(Re-post of <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27378230>)
Against all natural justice - in the name of national security.
Usually any entity dealing with the web don't want to reveal how their spam detector works because doing so could in turn reveal information on how to circumvent it[0].
The issue is that Meta thinks they're large enough that they can apply this to every single one of their business customers and all other parts of their policy as well - normally a company will be inclined to keep the businesses it's partnered with happy because losing their business can have a knock-on effect that could result in a bigger knock-on effect.
The sad thing is that Meta is probably correct in this assessment - losing one business wouldn't hurt them, regardless of spending. Even if you put a few thousand a month on the line, it's not worth for them to consider you. Heck even if you tell your friends about it - Meta doesn't give a shit.
The true Kafka-esque nightmare here though is that even just knowing someone at the company is apparently not even enough to get it properly checked out and fixed (even corporations like Google who have similar black box policies to most users have the means to do that). It seems Facebook runs on "computer says no" logic when it comes to cases they don't have data on anymore. That is truly disgusting.
[0]: This in part because most spam detection is ultimately still just checking heuristics; revealing the heuristic simply reveals what stat to adjust for. There's very few "sophisticated" detection methods - even the big email providers still just rely on heuristics combined with an internal trust score that they gain by checking how users respond to email.
Which is why it seems really strange that this was a lifetime ban, and so quickly at that.
Maybe it didnt even get to human review?
Welcome to the world of automation.
A genuine business will be willing to put down some information and a cash payment for a review; spammers won’t have the time or resources.
You run the risk of a perverse incentive to trigger it for revenue but make the fee refundable or something.
Besides, I think for modern society, paying $1 rather than presenting your government ID is an easier ask.
There's a few easy checks to prevent perverse incentives:
1. promise (yeah, an impossible task already) a human will review your appeal
2. if the strike was a false positive, refund that appeal cost.
Genuine business wouldn't mind paying their $970 bill by first paying $1 and then paying $969.
I saw a sign last year for forestry service work happening locally to me. Apparently they're only going to provide safety announcements on Facebook.
Shit like that grinds my gears.
Meta's users aren't citizens, they're serfs. :(
Things.
The privileges vs obligations of serfdom would be unpleasant by our standards, but it wasn’t slavery.
There probably are (and should be) laws or regulations forbidding that, especially because "safety".
OTOH, from the PoV of the lower-level Forestry Service people who decided to do that - I'd guess they're stuck in a miserably understaffed and low-budget bit of a pretty dysfunctional government, and doing traditional safety announcements would cost them 100X the time and headaches of "just put it on Facebook".
Sadly, this is something that needs reliable, local news coverage. Doesn't much matter if that's a "for profit" newspaper magically transported from the Good Old Days of local journalism...or ongoing, ~thankless work in the trenches by a person or few with the skills to set up and run some flavor of local news web site (which could be very niche - say, forestry service stuff, parks & rec news, road closures & construction, etc.).
While I understand, what's the alternative you propose? I have seen HN threads ridiculing some govt website for being outdated or not fixing the latest vulnerability or not using the latest version etc. Or if they do allocate a bigger chunk of their budget for tech and there will be unreasonable HN threads about how one user feels he/she could build it over a weekend and question the budgets. Worst yet, I have seen numerous HN threads talking about big ad tech (which most big tech are), claiming their services are totally non essential and a waste of time, and how their life improved since they stopped using these services. This comment goes as far as to call all the users as serfs totally ignoring that many real people and their real use cases :(
I feel its used because it's free and it simply works for most people. I feel the status quo is there because of the lack of a better one. You simply cannot make everyone happy on HN, let alone all people.
Simple: Strike the word "only". It's not that hard to post to several sites and also your own. I'd like some RSS on the main site too. It's not that hard for an individual and it's even easier for an organization with thousands of employees.
I'd prefer the government to host its own data.
I'd also like any site hosting public information to be compelled to serve that information to everyone.
Facebook may not know they're being used like this, and it would be fine for them to object, but if they do want to carry government alerts they should be open to non-users without tracking or shadow profiling.
So? Public institutions are free to run "outdated" web sites and ignore random people ridiculing them on HN. "We're on a budget, stop whining" is a perfectly valid response, if a such behavior even warrants a response.
And people are free to ignore them and rely on trillion dollar corporations.
I understand your point, but the main point here isn't internet elitism. It's how you justify hosting servers for stuff no one is already visiting. "Not relying on Meta" is an equally HN take.
these organizations can barely update those sites sometimes. what hopes are there in maintaining and posting on their own blog?
The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.
But there's the usual "explicit consent" caveat, which Meta will argue they have because the user (as in: habitual consumer of harmful substances) has agreed to it in their TOS.
But then there is also a transparency requirement on automated decision making (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-15-gdpr/):
[data subject has access to] the existence of automated decision-making [and] meaningful information about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of such processing for the data subject.
This explicitly says that the user has the right to know what logic is employed by automated decision making systems.
Data rights enforcement is nascent/emerging but certainly a space to watch.
Of course, that's only in Europe and it's not a very easy law to avail of, sadly.
And then you get banned for life
Mind-boggling!
Yes, "the document", without telling which document. When calling the support, they first said that it must be indicated, no kidding. And then they said that it was not possible (despite getting screenshots).
It is sometimes a matter of having the wrong attribute set somewhere in a database and welcome to hell.
Being a bit stubborn, he still kept the message and just applied rot13 to it.
Until I read that the law in my country explictely forbids "deceiving" the police...
Still, actual terror group would do it the same way intelligence agencies call their division 'room 10' as a code for something else. As a species, we certainly are a little weird.
Yes, you're meant to do KYC checks, but also be on the look out for things that your non-sanctioned customers might be doing (post KYC checks) that involves interacting with Sanctioned entities.
Hence lots of pattern matching on names of sanctioned countries/organisations/people.
What would have happened if your acquaintance was from Middle-East or Middle-East looking? Probably the story would not have ended so happily or at least not so fast.
Anyway, it's utterly bizarre to me that banks can get a license to run their business with what seems only a marketing and it-team with virtually no recourse for the customer, it was a WTF moment for me and I hope to never get in such a distopian situation for something I really rely on, be it banking or (utility) services.
I’ve been trying to get an Instagram account deleted for the better part of a year, and even with quintuple (!) ID verification and threatening to bring an GDPR case to bear, all I get is what amounts to “computer says no”, in such a talking-in-circles kind of way I am not sure I am talking to a human.
In case that leads nowhere, you should raise a complaint with you local data protection agency, for example https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/
I’ve been trying to escalate it to a manager, because I feel once the Irish data authority gets involved it will be handed off to legal.
Because killing your own account can be easily done by posting objectionable content.
honestly spam is the easiest and safest way to get banned. easy to automate as well. doubly efficient if you scrape the site to power your bot.
that's ideal if they are ignoring GDPR protocol, right? it'll make for glacial progress, but you did say you've been at this for a year as is.
It is that somebody might contact me in 10 years, and at that point I'll have no idea about the context or how to "defend myself" because I won't know what they're talking about.
Maybe it's far fetched, I don't know, but it's a possibility. An interesting thought exercise if nothing else.
Sometimes people cannot bear to see the phenomena in real life even if it is very clear for many people. Life is complex, so there are always many opportunities for weave a narrative to explain away phenomena that you cannot bear to see.
And I should note, compared to some countries, things were relatively soft on our case.
One of the problems is if you make a specific policy available and for whatever reason you can be shown not to follow that policy (like say you’re being an intelligent human being and exercising discretion) and someone is harmed they can potentially have a cause of action. So lawyers will often bias towards making the process as opaque as possible as a defence against litigation. Someone can’t claim to have been harmed by relying on a policy that says you will take a particular action if you never commit to doing that.
It’s one of the ways a culture of civil litigation makes things worse for people by creating perverse incentives.
The conclusion people should draw from this is that companies as big as Facebook should not be allowed to exist. They can get away with this because they have too much leverage in the vendor-client power balance.
how would you solve that? A big problem is that the primary product isn't in and of itself that profitable. So it's hard to encourage competition there. And if you can't ask for money from the consumer you resort to ads.
Even a relatively tiny company can have a huge impact on your life. Say you're interested in a niche hobby, so niche there's only one company who organises meet-ups and events around that hobby. The best friend of the chairman runs the main online forum for that hobby.
If you have a falling-out with either of those people, or their friends - you're going to lose all the social aspects of your hobby, and they're probably going to slander you to everyone they know. And people will repeat the lies, assuming that the chairman of the major event of the niche hobby wouldn't lie... and on and on.
The people who seek these roles absolutely love this, though homeowners' associations are probably the more familiar example of the same power structures.
If it's that niche that no one else forms groups around it, that sounds like an issue in and of itself.
>If you have a falling-out with either of those people, or their friends - you're going to lose all the social aspects of your hobby, and they're probably going to slander you to everyone they know.
sounds like your average small town experience. People can be cruel, they don't need a company to enable that.
further, there was a principle of roman law that forbids this... then again the USA is not following those principles (civil law) but common law which means you can disregard what I say
you seem like you haven't actually read the referenced book, but only heard about it
At that point the company serves a vital public function, and its rules and actions bleed into public governance.
Which is a great argument for limiting the scope and size of companies that interface directly with the public.
maybe you should be holding them to a different set of standards
"[..] the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader."
Today when I search for 'Kafka' on Google I get 'Apache Kafka' first and I'm still surprised. I never learn;-)
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Maybe I can bing it in Hotbot.
Even if you turn off all tracking and use a private window, there are ways. In my case, the combination of a Polish IP address, Safari on Mac OS and English as the browser language is enough to profile me as "tech-savvy, probably interested in science and edutainment, not in funny cute cat videos, Polish politics and sports." The Youtube home feed is a testament to this. If I change my location to the UK (with a VPN), that feed suddenly becomes a lot more generic.
I do everything in my power that it doesn't, but your point still stands.
My somewhat creepy story about this is that at some point I got lots of COPD related search results and ads and I didn't even know what this is at the time. After a few weeks my neighbors wife died from it.
I can only assume that my neighbors and other people in the house searched for it a lot in these weeks and Google thought I must be interested in this topic too.
Your average DDG user is somewhat privacy conscious, so they probably know much more about tech tan your average Google user, and are a lot more likely to be a programmer than anybody studying literature.
If you base your algorithm purely on what results get clicks (but not on who clicks them), you essentially target your average user.
I don't remember whether DDG does anything to the scores it gets from Bing. They might, but then - taking into account how particular its users are... - the poor Franz K. would be on the third page, far behind even a Kafka library for Franz Lisp. (No, that's not a thing. A shame, I know.)
That's how you tell companies who care about their users and those don't.
(Not saying Steam never did shady stuff)
They seem very opaque on rules broken whenever you submit VN's. Which is odd given the... variety of VN steam offers. You can have stuff rated by the ESRB rejected, you can have sequels to games that are still being sold on Steam rejected. some SFW VN's are also rejected, so it's not as simple as sexual content not being allowed.
Then you go on the page and are recommended "Sex with Furry Hitler 3" and can't help but wonder if you simply got the wrong reviewer.
Right now they do this to avoid legal issues but as a citizen, I want them to be legally responsible.
No room for arguments = no time needed for a human to interact.
For a while now, it's become pretty common knowledge that the big tech companies do not want anything involving people, because people don't scale. This is also why they invest so much in "AI" tooling, so there's even less people needed.
Oh unless I provide my phone number. Then they’ll unban me and I can continue presumably breaking the terms of service.
- Copy of unspecified ID or driver's license
- High resolution copy of national ID, front and back
- Copy of birth certificate
- 3D video of face
That sounds like an accessibility issue, if they're American it could be an ADA violation.
So I created a new account, but I assume found out that despite posting pretty benign comments they were uncontroversial, that account got shadow banned. I'm not sure what mechanism i triggered.
So now I created another new account which seems to be functional for the moment. I think the lesson I should be taking away from this is that almost all of Reddit is absolute garbage, and I should only be going there for niche hobbies and professional support forums. Let the rest of that God forsaken site burn.
Anyway, I thought this was relevant because of the fact they didn't inform me of my sin before banning me.
They want sheep. Only sheep.
1. With zero notification or reason, you are shadow-banned, all your posts/comments are hidden.
2. You use the "Appeals" page, and get a canned apology that it was a mistake with a spam-filter, and a message claiming your account has been restored.
3. Contrary to the message, nothing is actually restored, and instead the Appeals page stops working because it falsely claims your account is already in good-standing!
4. All your messages through unofficial channels (modmail) are also blocked/filtered-to-uselessness so that you can't reach out to anybody.
5. If you load up another established account, like a job-search throwaway from 5 years ago... the exact shame shitty sequence of events kills it too.
So your whole online identity is basically shoved into the 1984 memory hole.
Well that's your problem right there. That type of spam boosts a number of activity and usage KPIs and increases engagement.
Reddit has even been caught using bots to artificially build out new subreddits by Google translating and reposting existing content from other subreddits to give the illusion of popularity in order to bootstrap new subs.
Why would they want to cut down on any of that when it would affect their bottom line?
yeah that was one of the last straws for me. When you get banned instead of the spam or harassment you report, you know the site no longer cares about real people. I don't bother browsing with an account anymore. just quick checks on some niche communities I have yet to replace.
Sucks I can't hide posts, but I can still ignore annoying users or subs with RES. So I get most of the benefit.
How much quicker would this be resolved if the first AI said, "your account has been blocked because we detected an advert related to live animals" to which you could appeal with your one sentence reason, "these are not animals, they are programming languages with the same names as animals" which would take a very cursory check and continue to bring in advertising revenue.
I think like another poster it is probably true that if you were spending a lot, you would have been given more time to argue your case. For someone who brings in $10 a month, it's not worth their time.