I advertised some masks my grandma has sewn on FB. It was ok, expansive clicks like always but ok. This was running for at least a week or two. But when I changed some text it triggered a new ad review and within no hour my account was banned. It didn't even took a hour to deny my appeal as well and my account was lost forever (without ever naming any reason)

This account had 50+ (harmless) groups with way over 100k followers as well as a few thousand dollars in ad spend just that year. I didn't socialize at all on Facebook which I guess made my account fishy to some degree but all data was correct and passport verified.

This is the reason I completely ignore Facebook and all its platforms for whatever reason these days. I don't care if it could help my business, it's not worth the trouble.

That's basically my stance since 2004 when I first heard about them. I lost some opportunities, I guess, but it also allowed me to tell everyone how I feel about data privacy while keeping a straight face.

Same here. I not only don't condemn people for using Facebook, I almost always defend their use of Facebook. But since I mean what I say when I'm talking about the site, I haven't had an account in at least a decade and I block the domains. I dislike the site, not its users.

I don’t know if any one customer has enough money to get proper first class human service with Facebook.

But honestly I don't care anymore. Their ad platform barely worked for me and their numbers didn't match my log numbers for years before this happened.

I haven't had any other use for the platform either way.

https://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133

I once had a similar deal when I lived in a house with several guys for a year in college. We divvied up the utilities, and I was in charge of the phone bill. I set up automatic payment, and never had a problem. But 5 years later, the phone company accused me of skipping my June payment, and carefully deducting that amount from the "total owed" amount in every subsequent month. It's insane, and every human I spoke to agreed with me, but no one had the power to do anything about it. I could either travel cross country to go to court, with no evidence other than common sense, or just pay the $30 bill plus another $40 in penalties.

Is the review not human? Do they run it through the same algorithm a second time?

Do they lie about the review?

Is the reviewer so out of touch they don’t recognize real violence vs just the use of “beat?”

Yes, yes, and yes. There's a context-illiterate AI deciding what you can say or not, even if the later heavily depends on context.

And just like it'll trigger a bazillion of false positives, it'll also trigger a bazillion of false negatives; someone can easily spread hate through Facebook, unimpeded, by simply encoding language in a way that the algorithm doesn't understand, but humans do; or with simple irony.

People don't often realise, but users are a resource just like any other. And if a resource is abundant, you'll often sacrifice a bit of that for the sake of something else.

So... sure, bad content (false negatives) and being handled unfairly (false positives) sours users, prompting them to leave the platform. And both things are bound to happen, if you put an algorithm reviewing stuff instead of a person. But since there are so many users, Facebook is better off doing this crap than actually spending money by hiring enough people to actually review the reports, checking the context to decide if they apply or not.

And you'll see other businesses doing exactly the same decision; that's why, for example, Reddit became such a shithole, and people outright complain about the Anti-Evil Operations all the time. Twitter is likely the same, dunno. And it shows that we cannot and we should not rely on mass social media, we should be sticking to smaller alternatives.[/soapbox]

This could be the key point. Penalties for letting something bad slip past, but no penalties for falsely flagging. It’s a pragmatic solution, but it is almost by definition inhuman.

I looked into it and while a hassle it is on par with renewing your car insurance level of hassle (so some hassle, but doable, a "side project"). And worth it for the "stick it to the man" factor. In the end I got it almost all back by being nice, so no need.

In addition to small claims, there are credit card charge backs.

In this situation there would be no judgement because there is no right to have a facebook account therefore they can close your account because they don't like your face or indeed because you sued them. Why would you imagine that a jury would basically award you all facebook's money because they closed your account? Yes sir Mr soandso they were clearly jerks I award you Facebook now try not to be as big a jerk as Zuck and good day to you!

Anyway I do remember FB's "a cool "open source" way to do front-end development, feel "free" to use it, you can't sue us though". So maybe there is some shitty clause like that when you sign up.

Withholding your money and then when you (rightfully) sue them for that, retaliating and kicking you off the platform entirely?

This is true (if we take "was" literally). Though IIRC it was only if you sued them over patents.

> React is MIT licensed

And this is also true (now).

I believe that in many states the company that demanded arbitration has to bear the costs also.

Your account is totally blank and joined in 2021. You also submitted an article about rethinking app development at FB. In a comment you also post you work for a large company.

Do you work for Facebook?

However doesn’t change the fact that a lot of things get accepted at face value if they align with what someone’s view of things is

(It it is just one piece of data, and people are good at finding data that supports their viewpoint of course. Given all the scandals FB is under and problems on this thread, I do think it supports a narrative of FB having massive problems around ethics and moral actions.)

Here is a fun story :)

I have an ad account at FB for a company I closed in early 2020 due to Covid.

I wanted to delete the account, but FB makes it impossible to do that. I message their support and they tell me they can remove it, but they need my ID and a handwritten letter. I am stunned. A handwritten letter??? How does that achieve anything :)

So I write out a short note with a bit of snark about a tech company needing a handwritten letter, take a picture and send it to their support chat/ticket along with my ID. They do not like that I was snarky and refuse to do anything, even after I remove some of my snark and resend it.

Thus, I still have the account and 14 support replies later they still refuse to help me.

(note, they didn't want a letter send to them via the post office, they literally wanted me to write it and send it to them. So weird...)

Not that that's practical for a mom and pop shop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_Generation

Really cool author out of the Netherlands, I highly recommend the book. It is dark sci fi, and she calls it "Neon Science Fiction". Which sums the story up nicely (dark and gritty with a flippant attitude)

I believe the line she got hit with was "Can You Beat The Neon God's Algorithm?"

She also did a list on my site about books that inspired her creation of neon science fiction (and how she defines that): https://shepherd.com/best-books/inspired-neon-science-fictio...

Let me know what you think if you read it! There was one scene in the book I can't get out of my head... ever...

All the topics are hooked into Wikidata on the ML side, eventually I want to build knowledge graphs using the Wikidata info and play with historical timelines etc and see what I can do...

I am working on adding individual book pages and then genres and age group data is next.

Skynet is here.

More generally this is the result of giving free rein on global discourse to unregulated companies, who ultimately took full advantage and profiteed off of it.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/exclusive-facebook-inst...

I do support the right of Ukrainians to defend their country. But I'm not comfortable with giving social media corporate employees the power to decide which violence is good and which is bad.

Goes to show how grotesque those making the rules on Good and Bad are - I am sure we can find similar stuff regarding Saudi Arabia, which is pretty much a Daesh that succeeded at gaining power and keeping it.

Would you say that the NSA is a left wing organization then?

How do you honestly think this would go? they take the capitol and trump shows up and says "im the president for another term" then everyone goes home and ignores the corpse of Mike Pence?

They destroy the certifications of the electoral votes from the states (as almost happened[0]), causing various states to (disingenuously) disagree about how to replace the lost documents.

Enough FUD (and lawsuits, and delays) would be generated during this period of public disorientation that the Republican party could exploit the ambiguity of the Constitutional phrase "a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed"[1] and trigger the contingent election procedure described in the Twelfth Amendment.[2]

Since a majority of states at the time had Republican representation, they would have elected Trump and the Democrats would have not been able to stop them, even if Trump did eventually let them back into the Capitol.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/senate-aides-rescued-elector...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_Count_Act#Majority_o...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingent_election

You can dislike republicans all you want but this is just another level.

In such a circumstance, it's hard to imagine the state delegations of Republican states deciding to throw away a perfectly legal and constitutional opportunity to elect their guy to the presidency. If it makes you feel any better, I would expect Democrat delegations to vote for the Democrat candidate if there were ever a contingent election, even if that candidate didn't have a plurality of electoral votes (perhaps at least justifying their decision by pointing to the popular vote, which their candidate might nevertheless have won).

Also your statement that "Since a majority of states at the time had Republican representation, they would have elected Trump" is laughable. It's well known that Trump asked multiple Republican governors to "find some votes" and they obviously did not do this. Even if someone is a demagogue that doesn't make them willing to commit a career ending felony. After all, being a demagogue got them a long way. Not by falsifying election documents.

Comparatively playing for time, doing nothing, and then voting Trump are all low risk activities which is why it is entirely believable that they should come to pass.

Actually, it's not. The way this works (I really hope you're not an American, because if you are you really should know this) is that if the counting of electoral votes is sufficiently disputed (in this counterfactual case, the vote certificates were destroyed), deciding the outcome of the election rests with the US House of Representatives.

If that were (and it has, several times in US history), to happen the members of the House would vote (on a state by state basis, not each representative voting individually) on who was to be the President.

Since a majority (26 or 27 out of 50, IIRC) of states have Republican majorities in the number of House members, a House vote would likely have gone Trump's way[0].

This is something of a peccadillo of the US Presidential electoral system that probably should be reformed[1], but it currently is the law of the land.

[0] Which is why it was so important (at least for the Trumpists) for the proceedings to be disrupted. It was the final opportunity for them to overturn the clearly expressed will of the people.

[1] Because regardless of which party's state cohorts have a majority, that's a supremely undemocratic way to choose the winner and is a relic of the state of the states (as essentially separate nations banding together for defense) in the late 18th century.

Edit: Fixed typo.

That's a really reductive (and, in my view, incorrect) take on the issues in Florida in 2000. It was a hot mess, and I think (IANAL, so I may well be talking out of my ass) the Supreme Court should have kicked this back to the Florida courts, but all such activity was within the bounds of the US Constitution.

The absence of the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore, at least AFAIK, wouldn't have changed the outcome of the election.

I'd be interested to know what logical steps lead from what I wrote to "Bush v. Gore overthrew the US government."

Would you mind sharing that line of reasoning? Because It's not at all clear to me how you got from point a to point b. Thanks!

N.B.: I did not vote for George W. Bush in 2000 (or 2004, for that matter)

Your argument is that "Republican governors" could follow the processes of the government to somehow influence an election. I don't even think what you're describing is possible. But if it is, well that is the government just following it's own processes. If that makes you upset, you apparently feel that our government is not legitimate. The Republican vs Democrat vs whatever is irrelevant. If the government decides it doesn't like the outcome of an election & throws it out, that's the governments choice.

You're in the same boat that somehow champion's the idea the Roe v. wade is the "correct" decision of the Supreme court on abortion. Guess what: the supreme court basically just goes with whatever is popular at present. You love the idea of the fairy tale high school civics course where the US is some bastion of righteousness & freedom. How many times did the Supreme Court rule that slavery was all fine & dandy? Apparently enough we fought a war over it and had to get Congress to authorize amendments explaining that slavery was in fact not OK.

So I'm still not clear what chain of reasoning you're using here.

I'll recap my statements to make sure I'm being clear.

You said:

>Your argument is that "Republican governors" could follow the processes of the government to somehow influence an election. I don't even think what you're describing is possible.

That's not my argument at all. Nor did I mention state governors (Republican or otherwise). Rather, I was referring to the 12th Amendment which states, in part:

"The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice." [emphasis added]

As I stated in my initial comment, 26 states[2] had Republican majority delegations. Had the election gone to the House for resolution, it's likely that Trump would have been elected (Or maybe not, given the 10 Republican Representatives who voted to impeach Trump) by a vote of 26-23(or 24). Which, of course, would be in direct contravention of the November, 2020 election results.

That's to what I was referring in the comment[1] to which you originally replied. It's not clear to me how following the process set out in the 12th Amendment is akin (or even related, except that it concerned a Presidential election) to the events leading up to and including the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision.

As for the 2000 Presidential election, I'm not clear what you're getting at WRT to an "overthrow" of the government.

Since Marbury v. Madison[3] in 1803, it's been the case in the US that the US Supreme Court is the "supreme" court.

While there have been numerous (some of which you mention) "supremely" bad decisions by that court, and, in fact, as I stated in the second comment[4] to which you replied), I thought Bush v. Gore shouldn't have been decided by the US Supreme Court.

Whether you approve or disapprove specific Supreme Court decisions (I disagree with many myself, not least of which is the Dobbs decision BTW), that doesn't invalidate the decisions.

What's more, the results[4] of the Florida election, while having been reviewed repeatedly, show a really close election which could have gone either way, dependent on a multitude of factors.

All that said, for both elections, the circumstances and outcomes, while hotly debated, were certainly within constitutional bounds.

I still don't get the logical line of reasoning that takes you from the 12th amendment to the decision in Bush v. Gore. Primarily because you haven't provided one.

What's more, you seem to be ascribing a whole bunch of beliefs and attitudes to me which I do not hold.

[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-12/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32872345

[2] https://www.270towin.com/2020-house-election/state-by-state/...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32873337

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...

Edit: Cleaned up my prose. Added the missing link, reordered references.

If "various states" happen to "disagree" then it has to be a statement issued by the governors and legislature of those states. The members of Congress are most definitely not "the states". They are popularly elected nowadays and are not selected by the Governor or by the legislature of their home state. They have actually zero authority in their own state.

If a bunch of Congressional representatives happen to disagree, that's just Congress disagreeing. Congress can make whatever rules it wants with regards to a presidential election (see Bush v. Gore as I already stated) including delegating the results of that election to the Supreme Court. I suppose in fact they could actually explicitly pass Federal law determining the outcome of a local school board election if they wanted. In fact, I wouldn't even be surprised if such a law exists already in some form.

If you can't understand that "the states" is not Congress, you have no understanding of the United States.

I said no such thing. It was this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32865748

that contains that information.

Note that I (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nobody9999) am not the author of that comment.

It was, in fact, a user called dane-pgp (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dane-pgp) who wrote that.

But you (apparently) ignored the rest of his comment which describes the 12th amendment process for the House to elect the President.

So. Let's sum up here:

1. You disagree with someone (dane-pgp) and yell incoherently at someone else (Nobody9999);

2. When that someone else explains, in great detail, to make sure you understand their point, you produce further incoherent ramblings;

3. You continue to rant incoherently with no apparent regard for the law or the constitutuion.

Good show. Catch you on the flip side, although I hope not.

Somehow a huge swarm of a generally armed demographic left their guns at home when attempting a 'coup'.

Or maybe they just went to protest what they thought to be a wrongful state of affairs, and the situation devolved into a riot. Who knows. Maybe you can pull off a coup against the United States with selfie sticks instead of F15s.

The fact that his supporters almost succeeded despite most of them not being armed should be a cause for more concern rather than less, since it shows what a soft target they were attacking (and presumably some were at least subconsciously aware of that, which might have influenced their decision to not bring their weapons).

Anyway, as for your specific claim that they "left their guns at home", I refer you to this[0] article from last year:

"At least three people arrested in connection with the insurrection are facing charges for carrying firearms on Capitol grounds. At least eight others carried knives or tasers at the Capitol, including two defendants who allegedly committed assaults with tasers, according to FBI and court documents. Multiple others arrested downtown and in the vicinity of the Capitol had rifles, pistols, explosive materials, and large supplies of ammunition. And communications among numerous January 6 suspects detailed in court documents indicate that many of their fellow insurrectionists were armed with guns."

[0] https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2021/09/trump-extr...

> a sudden and decisive action in politics, especially one resulting in a change of government illegally or by force.

It is an attempted coup to ask election officials,courts, and then lawmakers to toss out legitimate ballots or wholesale discard or modify results in order to change the outcome of an election and then attempt to intimidate lawmakers with a show of force and violence intended to convince them in the presidents own words to "show some strength" by which it is meant illegally discard democracy in favor of fascism.

This statement by you reads like an apologist for a rapist disregarding allegations by virtue of re-defining rape to mean a stranger dragging a poor misdirected maid into the bushes.

It also reeks of a peculiar strategy that suggests we dismiss the actual by virtue of how little sense the strategy makes in the cold light of day. To this day I refer to this as the Connie defense in honor of an erstwhile house guest who while living in my home stole and then explained when caught that she wouldn't possibly have done that because it would be such an extreme disadvantage to do so for such a small gain. Indeed it was and I don't logically need to explicate her stupidity in order to allow the evidence of my own eyes to trivially convict her and put her out of my house like Fred Flinstone's cat.

The same women got a vehicle towed because she was speeding down the highway, while smoking a joint, and driving without a license. I doubt the Connie defense availed her then either.

We all saw the attempted coup on TV. Personally I watched it in real time on multiple monitors showing the news cameras view on one side and the insurrectionists on the other side. I saw months of blatant lies followed by a plea directly issued by the president to intimidate lawmakers and an organized if badly organized attempt to intimidate lawmakers. It happened. There was no stolen election and indeed only one side was working double time to steal it for Donald Trump.

They won't do this. Why?

The way that social media is structured - and the way Facebook et all make their money - is to get as many people as possible on platform, get them addicted to the platform, and then show ads. One of the easiest ways to do this is to provoke and generate outrage - as you can see on Twitter, which basically exists to turn people into public figures and then into "villains of the day". This is also why their systems reject context; because stripping speech of its context is the easiest way to construct a villain of the day.

The reality is that these outrage groups actually tend to be really, really small and close-knit. There's a small handful of people who actually feed the algorithm new extremist content, and everyone else parrots them without thinking much of it because they're angry. Extremism only looks large and prevalent because social media is designed to create echo chambers and manufacture consent. And extremists just so happen to be Facebook's best customers - people who already have outrage to play to, who will spend hours on platform, and so on. Of course they aren't going to ban their whales!

However, an ineffective bot that just randomly bans things that sound vaguely extremist-like? That gives you the appearance of Doing Something, without actually doing it, and it falls in line with the usual Silicon Valley protocol of "if it's not worth doing at scale, it's not worth doing at all". Treating extremism like a weirdly-shaped spam problem gives social media companies cover and is how we get stupid bots that think a Holocaust movie is Nazi propaganda.

[0] I do not consider taking down the content of jihadis or neo-nazis to be censorship. Jihadis and neo-nazis are groups with explicit, stated goals to do violence to groups of people for what they say or believe. An ISIS beheading video is not an artistic statement or a political diatribe, it is a threat to other Muslims. "Get in line or you'll be next." Allowing this to be spread around as if it were speech accomplishes the goal of censoring non-extremists.

If you want to argue that tankies or ANTIFA do this too, fine, but the poster I was replying to was specifically pointing out right-wing extremism.