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Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

simonbackx.com

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Re: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

#81

Post by piaste »

indymike wrote: post #14
paintman252 wrote: post #2

This is why massive companies like Meta and Alphabet needs to be nationalised. They simply have too much power over lives of billions. This article is just another reminder of this. At scale that Meta operates, this algorithmically decided domain blockings mean nothing to them, but everything to hundred's of non-profits. There need to be legally mandated protections so things like this never happen again.

> This is why massive companies like Meta and Alphabet needs to be nationalised. No. Giving this additional power to the government will not have the outcome you want. When something becomes too powerful, the solution is not to further concentrate that power into less accountable hands.

> less accountable

Governments are always more accountable than private companies, because the only way an ordinary citizen can force a private entity to cease its abuse is... through the government. (No, "voting with your wallet" isn't a thing, especially when the abuse is profitable.)

Re: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

#82

Post by DangitBobby »

indymike wrote: post #53
psychoslave wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nationalization is not necessary more concentration and less many accountable hands. Well, it depends on the governance obviously. If you talk some autocratic regime, where the king proclaimed "I am the state", that fits your description for sure. On the other hand, if you are looking at a direct democracy regime, you could hardly make the power more pervasive, and every citizen has to carry its part of accountabilit…

> Well, it depends on the governance obviously. Three reasons why nationalization is a bad idea: * Power disparity. As it is, Facebook is destroying people and business without any accountability. Now we hand that to the state who: * Has all the incentive to destroy anything that competes, and the government has the ultimate way to do it: just outlaw the competition. If you think the product is bad today, imagine how…

> Has all the incentive to make people use it. So, it becomes oppressive and horrible and the government decides, hey, let's make everyone use this thing for essential services like payments and democracy!

Any examples of this? The USPS doesn't seem to have much power and other shipping companiea do alright.

Re: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

#83

Post by bombcar »

simonbackx wrote: post #34
midislack wrote: post #23

First thing I always wonder with these, what did your customer(s) do wrong?

Good question! I would also like to know the answer. I've scanned through our sites and couldn't find any malicious content... My guess is that the block was automated, and might have been caused by a fake spam report. There can be some competition between non-profits (e.g. two scouting groups in the same local area). Maybe they started to report each other as a joke.

A large percentage of users use the "report spam" button as an unsubscribe/delete button in their email client.

Re: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

#84

Post by jrochkind1 »

rmah wrote: post #71
jrochkind1 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> into less accountable hands. While I'm not totally behind "nationalize all the things", do you really think the government is less accountable than Meta? (or Alphabet etc?) I guess that raises the question "accountable to whom", but in general, for all it's problems with accountability (and there are many), and acknolwedging that different US governments can stack up differently (say local vs federal) -- I'd still…

Why would you risk everything to start a company only to be forced to give up most of it to other people? Why would others invest (i.e. buy stock) in your company only to give up control to non-owners?

That's a different question than talking about "less accountable hands" but yes that would have to be figured out in any hypothetical utopian system.

The employees work for a paycheck of course, but I suppose there needs to be sufficient incentive to start a company. It probably doesn't need to be multi-billion-dollar payout possible to incentivize though. And talking about an already existing company like facebook, I think founders and early investors have already received quite enough reward to incentivize, being able to make as much money as they've made off meta up to this point is plenty of incentive to start a company.

(There are also other incentives than money to start a company).

Anyway, I was mostly responding to the suggestion that the government is "less accountable hands" than Meta -- I really don't think so, if we're talking about accountability to society at large. I think it's actually a problem that an entity with so much power over society isn't accountable to it; the first step is admitting we have a problem.

Re: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

#85

Post by stall84 »

paintman252 wrote: post #2

This is why massive companies like Meta and Alphabet needs to be nationalised. They simply have too much power over lives of billions. This article is just another reminder of this. At scale that Meta operates, this algorithmically decided domain blockings mean nothing to them, but everything to hundred's of non-profits. There need to be legally mandated protections so things like this never happen again.

I'd be in favor of trust-busting them into smaller entities before nationalization .. While nationalization might work for smaller western European countries, it isn't going to work in a political machine the size of the united states

Re: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

#86

Post by nicgrev103 »

Similar experience

I used to run a graduation photography company, we did professional graduation photos half the price of the 'officail' providers (who pay a huge commission to the university, but don't get me started on that).

We promoted our service with facebook events and advertised said events. One year without warning or explination they Facebook just deleted all our events (we would travel from one uni to another over the summer). I frantically tried to get a response from facebook. I never got one.

I sued in small claims court and they settled the case (not before being very threatening through high paid lawyers and trying to dodge the case altogether) they never did explain what had happend or why.

Ultimately it's partly the reason I shut the company down, facebook was our channel, without certainty we could host events and promote them it made no business sense to invest in the company.

Re: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

#87

Post by laundermaf »

paintman252 wrote: post #2

This is why massive companies like Meta and Alphabet needs to be nationalised. They simply have too much power over lives of billions. This article is just another reminder of this. At scale that Meta operates, this algorithmically decided domain blockings mean nothing to them, but everything to hundred's of non-profits. There need to be legally mandated protections so things like this never happen again.

You’re placing way too much trust in the government, the same agency held hostage by a private company that forbid them to automatically calculate the taxes owed by its citizens.

Plus why what the government do with a social network? They’d still need to moderate it — at atrocious prices at that.

Re: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

#88

Post by snowwrestler »

jabart wrote: post #61
snowwrestler wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you automate all this on behalf of your clients. The customer is not registering the domain and managing DNS, you are. The best reason not to do full domains is the risk of bad actors re-registering domains you release, as schroeding points out in another reply.

Now the customer has two domains and we have been training users to look for signs of phishing attempts using look alike domains AND ask them to put in their CC to buy things. Hard pass.

The customer would already have had two domains because the subdomain was off the SaaS domain, not the client domain.

Client.SaaSdomain.tld

not

Shop.clientdomain.tld

If you’re setting up your service as a subdomain off the client domain, you won’t face the risk that one customer will get your entire service domain blocked (since it’s the customers domain).

Re: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

#89

Post by wpietri »

NKosmatos wrote: post #72

Another day and again another complaint about lack of proper (human) support from a big company. When are we all going to realize that Facebook, Apple, Google and all the big names use automated moderating and they don't want to allocate resources for proper moderation? They're not going to put in place a proper resolution mechanism and they don't care about the average user that got his/her email banned, page delete…

It's honestly not clear to me that many of these companies can afford proper moderation. Twitter's revenue is about $1.20 per user per month. Facebook's is about twice that. Proper moderation is expensive, with each incident requiring significant time from one or more smart people with native fluency and cultural understanding plus deep familiarity with the platform rules and all the tricks bad actors will try to play to get moderators to do the wrong thing.

Re: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

#90

Post by UnpossibleJim »

CharlesW wrote: post #77
NKosmatos wrote: post #72

Another day and again another complaint about lack of proper (human) support from a big company. When are we all going to realize that Facebook, Apple, Google and all the big names use automated moderating and they don't want to allocate resources for proper moderation? They're not going to put in place a proper resolution mechanism and they don't care about the average user that got his/her email banned, page delete…

Apple is nothing like Facebook and Google in this respect. One of the reasons I gladly pay a premium for Apple products is that I can talk with a human, over the phone or at an Apple Store.

Doing business as a software developer through the Apple store is a different beast. Putting in tickets to see why your software failed can be a nightmare if it isn't a glaring mistake. They may treat their customers well, but they don't always treat their devs with the same respect.

EDIT: I will note, it has been a few years since I've submitted to the app store, so I hope things have changed.

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