Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#111

Post by im3w1l » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 6:13 PM UTC

pmlnr wrote: post #70

im3w1l wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you export contacts? Like many people will not list alternate methods of contact?

Ask for their email, then pen and paper. Or keyboard and a local, maybe synchronized contacts list. No, not sarcasm, no, not joking. I had decades old email addresses of friends I pinged when the lockdown started, and the vast majority of them got to the intended person. EDIT: yes, one by one. If they matter to you, they should worth the time.

I could do that personally, but I don't think telling other people to do it would very effective.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#112

Post by fakedang » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

root_axis wrote: post #78

anp wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They exist because they’re popular and because the currently successful ones acquired or strangled all of their smaller meaningful competitors using investment capital and money from first mover advantages.

Can you give some examples?

Haha, are you serious? Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat... Instagram's Systrom explicitly said that he sold because otherwise Facebook would snuff him away.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#113

Post by snarkypixel » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 6:15 PM UTC

I'm so tired of seeing these posts. Facebook can do whatever it wants with your account and the data you've giving them. Facebook isn't some "free speech" place or a decentralized protocol.. It's a for-profit business optimized to make, guess what, profits.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#114

Post by jancsika » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 6:15 PM UTC

rossdavidh wrote: post #20

I think FB has a fundamental issue here, which is that: 1) they don't feel they can NOT police content 2) they are wayyyyy too big to police content manually 3) any AI they train to police content, is not going to be able to state clearly why a given post/account was banned, and anyway... 4) if you state objective, clear rules that are automated, it will be pretty easy to game them (e.g. using euphemisms or code word…

> 1) they don't feel they can NOT police content

True.

But we should be explicit here-- FB isn't some neat, nerdy social graph software that just happened to get really popular, like git for regular people or something. They have a business model to shake up their social graph to maximize engagement, and the implementation achieves this by keeping everyone maximally mad as hell at each other. It spreads conspiracy theories efficiently. It and its users are easily exploited, and they continue to be exploited by any nation-state, nefarious actors, or even just some dude looking to make a buck spreading fake news. That all feeds into the same destructive behaviors for the users as the system desperately tries to keep them engaging more and more. Facebook's own software and UI exacerbates these problems.

With that starting point in mind, I agree with your 1, 2, 3, and 4 above. But this is less like email having to deal with new sets of problems as it scaled to the entire world. It's more like a drug cartel trying to figure out the maximum amount of their fundamentally destructive product they can sell before the government finally decides to comes in and break up their enterprise.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#115

Post by fiddlerwoaroof » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

root_axis wrote: post #82

fastball wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastadon is federated, so you can be banned from someone else's instance but you can always start your own instance, or join one where you're not banned.

Right, just like how you can start your own website if you get banned from someone else's, it's servers all the way down. The people complaining about being banned don't care that they can create their own instance, they care about losing access to the popular instance.

The advantage of mastodon is that banning is not monolithic: so, if I have instances A, B, C, D: B can decide (through whatever process it uses for such things) they don’t like A’s content and ban it without affecting users on C and D. But, the problem it really solves is moderation: if I start an instance with 10 friends, moderation of posts on the instance is almost a non-issue that can be handled by a couple admins in their spare time. Handling off-instance posts is more difficult, but you can either maintain a ban list to block a list of bad instances or you can adopt a default deny policy and only federate with instances that have content your local community wants to see. Either way, the Mastodon model seems better because it allows policy to be specified at the “local” level rather than requiring a uniform policy across the network.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#116

Post by 908087 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 6:18 PM UTC

stickfigure wrote: post #107

inglor_cz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2) they are wayyyyy too big to police content manually To be more exact: they do not want to spend money on competent policing. They probably have capability to employ ten times as many human moderators as they do now, thus reducing the blatant error rate (at least in the case of highly influential pages and people), but that would eat into their profits.

I don't want strangers looking at the content I post to my friends. Full stop.

I agree with you, which is why I don't use platforms like Facebook at all.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#117

Post by jbay808 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 6:18 PM UTC

stickfigure wrote: post #107

inglor_cz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2) they are wayyyyy too big to police content manually To be more exact: they do not want to spend money on competent policing. They probably have capability to employ ten times as many human moderators as they do now, thus reducing the blatant error rate (at least in the case of highly influential pages and people), but that would eat into their profits.

I don't want strangers looking at the content I post to my friends. Full stop.

Snowden made it pretty clear that they already are.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#118

Post by Terretta » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 6:18 PM UTC

jFriedensreich wrote: post #16

I think a good first compromise for policy would be to require all platforms to have a three strike system with required explanations and obligatory links to the concrete content in question. The current situation is not acceptable for users.

Isn’t it though? Almost all do accept it, and if you raise it with them, they ask you why you’re bothering.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#119

Post by fiddlerwoaroof » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 6:19 PM UTC

walleeee wrote: post #69

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, perhaps, these problems are reasons why large, centralized social networks shouldn’t be allowed to exist.

Just don't use them. And try to convince people you know not to. A ban isn't even necessary if enough people decide a platform works against their interests and cease to pay attention to it.

This argument is basically “I don’t need privacy because I have nothing to hide”

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#120

Post by ng12 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 6:19 PM UTC

snarkypixel wrote: post #113

I'm so tired of seeing these posts. Facebook can do whatever it wants with your account and the data you've giving them. Facebook isn't some "free speech" place or a decentralized protocol.. It's a for-profit business optimized to make, guess what, profits.

All of that is true. The question is: is that bad for society? There's increasing evidence that it is.