a bad thing.
- nnechm 1y agoHad a similar experience with meta. Extremely opaque decision making, terrible UX. Account permanently disabled ... did not follow community standards, literally on sign up to get a dx account. It's difficult after an experience like that to see how they are so successful. Is it because their users are so addicted and ad sellers will do anything to get onboard ? It's probably just a few dark patterns here and there to bump up impressions at will.
- brador 1y agoWhy is their no libre clone of facebook?
- Zak 1y agoThere is, but creating the software was never the hard part.
- Thoreandan 1y agoHuh. Posting a screenshot of the tweet just got my FB account suspended.
- saltysalt 1y agoIf they suspend everyones accounts, the Internet will be a better place. “Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.” - Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
- SLHamlet 1y agoUpdate, 3:03pm PT: Stephenson's Facebook account has been restored within the last 1-2 hours. (I've been checking since the morning.) But the irony goes on forever.
- chairmansteve 1y ago"for impersonating someone noteworthy"....
- theshrike79 1y agoTbh authors should have blogs with RSS-feeds I can follow to know when new stuff is coming out. Way too many only post content on Facebook on Goodreads. Or even worse, the only notification comes from Amazon.
- gusfoo 1y agoI made a whatsapp business account yesterday, started a test advertising campaign. Went to log in to the developer area, "Your account is banned, there is no appeal". And whatsapp customer services says "Your account is fine and there are no issues and this ticket is closed" I really, really don't understand why you have to make a facebook account in order to get access to the developer area, and now I get to watch my advertising spending tick up with no way of accessing anything about it.
- richardatlarge 1y agoMaybe the first sign of AI running full amok will be Meta canceling all its accounts in a runaway state of algorithm-induced internal paranoia