Was this within the last couple years? How much you wanna bet the appeal is handled by an AI.

Its probably just a variant on a placebo button.

Where if you have the temerity to complain, you’re immediately labelled a rebellious non-conformer and banned forever.

I 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.

Are you implying that being banned from Facebook is a bad thing?

I'm pretty sure they are implying that it might be a bad policy to not ban nazis.

even if you would think people should be happy about being banned, they always get annoyed

https://medium.com/luminasticity/facebook-deleted-my-account...

Depends on the reason. I'm saying that banning someone for calling out a Nazi and not banning the Nazi is a bad thing.

It's not intentional malice, it's just 2025 - an age where calling someone a fascist or a racist is worse than being one.

If that doesn't make a lick of sense to you - it's simple. The latter is an offense against a nebulous, undefined outgroup of people, while the former offends a particular person.

It's the same reason why someone can steal a dollar from a million people, but why you'd go to jail for punching the thief in the face.

This was back around 2019 or so, but you're not wrong at all. Back then Zuckerburg et al at least pretended to be against hate speech. It's so much worse now.

"Everyone I disagree with is a nazi"

Did you miss the part of my 2 sentence comment where they openly praised Hitler? That makes someone a Nazi.

I think they were aiming to provide a live demonstration of my postulate.

>The person openly praising Hitler did not get banned at all.

Content moderation at Meta is a joke now. I reported an account multiple times for hate speech. The account's photos were comprised entirely of racist caricatures of black people. Like absolutely vile, hateful shit.

Each time, I received a notification along the lines of: [paraphrasing] "We found that the account in question did not violate our community standards. Therefore, we did not take any action. Thanks for the report."

Yeah, OK. Gross.

I don't think I've ever gotten a response from a corporation other than "this totally obvious Nazi adjacent content seems fine to me".

Why would they restrict speech?

Your policies help to enable one genocide in Myanmar and suddenly people expect you to have standards.

"Shoot the messenger!"

Meh, what do you expect from a company that immediately pivoted to “free speech” and explicitly called out that it’s okay on their platform to call for firing gay teachers for being gay.

Because to do otherwise would just be too much of an assault on free speech apparently.

In other news the president signed an executive order that acknowledges flag burning is protected speech even as it promises to find a reason to prosecute people for it. Also trying to force the Smithsonian to stop talking about slavery,

I’ve experienced something similar in attempting to report very explicit and outrageously racist posts and comments. Zero action on blatant neo-Nazism (including specific threats of violence), and several lost appeals. However, far more benign posts and comments that don’t really violate the ToS are often flagged. This is quite prevalent on Instagram especially, which is quite worrying as it’s acting as a radicalisation tunnel for large numbers of impressionable young people. It’s almost as if the algorithm attempts to throw you into a far-right rabbithole because they know it boosts engagement.

That's exactly what happens. The algo does not judge how hurtful a rabbithole may be - it optimizes for engagement with some moderation sprinkled on top. I've tried to make my facebook feed palatable for a couple months and eventually passed up on trying. I'd rather IM my family about cat photos than engage with their fringe political views. Same goes for colleagues on LinkedIn.

Tentacrul did a good video on it and more across the years https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MPyJBJTHyO0&pp=ygUWZmFjZWJvb2s...

Had this happen to me on Reddit.

After I reported a post, nothing happened, then I messaged the mods, and they agreed with me that the post should be taken down and they did.

A day after it was taken down, I got a warning message from Reddit that my report has been rejected, and I should stop falsely reporting content, or else.

FWIW, I've been cut off twice, appealed twice, been reprieved twice.

Some heckler I guess.