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When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"
- dev_l1x_be 1y agoNot opening a Facebook account for your organization is how you can avoid these.
- fajmccain 1y agoGreat article. Another problem with Meta’s moderation on political topics is they block content worldwide rather than in the united states only
- electric_muse 1y agoContent is one thing. But it gets me really concerned about these kind of appeal processes when it comes to more critical things like your identity or proof of personhood. It is not hard to imagine getting a black mark in some invisible proprietary profile that determines if you can access Uber Eats, LinkedIn, etc. and have no recourse to fix it or get another chance.
- throwawaysleep 1y agoYou don’t need to imagine. It happens frequently.
- ceejayoz 1y agoAnd not just for stuff like Uber. You can get locked out of the IRS, Social Security, etc. in the same way. https://www.id.me/government https://www.id.me/government
- jonbiggums22 1y agoI'm thinking of people who bought an Occulus Rift, which Meta then purchased and then forced people to associate a facebook account with it which they could then ban causing you to lose access to the hardware (and any games you purchased). A strong incentive to use the facebook account as little as possible since making a throwaway facebook account is now such a PITA. Infuriating since it was a bait and switch on an expensive piece of hardware. I guess the only winning move was to sell the device to some other sucker the moment the facebook purchase of Occulus was announced. Don't worry this requirement was removed. Now you just need a Meta account which is totally different!
- pavlov 1y agoThe Facebook acquisition of Oculus was in March 2014. The hardware that Oculus sold before that was a developer prototype. There was no bait and switch because there was no consumer product. There’s a lot to dislike about Meta, but this complaint doesn’t make sense. If anything, Meta has put millions more of VR devices into consumers’ hands by selling the Quest at a loss. Nobody has to buy it.
- Rebelgecko 1y agoWhen I bought my Quest, I was allowed (initially) to only use an Oculus account. The FB requirement came later.
- freedomben 1y agoNot accurate. I'm not a Facebook hater, but they definitely did a bait and switch. We were advertised Linux support, but that got canned plenty after people had pre-ordered. I'll likely never forgive them for that
- j45 1y agoThe online "sign in with X/Y/Z" services are a digital identity provider. We are citizens of private corporations that are social networks. There are not many laws there for recourse or communication.
- pndy 1y agoOpenID was aiming to be a decentralized digital identity solution for everyone but then companies opted out for own solutions. I'm seeing more and more sites pushing for signing with facebook/apple/google accounts and I'm afraid how the Internet may look like in a few years. It seems we're on path on total sanitization of online services, sites and content to the point where everything will be "safe", verified and authorized and so will be users.
- j45 1y agoI'm sure there's enough folks here who have gone through the single sign on fun, which anecdotally can expose you to the independent ID hosting. I believe it's still possible to run independent identity services and route it through one of the cloud providers in some cases. Creating your own email address on your own domain and then enrolling your own domain in identity accounts seems to be one practice I saw being mentioned the last time I was brushing up on SSO.
- diebeforei485 1y agoIt's important to have your own website, so you can post updates there. Use Meta to let people know that there is an update on the site.
- dylan604 1y agoHaving your own site on someone else's corporate service is no less of a risk of being shut out of your account. Free speech is only as free as the service you are using thinks it is.
- Zak 1y agoWeb hosting is, or can be a commodity. An organization that gets dropped by its web host can just get another.
- bestouff 1y agoSure, but as long as you own you domain name you're a DNS update away of moving it elsewhere.
- j45 1y agoAs long as? I'm not sure if there's a common way, largely practiced by many people where they don't own their own domain name that they can point anywhere?
- toast0 1y agoIt used to be common to let an outside agency run your website, and they may own the domain. It's probably still very common to manage your domain with your hosting company. If you get blacklisted by your hosting company, you may not be able to transfer your domain out.
- j45 1y agoIf someone built you a house and retained the master keys to the house that's more on the buyer being lead through the process more ethically.
- mschuster91 1y agoIt's not just Meta. All big tech companies (including Amazon, if you are a vendor) have gotten infamous for basically only getting a human to intervene with automated moderation or outsourced lowest-effort moderation if one raises a big-enough stink on social media or manages to secure a court judgement, but even that isn't foolproof these days. Twitter has recently gotten under fire for ignoring German court orders.
- CM30 1y agoYep. It's why the only way most people get their hacked YouTube channels back is by begging the Team YouTube account on Twitter for help, and hoping enough people bother the staff there that something actually gets fixed. If you're a popular creator that doesn't have much of a social media following, friends at Google or lots of lawyer money, RIP any chance of getting your channel back before/after it gets banned due to the hackers.
- greyb 1y agoThis remembers of the Youtube channel TRNGL [1]. They got banned from posting for some reason, and their channel was about to be deleted within a few days. They had no following, so they instead looked for bypasses to put a video publicly. They found that while their uploading rights were disabled, they were able to use Creator Studio to record a webcam video begging for help since nobody was hearing their pleas. They have ~200k subscribers too. [1] https://www.youtube.com/@TRNGL https://www.youtube.com/@TRNGL
- linsomniac 1y agoGoogle, especially Google Corp, is very much that way too. One of my users is currently getting a fair bit of spam because a spammer figured out that if they send a message with envelope sender @google.com, rcpt @gmail.com, google.com MX will accept it, then bounce it with NoSuchUser and gmail will accept it. I spent an hour yesterday looking for a way to contact Google about it, but couldn't find anything. Made harder because most things assume you are talking about gmail or youtube, not google.com itself. It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them.
- Benlights 1y agoI've been having the same issue
- hollow-moe 1y agoThis has been going for months already, it will most likely never be fixed.
- throw-the-towel 1y agos/months/years
- Sleaker 1y agoI saw these spam mails start showing up a few months ago, and I was like WOW how is google infra just letting nefarious actors use their own domain to bounce spam/fishing emails?
- afandian 1y agoAmusingly Firebase auth (a Google product) has such a bad reputation with GMail that standard procedure is to bring your own mail service. Or your password-reset emails are binned.
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y agoFirebase technicians allegedly attempted to contact gmail support, but found that gmail did not have an inbound support contact and thus the firebase technicians were unable to rectify their issue.* *This entire post is fabricated satire. Though, I would not be shocked if it were true.
- _-_-__-_-_- 1y agoI lost my facebook account about five years ago--total outright account ban. No recourse at all. It happened to a group of about 10 people that had been administrators of a local non-profit's facebook page and who had managed groups for the organization in the past. Our non-profit was non-denominational and helped local teens with after school type programs. We never knew why our personal accounts were banned. Best we could figure was that we used a tagline in the past in some facebook comments and posts that later got co-opted and spread by a "white power" group in the USA. We were located in Canada. At the time, some people recommended buying an Occulus device and calling their support because they were able to recover accounts and they had human support. We tried appealing to the company on social media, but we didn't have any luck. I had to rebuild my social media profile and our organizations profiles and I lost 14 years of Messenger conversations, posts, and photos. These memories were just gone. It sucked. For the non-profit, it meant lost donations and lost connections for our alumni. Keep your own content off-platform.
- ToucanLoucan 1y agoI registered an instagram account to share my art, and was banned entirely, immediately, before I could even upload an avatar, with zero explanation. I emailed several times, did the license scan thing, and even messaged support from my personal account, and I still have never gotten any sort of explanation. shrug This and that other thread today about Slack just seems to be what happens when you're determined to remove as many humans from your processes as possible.
- j45 1y agoMakes a good case to have separate brand accounts for nearly everything and to do little from your own personal identity accounts
- pogue 1y agoTry Pixelfed or even Bluesky. Pixelfed is the fediverse alternative to Instagram, and there are some independent app devs working on Bluesky apps to be similar in look to it. You won't find the reach, but you'll find a little community of other artists that can be a lot more personal & fulfilling than you would find on mainstream social media. https://pixelfed.org/ https://pixelfed.org/
- cwmoore 1y agoNow do match.com
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ruralfam 1y agoI had a Youtube video account with I think two videos. Got a notice it was suspended for content violations (these were self-created videos with no copyright content). Asked for reinstatement. Nada. This was years ago. On a lark recently decided to ask again. Got approved. Have no idea why/how/what/who/etc.
- _9ptr 1y agoyoutube giveth and youtube taketh away
- EGreg 1y agoDon't y'all see? Every other day a story comes out about a centralized platform either: 1) Extorting for money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887 2) Canceling accounts: https://www.eff.org/pages/when-knowing-someone-meta-only-way-break-out-content-jail https://www.eff.org/pages/when-knowing-someone-meta-only-way... 3) Has their algorithms choose what you see and hear: https://x.com/i/grok/share/NwPcWVxZiHQytvGs8MONRdpCi https://x.com/i/grok/share/NwPcWVxZiHQytvGs8MONRdpCi 4) Deplatforms you anytime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deplatforming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deplatforming 5) Demonetizes you, after taking over half to begin with: https://podcastle.ai/blog/how-much-money-do-youtubers-make-per-view/ https://podcastle.ai/blog/how-much-money-do-youtubers-make-p... 6) Allows governments easy surveillance and even hacking your account: https://natlawreview.com/article/even-hacking-field-government-surveillance-bill-passed-parliament https://natlawreview.com/article/even-hacking-field-governme... 7) Sends your information to advertisers, etc. etc. 8) Makes everyone increasingly depressed, angry and distrustful of others https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ Now I ask you, why do people put up with this, especially content creators with large audiences? Because they have no viable open alternative that they can host easily themselves. And why is that? Here is what it would look like if they did: https://qbix.com/community.pdf https://qbix.com/community.pdf I think it's because just like in Web3, the incentives of Web2 are to make a lot of money for your early stage investors, the VCs, and very few choose not to sell out after they hit the critical mass and get massive centralized power and network effects. I've seen "indieweb" come and go, "decentralizedweb.net" is down but they used to have TimBL speaking at it. I've seen Diaspora come out 13 years ago and sadly one of the founders killed himself. I've seen Mastodon, which Trump's team forked to make Truth Social (one of the few deplatformed guys who actually got his own platform, had to spend millions on it). Why do you think there is no good alternative to Big Tech, the way that, say, at least the Incredible Burger is an alternative for people who want to opt of meat?
- the_real_cher 1y agowe need to move away from centralized platforms asap
- Glyptodon 1y agoThis is pretty much the case for non-abortion, non-political situations, too. For example, MMI, a small watch company out of Singapore, had their Facebook page removed in the middle of one of their Kickstarter campaigns earlier this year. To anyone on the outside, it's not clear at all if (a) there really was some kind of issue that consumers would want to know about, or (b) their page shouldn't have been removed to begin with. It's not only (I'm sure) annoying to the company, which, being small, has responded in a relatively circumspect way, but annoying as a consumer because it's not very easy to interpret the signal. In the same ballpark, but reverse, my news feed always has one or two posts from maybe fake groups that have seemingly AI-written stories that carefully mention the Tedoo app, and FB is all too happy to let that slide no matter how many times I report it as spam...
- OptionOfT 1y agoSame with bugs. Reporting bugs rarely seems effective anymore. Maybe my use-cases are more unique, but sometimes I stumble upon things where there the bug I encounter is 2 years old with 0 responses from the company, but I don't know how many comments from customers. And it's already a hassle to report, so actual amount of people encountering the issue is probably higher. One example comes to mind... I can't ask my Google Mini anymore to ping my remote. Many reports. Nothing from Google.
- the_real_cher 1y agoWe all need to get off of centralized platforms quickly.
- intended 1y agoOh boy isn’t this the truth. Firstly - Hah! this is the easier situation! This is Americans talking about reaching out to Americans. It’s even more fun when you are in another country, and need to go through your network to get attention to an issue. Secondly - Everyone I know, who is in a T&S team or does content moderation hates this situation, and is glad that this is being highlighted. it’s considered unfair and absurd. Getting recourse because people know someone who know someone to get it to the right team, is NOT how things should work. Let alone at global levels. I can give maybe a smaller firm or platform a pass. But at FAANG scales? Cmon. —— This is also a reason why I think that Reddit dug its own grave, back when it found the testicular fortitude to oust moderators during the API black outs. If a firm has the willingness to remove mods and craft new philosophies of engagement when the bottom line at risk - does it magically lose that capability during the remainder of the financial year?
- pogue 1y agoUnrelated to reproductive rights, but my private Instagram account got suspended for community guidelines violations out of the blue & I lost all access to my old photos, my friends, contacts, years of DMs. I don't have the slightest idea what triggered it (and of course they won't tell you), nor is there apparently any way I'm aware of to appeal. Interestingly, I still have access to meta[.]ai for whatever reason, so I'm wondering if there is some way to talk to it to get out of InstaJail, or finding a prompt to get it to give you more info on who to contact or ANYTHING at all. However, after hunting around on reddit for solutions, I was quickly made aware of underground groups of individuals (hackers? I'm not sure what you'd call them) who offer account recovery for up to 1 to 2 grand per instance. These aren't just the people who send you phishing messages claiming to get your account back, but offer full services such as promotion, getting unbanned, having other users banned and etc. We've seen news reports in the past where individuals or groups get backend access into Meta and then offer these sorts of features. [1] But who else has access to these sorts of tools & features? I wouldn't be surprised at all if Meta moderators or employees are making a very nice side hustle for themselves doing this, as they'd have not only the access, but presumably know how to hide their tracks. Just a theory. Anyway, if anyone has any ideas on getting an Instagram account back or filing an appeal or whatever, any info would be appreciated. [1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-instagram-facebook-account-hacked-brokers-customer-support/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-instagram-fac...
- United857 1y agoThese are not hackers but Meta employees/contractors who make money on the side by using their access to internal support tooling/channels. It's a fireable offense (it's only intended for actual friends/family) but still happens a lot.
- alex1138 1y agoThere's a post on HN about someone being banned from Facebook because they violated (supposedly; who knows what violated even means) Whatsapp TOS from 3 years prior (possibly even before FB acquisition) Someone needs to tell Zuckerberg about this thing called "antitrust" and not being a dick and that you can't run your company(ies????) like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
- commandersaki 1y agoAnother case was some fellow selling Python & Pandas educational content on FB and was completely banned from advertising because AI flagged it as promoting animal cruelty and then AI reviewed itself and said it has done nothing wrong.
- bdcravens 1y agoI feel like this is a cultural value pretty common among modern companies, where the "proper channels" is a broken system and we have to work around it. We've seen it often, where the only way someone will get support requests looked at is by commenting here, on Twitter, etc. Once a furniture company wasn't really taking action on my warranty claim until I commented about it on a promotional Facebook post.
- cptnapalm 1y agoI've been banned for over a decade from leaving reviews on Amazon. I have no idea why.
- jongjong 1y agoI bet they have a team of people whose job is to keep employees in a kind of trance. Part of that would involve responding swiftly to employee concerns so that the employees maintain the illusion that the company cares and that it was just a mistake. From the perspective of the employees, they must think their employers are extra nice. They must think it reflects the broader reality of how they treat everyone else.
- Terr_ 1y agoI had a weird and painful experience like that with Reddit, where my account and 10+ years of content all vanished one morning for no reason... but its "appeals" webpage insists that my account is in good-standing, so therefore I can't submit any kind of request for help. A real hard wake-up call on the importance of owning your own online identity and content.
- qingcharles 1y agoThat's odd. You can't log into it at all, right? 99% of the time you can still log into a banned Reddit account and visit the internal appeals page. You are usually just "shadowbanned".
- randycupertino 1y agoMy reddit is IP and hardware device banned- when I create a new account it's banned within 24-hours. All from pissing off a "power mod" of a main bay area subreddit. So aggravating.
- qingcharles 1y agoThat's the sad thing: piss off the wrong mod and they'll bot reports against your account until it's banned. This happens very frequently.
- Terr_ 1y agoI described the final state for brevity, but the slightly longer version is: 1. One morning my account was shadowbanned. Literally everything from any time in any subreddit, including truncating threads and taking other people's replies with it. 2. I logged in and used the appeals page... and it was eventually "granted" with an apologetic message! 3. But nothing changed, except that appeals page stopped working, as it claims the account is normal. 4. Mods can briefly approve what I post, but it doesn't stick. After a few minutes it becomes blocked again, with no audit-trail. 5. So... I dug up an old resume-feedback throwaway account from ~5 years ago to go asking for help... 6. Within a day, it got shadowbanned the same way. 7. For a few months, I did a monthly attempt to make a ticket via support.reddithelp.com, but never got any kind of response. 8. I guess I gave up trying to fight the faceless Kafkaesque system and slid into mild depression, as Reddit had been my primary social conduit after the pandemic. Even if I go back and try to build up a presence again, without answers I'll be plagued by anxiety waiting for some mysterious stupid algorithm to stab me in the back and destroy everything again.
- rr808 1y agoYour life is infinitely better without Instagram or Facebook anyway.
- Ensorceled 1y agoInteresting this is on front page the same day Hack Club got their costs reduced by Slack by complaining on here about the bait and switch.
- brendank310 1y agoI got a panicked call from my parents when Facebook deleted my brother's profile, probably 5 or 6 years after he passed away. After looking into just trying to get the profile restored, I came to the same conclusion as the title essentially. The "memories" feature frequently shuffled posts and pictures of him and had become a comfort for them. They bring it up every now and then, maybe some day I'll find a way to sort it out.
- kashunstva 1y agoThe big LLM players are getting in on the act now, too. In May 2025, out of the blue my account with Anthropic was auto-banned. Your recourse? Fill out a Google form to appeal and wait. Over 4 months in, I’m still waiting. Early on, I did manage to correspond with a human called “Destiny at Anthropic” but now they’ve put up some AI chatbot. The answer is always “wait.” At scale, the value of individual users approaches zero.
- kashunstva 1y agoMeta has repeatedly demonstrated its disregard for free speech and privacy. Within the span of a year, it has utterly cowed to the demands of the current U.S. administration. I don’t think it’s going to be a place for promoting progressive causes such as reproductive rights.
- Razengan 1y agoApple's "iCloud Keychain" API lets Facebook and other apps track you across multiple devices and even device resets, because it's tied to your iCloud account. There's no way for a user to see or delete that secret data, except asking and trusting those apps to delete it. This "exploit" has been there for years. I only ever used throwaway accounts on Facebook, just to access some services that were only accessible via FB. At some point FB banned my account. I created a new one on the browser. Worked fine. When I signed into that account on my iPhone: instant ban. Delete FB app on iPhone, reinstall FB, try new account, same thing. Try a new iPhone, same iCloud account, new FB account: instant ban again. They can not only track you across app reinstalls, device resets, but also across multiple devices. And Apple facilitates it.
- pbiggar 1y agoThis is exactly what happened to people speaking up about the genocide in Gaza. 7amleh documented this in multiple reports [1][2][3]. See also [4] [1] https://7amleh.org/post/erased-and-suppressed-palestinian-testimonies-of-meta-s-censorship-en https://7amleh.org/post/erased-and-suppressed-palestinian-te... [2] https://meta.7amleh.org/ https://meta.7amleh.org/ [3] https://7amleh.org/post/hashtag-palestine-2024-en https://7amleh.org/post/hashtag-palestine-2024-en [4] https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palestine-censorship-sjp/ https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti... Wondering where the EFF was for that issue?
- puchatek 1y agoSo this is the reality of the free speech utopia that Zuckerberg promised when he let go of content moderators at meta.
- chistev 1y agoMy Facebook account got unfairly suspended for integrity issues, and all emails to Meta have not been responded to. Pisses me off.
- jami900 1y ago[dead]
- osejesse 1y ago[dead]