Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Instagram Threatened Removal of Verified Status for Posting Snapchat Content

beebom.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 151 posts

Re: Instagram Threatened Removal of Verified Status for Posting Snapchat Content

#131

Post by elmo2you »

elmo2you wrote: post #125
JoshTriplett wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of unstated meaning wrapped up in "arbitrarily" there. You can obviously treat customers differently based on whether they pay or not, and you can obviously have terms that say what you can and can't post on the platform (and apply moderation accordingly). Otherwise you couldn't maintain any kind of forum or communication platform. Saying you can't post links to other services may be distasteful, but sh…

As I said: "treat them differently for things they do that are neither an explicit breach of contract, nor illegal behaviour" In other words: these rules need to be explicitly stated in whatever contract consumer and provider agreed on. These rules also need to be universally enforced. Rules that are (intentionally or not) written in such a way that they lend themselves for arbitrary application (that is, not equally…

More to the point: if you provide a service (or product) to the general public, you have to accept that people will user it as they see fit.

If you want to limit the ways your service (or product) can be used, you can do so by explicitly arranging these limitations through a contract. Things that are already (otherwise) illegal do not have to be included in this arrangement (hopefully for obvious reasons).

Whatever is not explicitly forbidden by either law or contract, are not valid grounds for treating consumers differently.

Sadly, and mostly for historical and cultural reasons (and law enforcers not paying attention for a long time), it is often assumed that these rules do not apply to big service providers (and software producers alike). However, I have never found any legal basis for why such companies should be treated any different than any other one.

Re: Instagram Threatened Removal of Verified Status for Posting Snapchat Content

#132

Post by greggyb »

danShumway wrote: post #59

> Links asking someone to add you on another service aren’t supported on Instagram That's some weasel-wording right there. "Not supported" makes it sound like this is a feature they'd need to code that they haven't gotten around to yet. It's not -- they needed to take the time to explicitly block something that would otherwise work by default. Phrasing it as "Links asking someone to add you on another service are not…

While I agree with the technical criticism you level, I think the more important thing is whether the truth of the matter is:

1. "Links asking someone to add you on another service are not allowed on Instagram."

or

2. "Links asking someone to add you on a service not owned by Facebook are not allowed on Instagram."

"Support" vs "allowed" seems to me to be a distraction from the universality of that policy.

Re: Instagram Threatened Removal of Verified Status for Posting Snapchat Content

#133

Post by cwkoss »

input_sh wrote: post #129
cwkoss wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This elevation of the credibility of snopes and politifact would make it more damaging when they choose to editorialize. People who share political ideologies with these sites tend to overestimate their accuracy and underestimate their displayed bias.

Or, you know, the truth leans heavily on one side, considering that there's not a single one even remotely relevant fact checking organization on the other one.

I assure you, if you believe this, you're being frequently misled.

Don't get me wrong, I think these sources are more accurate than many journalistic institutions, but they are not infallible or completely unbiased.

Re: Instagram Threatened Removal of Verified Status for Posting Snapchat Content

#134

Post by HiroshiSan »

ritchje wrote: post #114
HiroshiSan wrote: post #73

This somewhat related but Instagram has started doing some shady shit, for starters if you browse without an account they now cover the page with a sign up splash. The one that really grinds my gears is that I made an Instagram to follow some artists I really enjoyed browsing, and for whatever reason their algorithm flagged me, and so they deactivated my account. In order to reactivate my account they requested a pic…

Was it a new account? If so, the same thing happened to me; I created an account on Sunday to follow some photographers and my account immediately got disabled - before I could even login for the first time!

It was! Same day I made the account, all I did was follow people, never posted myself.

Re: Instagram Threatened Removal of Verified Status for Posting Snapchat Content

#135

Post by fulvous »

dwild wrote: post #71
sschueller wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if your ID has been "verified", why would you all of a sudden no longer be verified unless the verification was fraudulent? To verify yourself on instagram etc. you need to submit identification etc. . Once you have done that there should be no reason to take that away from you if valid. You are still you unless maybe you get married and your name changes which could require a re-verification and if the policy wa…

> But if your ID has been "verified", why would you all of a sudden no longer be verified unless the verification was fraudulent? From what I understands, the previous verification was merely reaching 100k, nothing more. I wouldn't call that fraudulent, but considering many people may expect it to means that their identity was actually verified by Youtube (and not that they simply reached a milestone in subscription)…

On YouTube can you set your name to anything, including the name of another channel. This leads to accounts with the same name and profile picture as the actual channel commenting on any popular video. These accounts typically have no subscribers as they are not channels of actual creators. Having 100K subscribers proves you are an actual channel with fans who will want to know if a comment posted under that name is the actual content creator.

Re: Instagram Threatened Removal of Verified Status for Posting Snapchat Content

#136

Post by elmo2you »

zeckalpha wrote: post #124
elmo2you wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it is forbidden by law to arbitrarily discriminate consumers" (in many countries with a sane legal system) It is a common and stubborn misconception that laws like these somehow do not apply to big (international) tech companies. It is more the product of cultural acceptance of a reality that has existed for long time. Maybe you are right about this, within the USA. But than that would say more about the legal reali…

Are instagram users consumers or consumed? Isn’t the consumer the ad purchaser?

Instragram offers their services to the general public, which makes the users of these services consumers. That is, if these are not businesses.

That Instagram uses the information gathered from providing these services for different services provided to another type of client (businesses, since consumers are officially not allowed to do business), does not change that.

But it could mean that Intragram is breaking laws that protect consumers (or citizens in general) from abusive practises. For example invasion of privacy (in particular surveillance), which is in many countries a privilege/monopoly limited to governments (just as use of violence).

When social media companies declared that privacy is dead, they essentially said that they do not acknowledge this monopoly/privilege of governments. This has been reality for some time, which is why many people got used to it and have accepted it as normal. However, just as criminals can claim that laws do not apply to them, the claims of social media companies might not have any legal basis. Maybe they have in the USA (I really do not know), but they sure appear to not have it in other parts of the world.

Re: Instagram Threatened Removal of Verified Status for Posting Snapchat Content

#137

Post by fulvous »

apostacy wrote: post #74
mc32 wrote: post #7

This “verified” nonsense is silly. Twitter knew who Assange was but refused to “verify” him. They should change what they call verified to another label like “goodie two-shoes” instead. As it is is a complete misnomer. It’s basically used to get users to behave a certain way and if they don’t conform they don’t get verified or if they are verified it gets revoked.

All this nonsense started with online agitators from Breitbart. Instead of having the gumption to just ban people like @nero, they instead unverified him for some reason. Probably because he was making money for them.

Ban him for what?

Re: Instagram Threatened Removal of Verified Status for Posting Snapchat Content

#138

Post by sailfast »

vageli wrote: post #89
sailfast wrote: post #23

Removing links to other platforms is anti-competitive full stop. Threatening de-verification due to links is even worse. This is the behavior of monopolists. The FTC and existing anti-trust organizations would do well to return to their jobs and take a look at these practices broadly across the tech industry.

> Removing links to other platforms is anti-competitive full stop. Threatening de-verification due to links is even worse. > This is the behavior of monopolists. The FTC and existing anti-trust organizations would do well to return to their jobs and take a look at these practices broadly across the tech industry. While I am inclined to agree with you, is it anti-competitive to remove phone numbers, etc from apps like…

I think there is a distinction to be made between removing a direct contact to a person using your platform, and removing a link to another competing platform to different content. (If you're linking to the same listing on another platform that's probably something a user agreement would have to deal with)

For example, if you said "check out our other listing on VRBO" in your AirBnB profile, but they were not the same listing - and AirBnB scrubbed your link, I would argue that would be anti-competitive behavior for a large player in the marketplace to remove the link. Why did they edit your content? Was it Spam? Was it against the rules? The only reason to remove it was to remove the competition from the other platform.

I acknowledge that the user acquisition pipeline / discovery chain for sales / rentals is very valuable and these platforms want to maintain the chain so they make their money. That said - you can't have your cake and eat it, and becoming a large player and exhibiting these behaviors has historically been a problem.

I also acknowledge that real moderation of these types of links is a problem. The "easy" answer that happens to benefit the company is removal of all of those links, but that reasoning seems flimsy.

If you're a major player in a market space with huge network effects and you remove links that your users have posted (in-line with your user agreement on your website), that's anti-competitive behavior that has typically not been looked well upon in the United States.

Re: Instagram Threatened Removal of Verified Status for Posting Snapchat Content

#139

Post by sailfast »

privateSFacct wrote: post #94
sailfast wrote: post #23

Removing links to other platforms is anti-competitive full stop. Threatening de-verification due to links is even worse. This is the behavior of monopolists. The FTC and existing anti-trust organizations would do well to return to their jobs and take a look at these practices broadly across the tech industry.

I think most of the scam / paid date / etc folks ask you to add them on other platforms. I guess this will now be permitted "full stop"?

They hid links, hash tags, and other content referencing SnapChat. I didn't read anything in the article related to reducing scams. I'm also not sure that it would be credible to happen to block Snapchat just for scams. Are they blocking all links, or just to their social media competitors, for example. But this is a good point. Moderation is damned near impossible here, but it's suspicious to apply this to your competitors content including hash tags and verified profiles.

Re: Instagram Threatened Removal of Verified Status for Posting Snapchat Content

#140

Post by Faark »

cwkoss wrote: post #116
cameronbrown wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what worries me about verified. It's just a form of nepotism at the end of the day and they certainly prefer certain niches (Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the media industry, etc..) over others.

Also seems verified is fairly correlated with certain political ideologies - kind of feels like twitter is trying to direct conversation without taking responsibility for bias.

That sounds like the usual persecution complex of the anti establishment/alt right. If that where the case, Twitter would be very shitty at such job, since countless of them are verified. Notably including alex jones up to his ban.
Post reply on HN