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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

#121

Post by tarranoth »

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.

Did you consider the fact that your domain name itself could have been the cause by itself? It is not extremely far fetched that stamhoofd could somehow find its way in being found offensive by some automated tool (or a person who takes these things very seriously). It would explain the TOS violation too, if it considered the word to be problematic.

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

#122

Post by orwin »

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…

It's because our nationalization used to ressemble the Soviet model, for various reasons (one that governments were far more authoritarian in the 40s, 50s and 60s that they are now).

You have other options. One is the following:

- 1/3 government (adapted to the size of the business: federal for Facebook, but local for a sawmill)

- 1/3 workers (including the owner if he's working his business)

- 1/3 investors (owner or shareholders).

That would makes the owner who also work at the company the final decision maker for stuff that doesn't involve the government (like investment), but allows more balanced power balance.

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

#123

Post by unity1001 »

paintman252 wrote: post #7
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't nationalise them, break them up. A state monopoly is preferable to a private monopoly, but in this case there's no reason we have to have a monopoly. Facebook and Google do too many things.

>Facebook and Google do too many things. Google? Definitely. Meta? Not really. All Meta has is two social networks and one messaging service. They haven't really experienced huge success in anything else. They MAY hit big in VR/AR space, but that's yet to be determined.

> All Meta has is two social networks and one messaging service.

They literally dominate the social network landscape along with Twitter. They can literally set public agenda. That's too much power.

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

#124

Post by jrmg »

simonbackx wrote: post #114

Our domain just has been unblocked, thank you everyone for your support! I'm soooo happy right now!

Did they give you any explanation as to what happened, or why they chose to review the block (probably because of this attention…)?

I’m not sure how to ask this in an answerable way, but did they ask you not to talk about what happened and/or how it got resolved?

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

#125

Post by realusername »

UnpossibleJim wrote: post #90
CharlesW wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It hasn't changed, I'm basically treating the whole platform as legacy now and "best effort".

And I'm only talking about the normal process, good luck if you happen to have a buggy developper account which loops during the sign-in...

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

#126

Post by throw10920 »

wpietri wrote: post #89
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 pla…

These companies explicitly and intentionally cultivated profit models built around providing services for free and subsidizing them with data collection and advertising. Their low revenue-per-user is a direct result of that, and if they can't afford to provide proper moderation, that's entirely their fault, and does not absolve them of the responsibility to provide it anyway.

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

#127

Post by luckylion »

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.

> 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

They already have to do that, only currently they have to put it into customername.shop-saas.com, not customername-shop.com, or even shop.customername.com.

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

#128

Post by danpalmer »

rendaw wrote: post #74
danpalmer wrote: post #38

Fun story. At my previous company we had "Sign in with Facebook" – whatever your opinions on it are, it was probably the right thing for the company at that time. Facebook decided to "audit" us to make sure we were doing sign in right. The tested it incorrectly, told us we were at fault and needed to fix it, and gave us 2 weeks to do so. We scrambled to figure out what the issue was, only to find after they eventuall…

Who on Facebook's side resolved the problem in the end?

Not certain. Our ads account manager (or maybe the old account manager) found the internal ticket and I suspect told them that it was looking really bad for Facebook and that they were at risk of losing us.

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

#129

Post by danpalmer »

jherskovic wrote: post #117
danpalmer wrote: post #38

Fun story. At my previous company we had "Sign in with Facebook" – whatever your opinions on it are, it was probably the right thing for the company at that time. Facebook decided to "audit" us to make sure we were doing sign in right. The tested it incorrectly, told us we were at fault and needed to fix it, and gave us 2 weeks to do so. We scrambled to figure out what the issue was, only to find after they eventuall…

We removed "Sign in with Facebook" from our public learning management system (we provide content to the public) instead of continuing to jump through their insane requests and demands.

It was a ticket we had for a long time to remove it, in fact we had been no longer giving it as an option for account creation for a few years. It just was going to be a week of work and we wanted to avoid it if we could.

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

#130

Post by danpalmer »

998244353 wrote: post #120
simonbackx wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many stories like this, it is crazy! Thank you for sharing this.

One quite perplexing common theme is "thing gets flagged -> thing gets resolved by a human as a false positive or whatever -> two weeks later, thing gets flagged again with no change, presumably by an automated system". If the flagging is done by a human, is there really no "case file" that records the previous flags and why they were false positives? If it is done by an automated system, why is it allowed to flag th…

FWIW, the audits were definitely being performed by humans, we saw the screenshots and some notes. The triggers for audits were likely automated.
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