8 ms·

Kicked Off Facebook, and Wondering Why

37 points by todayiamme 12y ago

themodelplumber 12y ago
Glad I went back and read the end of the article. For anyone else who is about to give up and let themselves believe Facebook was unfairly moralizing in this case: > For Mr. Letwin, that can’t come soon enough. A month after his account was disabled, he received an email apologizing, saying it had all been a mistake on Facebook’s part. > A Facebook spokesman said a report was filed against Mr. Letwin for using a fake name, which he had not done, and a reviewer looking at his account then mistakenly thought it violated Facebook’s standards regarding promotion of violence and terrorism. But the process took far longer than it should have, he acknowledged, saying that typically, an appeal should be responded to within a few days.
- linguafranca 12y ago
  Thanks for the tl;dr. It seemed like an awfully long article for non-news.
  - e40 12y ago
    Well, it wasn't really non-news. It's an interesting form of denial of service.
- infinitone 12y ago
  Probably some zionists didn't like his group and probably mass reported his account. They do have a dedicated group for that kinda stuff.
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    There seems to be well organised groups out to promote the Israeli viewpoint on any social media site which discusses it. Take Reddit for example, every time the topic comes up it gets absolutely inundated with "people" trying to browbeat any non-pro point of view into submission (through a combination of downvoting and just outright argument from multiple puppets). While there are definitely real people who feel that strongly about the topic and have similar views, all you have to do is start looking at the account histories of others to feel like there is a lot of sockpuppeting going on. I'd love for the site admins on social media sites to look into this to see if there is any "unusual activity" going on, particularly Reddit.
    - Estragon 12y ago
      http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/08/14/israel-students-social-media/2651715/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/08/14/israel-s...
  - Torgo 12y ago
    Both Facebook and Twitter seem very susceptible to "report" campaigns. Anybody who can drum up the numbers can silence somebody else.
  - lotharbot 12y ago
    I have friends whose ministry is focused on problems in religion A and making converts from religion A to religion B. There is apparently a group of religion A members who flag literally everything they post as hate speech. Photos of themselves? Hate speech. Photos they took of religiously significant locations? Hate speech. Telling us that her mom is in the hospital? Hate speech. Eventually, after hours on the phone with FB support, it appears to be settled. I would love to know the technical means FB used -- whether they marked my friends' account as "always manually review flags", whether they've got better voting ring detection, or whether they simply found a group of abusing flaggers as a result of the first phone call and that group isn't slick enough to make new accounts.
kiallmacinnes 12y ago
I was shut out of Facebook for 24 hours and felt like I had a limb chopped off. I honestly, truly, just don't understand this. Really, I don't. How can anyone allow themselves to become so utterly dependent on a single company like this? This reads like a drug addict describing going cold turkey.
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  Because all of their friends are also dependant on it.
  - wanderingstan 12y ago
    And not just friends, many people depend on Facebook for their work. I know from an ex that the Opera world operates entirely within FB, and I can imagine the same is true for drag queens getting gigs. My realtor also swears by FB. It's not like people chose to become so dependent on a social network, often you one must to work within the context that's given.
- w1ntermute 12y ago
  Especially someone who's 58 y/o (according to his Wikipedia profile). Did he just forget that he was living just fine for nearly half a century before Facebook was even created?
  - Nickoladze 12y ago
    That quote was from another person. “We don’t realize how ingrained Facebook is in our everyday lives,” a drag queen named Heklina told KNTV in San Jose, Calif. “I was shut out of Facebook for 24 hours and felt like I had a limb chopped off.”
  - kiallmacinnes 12y ago
    I didn't look that up before posting, but yea, it certainly makes it even more difficult to understand. Edit: Aha, I see from a sibling post that the wikipedia page is for a different person.
llamataboot 12y ago
I predict that the new vigorous enforcement of the "real name" policy will be a disaster and it boggles the mind that facebook is doing it after G+ tried and failed. I estimate 20-25% of my 1000 "friends" are using modified versions of their legal name, or other names entirely.
- morganvachon 12y ago
  There are legitimate reasons to change one's public name, too. A victimized spouse hiding from their abuser comes to mind. I am friends with a few indie authors who write under a pen name, and that pen name is what they go by on Facebook. One does it for day job security; she's an elementary school teacher by day, supernatural erotic fiction author by night. She tries to keep her working life and personal life completely separate. Thankfully Facebook hasn't caught on to any of them doing this, or they would lose their connection with readers and friends alike.
yason 12y ago
My Facebook account was suspended out of the blue, "due to recent changes in my profile" where there weren't any. I don't use Facebook that much but I mostly felt liberated. "I thought, hey, they did it for me. I didn't have to get frustrated and shut my account myself. That's it then." I did miss the chance to keep in touch with certain groups of people but OTOH Facebook already does a lot to make their platform unusable for simply following your friends and groups, such as not necessarily showing what your friends and groups actually post. They did re-enable my account later. Still have no idea why it was suspended in the first place, even if me and Facebook exchanged a handful of emails about it.
junto 12y ago
I'm glad I've deleted my Facebook account. I really don't miss it one tiny little bit. It's like looking back at a relationship with a really clingy partner and thinking to yourself 'wtf was I doing with her? Why did it take me so long to realise that she was just using me?" Yep folks. Facebook is that girl or guy you need to dump to realise how screwed up they are.
tych0 12y ago
A friend of mine a month or two a go began posting "throw-up Thursday" pictures (a play on #tbt, i.e. throwback Thursday). He posted pictures of people who were drunk and had thrown up on themselves. They were pretty gross, as intended. Someone reported him, and Facebook removed all of the posts and comments referencing those posts. He began posting pictures again in protest, and they threatened to ban him if he didn't stop, so he did. I think it is unfortunate that Facebook feels the need to police content like this (especially when the content is relatively in-offensive, like some pictures of barf). There is also a block mechanism, so you can block stuff from people you don't want to see (or, you could, you know, un-friend them!). I can (potentially) see an argument being made for censoring some kinds of content, but I was completely amazed that Facebook cared about something like throw-up Thursday.
- yeukhon 12y ago
  This is not news. You can post comments that make some people angry (like a political argument), and after a couple reports on you, a ban hammer will come to your door within a day and you will not be able to even update your status. It happened to me twice a couple years ago. What I said were pretty clam and reasonable though (nothing inappropriate).
- DanBC 12y ago
  I find it weird that Facebook is so clueless about this kind of stuff. Women breast feeding children? Banned, for ages, until enough kerfuffle tha FB changed their mind. Beheading videos? Fine, no problem, go on. Until there was enough kerfuffle for FB to make it easier to block those videos.
pasbesoin 12y ago
TL;DR: Maintain records of out-of-band means of contact. My friends on FB are "real" friends. A few years ago, one of FB's mandatory updates swapped out all user profile email addresses with FB-domain email addresses. I had my address entry set to show only to friends, and I considered it (perhaps uncommonly in comparison to the common user) as a backup means of communication, including in the event of losing control -- for whatever reason -- of my FB account. When the FB update swapped my non-FB address for a FB address, I took the time to manually swap it back and to suggest to my friends that they do the same, including a brief explanation of why. If you are going to use FB and the like for significant relationships, make sure you have an out-of-band backup means of contact for said. P.S. This also presupposes, in the case of email addresses in FB profiles, actually noting same in your own records BEFORE the disconnect occurs. I.e. most of my friends also restrict visibility of those addresses to "friends only".
bowlofpetunias 12y ago
I don't understand why intelligent people that are capable of independent, critical thought don't stay the fuck away from a platform that enforces a narrow set of cultural, political and religious values that aren't theirs. "My profile didn’t break any rules" "They’re cut off to access to their communities" It is not your fucking profile. They are not your fucking communities. It has a Facebook logo on top of it, you are publishing for Facebook on behalf of Facebook so that Facebook can profit from it. You are working for Facebook and paying for the privilege with your privacy. It's Facebook's profile about you, and Facebook decides what happens to it. It all belongs to Facebook because you gave it to them. Just stop fucking doing it. I'm all in favor of tight government regulation when it comes to consumer protection, privacy and corporations abusing their power, but this kind of idiotic whining about what people do to themselves completely voluntarily just pisses me off. People deserve to protected against the insidious way in which Facebook c.s. violate people's privacy rights. I understand that people have no idea how and how much info Facebook collects about them, and how much harm that can do. But if your communication and social life depend on Facebook you're just an idiot who deserves to be made fun of rather than taken seriously and getting portrayed as a victim by the NYT. Being lazy and stupid doesn't make you a victim, no matter how idiotic Facebook's rules are.

37 points by todayiamme 12y ago

Glad I went back and read the end of the article. For anyone else who is about to give up and let themselves believe Facebook was unfairly moralizing in this case: > For Mr. Letwin, that can’t come soon enough. A month after his account was disabled, he received an email apologizing, saying it had all been a mistake on Facebook’s part. > A Facebook spokesman said a report was filed against Mr. Letwin for using a fake name, which he had not done, and a reviewer looking at his account then mistakenly thought it violated Facebook’s standards regarding promotion of violence and terrorism. But the process took far longer than it should have, he acknowledged, saying that typically, an appeal should be responded to within a few days.

linguafranca 12y ago
Thanks for the tl;dr. It seemed like an awfully long article for non-news.
- e40 12y ago
  Well, it wasn't really non-news. It's an interesting form of denial of service.
infinitone 12y ago
Probably some zionists didn't like his group and probably mass reported his account. They do have a dedicated group for that kinda stuff.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  There seems to be well organised groups out to promote the Israeli viewpoint on any social media site which discusses it. Take Reddit for example, every time the topic comes up it gets absolutely inundated with "people" trying to browbeat any non-pro point of view into submission (through a combination of downvoting and just outright argument from multiple puppets). While there are definitely real people who feel that strongly about the topic and have similar views, all you have to do is start looking at the account histories of others to feel like there is a lot of sockpuppeting going on. I'd love for the site admins on social media sites to look into this to see if there is any "unusual activity" going on, particularly Reddit.
  - Estragon 12y ago
    http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/08/14/israel-students-social-media/2651715/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/08/14/israel-s...
- Torgo 12y ago
  Both Facebook and Twitter seem very susceptible to "report" campaigns. Anybody who can drum up the numbers can silence somebody else.
- lotharbot 12y ago
  I have friends whose ministry is focused on problems in religion A and making converts from religion A to religion B. There is apparently a group of religion A members who flag literally everything they post as hate speech. Photos of themselves? Hate speech. Photos they took of religiously significant locations? Hate speech. Telling us that her mom is in the hospital? Hate speech. Eventually, after hours on the phone with FB support, it appears to be settled. I would love to know the technical means FB used -- whether they marked my friends' account as "always manually review flags", whether they've got better voting ring detection, or whether they simply found a group of abusing flaggers as a result of the first phone call and that group isn't slick enough to make new accounts.

kiallmacinnes 12y ago

I was shut out of Facebook for 24 hours and felt like I had a limb chopped off. I honestly, truly, just don't understand this. Really, I don't. How can anyone allow themselves to become so utterly dependent on a single company like this? This reads like a drug addict describing going cold turkey.

jiggy2011 12y ago
Because all of their friends are also dependant on it.
- wanderingstan 12y ago
  And not just friends, many people depend on Facebook for their work. I know from an ex that the Opera world operates entirely within FB, and I can imagine the same is true for drag queens getting gigs. My realtor also swears by FB. It's not like people chose to become so dependent on a social network, often you one must to work within the context that's given.
w1ntermute 12y ago
Especially someone who's 58 y/o (according to his Wikipedia profile). Did he just forget that he was living just fine for nearly half a century before Facebook was even created?
- Nickoladze 12y ago
  That quote was from another person. “We don’t realize how ingrained Facebook is in our everyday lives,” a drag queen named Heklina told KNTV in San Jose, Calif. “I was shut out of Facebook for 24 hours and felt like I had a limb chopped off.”
- kiallmacinnes 12y ago
  I didn't look that up before posting, but yea, it certainly makes it even more difficult to understand. Edit: Aha, I see from a sibling post that the wikipedia page is for a different person.

llamataboot 12y ago

I predict that the new vigorous enforcement of the "real name" policy will be a disaster and it boggles the mind that facebook is doing it after G+ tried and failed. I estimate 20-25% of my 1000 "friends" are using modified versions of their legal name, or other names entirely.

morganvachon 12y ago
There are legitimate reasons to change one's public name, too. A victimized spouse hiding from their abuser comes to mind. I am friends with a few indie authors who write under a pen name, and that pen name is what they go by on Facebook. One does it for day job security; she's an elementary school teacher by day, supernatural erotic fiction author by night. She tries to keep her working life and personal life completely separate. Thankfully Facebook hasn't caught on to any of them doing this, or they would lose their connection with readers and friends alike.

yason 12y ago

My Facebook account was suspended out of the blue, "due to recent changes in my profile" where there weren't any. I don't use Facebook that much but I mostly felt liberated. "I thought, hey, they did it for me. I didn't have to get frustrated and shut my account myself. That's it then." I did miss the chance to keep in touch with certain groups of people but OTOH Facebook already does a lot to make their platform unusable for simply following your friends and groups, such as not necessarily showing what your friends and groups actually post. They did re-enable my account later. Still have no idea why it was suspended in the first place, even if me and Facebook exchanged a handful of emails about it.

junto 12y ago

I'm glad I've deleted my Facebook account. I really don't miss it one tiny little bit. It's like looking back at a relationship with a really clingy partner and thinking to yourself 'wtf was I doing with her? Why did it take me so long to realise that she was just using me?" Yep folks. Facebook is that girl or guy you need to dump to realise how screwed up they are.

tych0 12y ago

A friend of mine a month or two a go began posting "throw-up Thursday" pictures (a play on #tbt, i.e. throwback Thursday). He posted pictures of people who were drunk and had thrown up on themselves. They were pretty gross, as intended. Someone reported him, and Facebook removed all of the posts and comments referencing those posts. He began posting pictures again in protest, and they threatened to ban him if he didn't stop, so he did. I think it is unfortunate that Facebook feels the need to police content like this (especially when the content is relatively in-offensive, like some pictures of barf). There is also a block mechanism, so you can block stuff from people you don't want to see (or, you could, you know, un-friend them!). I can (potentially) see an argument being made for censoring some kinds of content, but I was completely amazed that Facebook cared about something like throw-up Thursday.

yeukhon 12y ago
This is not news. You can post comments that make some people angry (like a political argument), and after a couple reports on you, a ban hammer will come to your door within a day and you will not be able to even update your status. It happened to me twice a couple years ago. What I said were pretty clam and reasonable though (nothing inappropriate).
DanBC 12y ago
I find it weird that Facebook is so clueless about this kind of stuff. Women breast feeding children? Banned, for ages, until enough kerfuffle tha FB changed their mind. Beheading videos? Fine, no problem, go on. Until there was enough kerfuffle for FB to make it easier to block those videos.

pasbesoin 12y ago

TL;DR: Maintain records of out-of-band means of contact. My friends on FB are "real" friends. A few years ago, one of FB's mandatory updates swapped out all user profile email addresses with FB-domain email addresses. I had my address entry set to show only to friends, and I considered it (perhaps uncommonly in comparison to the common user) as a backup means of communication, including in the event of losing control -- for whatever reason -- of my FB account. When the FB update swapped my non-FB address for a FB address, I took the time to manually swap it back and to suggest to my friends that they do the same, including a brief explanation of why. If you are going to use FB and the like for significant relationships, make sure you have an out-of-band backup means of contact for said. P.S. This also presupposes, in the case of email addresses in FB profiles, actually noting same in your own records BEFORE the disconnect occurs. I.e. most of my friends also restrict visibility of those addresses to "friends only".

bowlofpetunias 12y ago

I don't understand why intelligent people that are capable of independent, critical thought don't stay the fuck away from a platform that enforces a narrow set of cultural, political and religious values that aren't theirs. "My profile didn’t break any rules" "They’re cut off to access to their communities" It is not your fucking profile. They are not your fucking communities. It has a Facebook logo on top of it, you are publishing for Facebook on behalf of Facebook so that Facebook can profit from it. You are working for Facebook and paying for the privilege with your privacy. It's Facebook's profile about you, and Facebook decides what happens to it. It all belongs to Facebook because you gave it to them. Just stop fucking doing it. I'm all in favor of tight government regulation when it comes to consumer protection, privacy and corporations abusing their power, but this kind of idiotic whining about what people do to themselves completely voluntarily just pisses me off. People deserve to protected against the insidious way in which Facebook c.s. violate people's privacy rights. I understand that people have no idea how and how much info Facebook collects about them, and how much harm that can do. But if your communication and social life depend on Facebook you're just an idiot who deserves to be made fun of rather than taken seriously and getting portrayed as a victim by the NYT. Being lazy and stupid doesn't make you a victim, no matter how idiotic Facebook's rules are.