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Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

lincoln.metacannon.net

131–140 of 246 posts

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a short-sighted statement. On a personal level, I completely agree with you. Facebook is a giant waste of time for the typical user and a big +1 for your life if you ditch it. For many business, however, it's critical. My local Snap-on Tools dealer uses it to announce where his truck will be each day and what tools and equipment he's running on special. He hates Facebook but told me the other day that he condu…

A lot of businesses in the developing world just use messaging apps for effectively the same purpose. You don't need FB.

And the messaging app they often use belongs to FB.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#133
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a short-sighted statement. On a personal level, I completely agree with you. Facebook is a giant waste of time for the typical user and a big +1 for your life if you ditch it. For many business, however, it's critical. My local Snap-on Tools dealer uses it to announce where his truck will be each day and what tools and equipment he's running on special. He hates Facebook but told me the other day that he condu…

I run a business and don’t use Facebook. It’s not necessary.

It depends on your location and market.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#134
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems overly glib. Facebook’s monopoly status means it’s necessary for many people. As per the post, if this person were a small business owner, or simply not well-connected elsewhere, this could be both financially and personally devastating. As it is, he’s only protected because he has other access to business and personal pages. One company shouldn’t have this sort of arbitrary power over people’s lives.

I haven't used anything Facebook-owned for years and haven't noticed any difference in my life. Never used WhatsApp, never used Instagram, and deleted my Facebook account years ago.

This is highly dependent on your location and social circle. For example in many countries, not having Whatsapp is like not having SMS/iMessage in the US.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#135

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.

Because it's legal doesn't mean you can't make noise about it.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#136

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.

I think you have neglected to consider the power Facebook has over people's lives - 2/7 of the world's population is on it. All of your family and friends are on there, as well as social organizations, your employer, your pictures, and your messages. The network effect generated by this is irresistibly strong and difficult to run from. Now, you were saying that a company that has such a huge hand in the lives of everyone around you doesn't have to respect its users' accounts and data? That just sounds tone-deaf and irresponsible to me, and has over and over been shown to have damaging consequences for users' lives and endeavors.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of businesses in the developing world just use messaging apps for effectively the same purpose. You don't need FB.

And the messaging app they often use belongs to FB.

And just recently made a change to pipe all that data back into Facebook haha

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#138
Whats the alternative to Facebook? I find it weird that they still don't have any real competitors. Sure other platforms have similar features, but nothing with the entire combination (groups, events, messaging, marketplace) that makes facebook so lethal. I think the closest thing might have been Google+, but we all know how that went.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Facebook never acquired Snapchat so I'm not sure what you're talking about there. Instagram and WhatsApp have continued to thrive since their acquisition, so from a user perspective nothing really changed, it's not like you need a FB account to use insta or whatsapp.

GP: > 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. Facebook literally copied Snapchat features into Instagram rightaway - Systrom even openly admitted it. That fits the bill of "strangled". Snapchat is in stagnation now, because everything it has is there on Insta.

Instagram and WhatsApp thrived only because Facebook acquired them, else both companies new they would be smothered to death. That pretty much fits the bill of "acquired... Using investment capital and money from first mover advantages".

They don't need you to use your FB account because they cross share data anyways. It's not like it's a painstaking operation to link different accounts, once you have all sorts of device data (which Facebook had, even on Apple devices up until recently).

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#140

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 th…

Censoring content rather than refuting its claims is counterproductive. If skeptics are not able to be argumentatively refute a claim, they will not succeed in changing minds. The current strategy of trying to silence view points will eventually fail miserably.

The issue is that when a platform outsources its censorship (“moderation”) to a third party that it still controls, rather than a third party that is actually perceived to be neutral by most people, then you create distrust which further fuels conspiracy theories. Also a conspiracy theory may actually be true. Jeffrey Epstein was not discussed during the 2016 election aside from a few fringe articles. It was too toxic for mainstream to touch. And everyone in Hollywood knew about Harvey Weinstein and even joked about it. These topics were covered up only for so long. Today there are lots of insane and farfetched theories being floated. But the theories being censored today that are indeed based in reality, will eventually become common knowledge and the censors will be implicated in the coverup thereby harming their trust.

Discussion, debate, argument, evidence, analysis lead us towards truth. Mute only appears to work and can be a useful political tool for only so long.

Today our public forum is virtual, but still a public forum. Trump wasn’t allowed to block certain followers because of their right to be in the forum and hear from their president.

So the question is whether governments will acknowledge this fact and limit the power of our big tech group communication platforms and enforce transparency and non-biased appeals process. Or will they cede total control of our public forums to Big Tech out of short term political convenience.

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