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Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

lincoln.metacannon.net

231–240 of 246 posts

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you propose instead? And before you answer, consider that many systems only let you sign in with Facebook or Google.

Can you name some of them? All apps/services I've used always had some way of register account with email. Granted, this option is sometimes "de-prioritized" (displayed less prominently).

Advent of Code only permits GitHub, Google, Twitter and Reddit, despite using OAuth.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#232

Something particularly concerning about this incident is buried further down in the article. Under the heading "Why Facebook Doesn't Ban Everyone", Lincoln explains how social network theory can identify individuals in networks that are influential. This isn't an exaggeration - basic graph heuristics (such as comparing in/out degree of an individual relative to other parts of the social graph) can easily identify suc…

Your concern seems to ignore that humans are not static agents.

They’ll route around black holes.

Conversation will not simply stop. It will move to a different platform or, should the network of platforms using HTTP look black holes, where useful into goes in but little useful info comes out, will pivot to a new protocol.

The really important infrastructure is the hardware and basic protocols.

There’s no reason see the network “inside Twitter” as important. Highly visible, but it’s just one groups choice of what to store in a database.

Alternatives can be copy-pasted together in hours by competent groups.

Tech is so up it’s own ass these days because it’s measuring inside a few Petri dishes and ignoring the Internet as a concept in and of itself.

The internet is not FAANG and Silicon Valley. It’s the hardware everywhere and fundamental protocols.

So, yes, the math is right. But the math applies at various scales. For as visible as Twitter and the rest are, they’re not in and of themselves a distributed global network of hardware and routing protocols. They’re black holes in a bigger universe.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m banned from Twitter without explanation. I made an account, followed 3-4 tech celebrities like Paul graham, and posted a single tweet similar to “I finally got pressured into making a dumb Twitter account...” The account got banned for community violations within an hour and my support email said that my requests for support would not be responded to. Years later, I’m working on a video game and I’m worried this…

Changing your IP address should resolve your concerns?

Of course you can get around their "security" system, but you should ask yourself whether it is a game worth playing especially since the rules of the game can change overnight. Getting tied to a platform is a dangerous bet.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#234

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.

I'm already seeing businesses start to switch to Signal.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#235

I stopped using Facebook and Messenger out of similar fears. If my Facebook account were disabled, I'd be unable to use my Quest VR headset and lose access to all my Oculus Store purchases. Now I only express views critical of Facebook on Twitter, Signal, and in person.

Doesn't that leave a bad taste in your mouth? How many other products do you fear will stop working if you say something critical of the manufacturer?

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other good suggestions here, but here’s another: you tripped the New Bot Account detector. As your account ages there will be more information about whether you are real or not. Stopping the influx of bots before they do damage is important. Therefore it’s quite likely that Twitter ban accounts early if they look like bots based on not much info (and potentially if they look low value). You followed a few people who…

That is one explanation, but the explanation I tend to believe is another: Twitter quickly bans new accounts to force you to "prove your identity" by adding a phone number.

It is a very good way to confirm that you're in fact a person though.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking about lead in the gasoline and you're talking about more speech. I don't disagree with your point but it isn't relevant to mine.

Totally fair

I'll take that at face value.

I'll only add that it's going to be difficult as hell to stay on topic as FAANG pushes back against attempts to deal with their monopoly practices. Uber and Lyft effortlessly destroyed the original meaning of "ride-sharing" for their own interests. Expect Google, Facebook, and Twitter to put all their weight behind narrowing the meaning of free speech to simply mean ensuring everybody has equal access to be manipulated by their commercial blackboxes.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#238
post #90

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.

Assuming a user:moderator ratio of 10,000:1, they would need to hire 200,000 moderators to cover their 2 billion users. Then at that scale, they’d need to hire thousands of meta-moderators and meta-meta-moderators too.

I think it's far worse than even this. Facebook reportedly receives over 50000 posts per second on average. With 200000 moderators, each one would have to read a post every 4 seconds every hour of every day. I would place the number of human moderators at least an order of magnitude higher.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this comment. The article and parent comments probably were doing some scam, either by the people themselves or if they were hacked. Lots of people criticize Facebook all the time and have no issues.

You just accused me of being a scammer for creating a Twitter account and making a single tweet and getting banned the same day. What is wrong with you?

Many other people, including me, have criticized Facebook on Facebook and other places without being banned. You make a claim, without evidence, that you were banned for publishing criticism. Are you absolutely certain your account was not compromised in another way? How do any of us know that you were not violating their ToS in another way?

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m banned from Twitter without explanation. I made an account, followed 3-4 tech celebrities like Paul graham, and posted a single tweet similar to “I finally got pressured into making a dumb Twitter account...” The account got banned for community violations within an hour and my support email said that my requests for support would not be responded to. Years later, I’m working on a video game and I’m worried this…

Other good suggestions here, but here’s another: you tripped the New Bot Account detector. As your account ages there will be more information about whether you are real or not. Stopping the influx of bots before they do damage is important. Therefore it’s quite likely that Twitter ban accounts early if they look like bots based on not much info (and potentially if they look low value). You followed a few people who…

You’ll probably find that these kind of systems don’t have just a single ‘New Bot Account’ detector, but a tangle of multiple subsystems that automatically temp-lock accounts based on various heuristics written by different people at different times.

A new account might incorrectly trigger an account lock due to signals for proxy detection, another lock for a specific 2017 bot wave with Romanian IP addresses and a third generic fake account lock. That, in turn, triggers a recidivism threshold that sets off a permanent disable.

Working ‘at scale’ means that developers who unravel old code to fix a use-blocking problem for 5000 users can be considered astronomically less productive than someone who fixes a minor problem for 100,000+.

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