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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

#131

Post by hirsin »

simonbackx wrote: post #28
jefftk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes is enough one bad actor under one of your subdomains to have a full ban on the whole domain. If you're running independent subdomains where a bad actor on one should not affect the reputation of the rest, you probably should add your domain to the public suffix list: https://publicsuffix.org

Thanks, I didn't know about that list. I'll try that!

Note that adding your domain to the PSL changes how browsers interact with it, so don't do it lightly. In particular, no more cookies for the parent domain.

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

#132

Post by marcosdumay »

simonbackx wrote: post #42
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…

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

You mean large company screws up, people get in touch and they fix it?

I completely disagree, there aren't many stories like this. In fact I don't remember reading any on HN.

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

#133

Post by tremon »

anderspitman wrote: post #116

It's worth remembering what the long-term solutions to these types of issues are. For Facebook: decentralized social networks built on open protocols. For the ISP: normalizing the use of VPNs (through a local server) for all internet traffic. Yes there are tradeoffs. I'm personally happy to make them.

For society: making de-facto public infrastructure public again.

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

#134

Post by dymk »

another_story wrote: post #66
dymk wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think you should get everything for free or something?

You think Facebook isn't getting something out of allowing users to sign into other sites through them?

You think the site isn't getting something out of allowing users to click a social media button to sign in?

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

#135

Post by nicgrev103 »

kragen wrote: post #103
nicgrev103 wrote: post #86

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 ano…

Did they undelete your events as part of the settlement?

Negative, as with all legal action it took months and by then the graduations were long past.

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

#136

Post by debugnik »

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…

Not a FB story, but I once had an innocuous profile image on a Google side-account get flagged and automatically restricted from public view. I requested human review and it was manually approved. The next week it got flagged again; same process, reapproved. This kept happening every week until 5 times total; I kept going just to see how long would it take them to stop, as I didn't really care about the image or even the account.

Long time after I'd last used that account, I logged-in again and, you guessed it, the image was flagged. Requested yet another review, approved. Was it really that hard for them to trigger human reviews before restricting content that had already been reviewed?

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

#137

Post by theanonymousone »

base wrote: post #13

I don't have a specific solution for you, but I also run a domain with some thousands of subdomains and is always a fight to not be banned from Google, Meta, internet operators etc. Sometimes is enough one bad actor under one of your subdomains to have a full ban on the whole domain. What I suggest is for your and your clients to contact Meta through the Business Center support. Their support for paying clients is mu…

Then how come GeoCities, Heroku, Vercel, GH Pages and others survived?

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

#138

Post by blahyawnblah »

kragen wrote: post #103
nicgrev103 wrote: post #86

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 ano…

Did they undelete your events as part of the settlement?

I'm not sure small claims would do something like that

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

#139

Post by hliyan »

throw10920 wrote: post #126
wpietri wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. If your car company cannot be profitable with airbags, then you shouldn't be in the car business (to use an analogy).

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

#140

Post by yamtaddle »

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.

Nah. Just make providing free services then blatantly fucking people over who rely on them a very risky thing to do. Like "attractive nuisance" laws that can make you liable if some kid you've never seen before drowns in a pool on your property if you didn't take reasonable measures to keep a kid from wandering into the pool. Or various regulations that make certain demands on businesses that open up physical spaces to the public (like stores or malls or whatever).

Separately I'd also like to see us outlaw the kind of data collection & retention that lets Facebook's business model exist, but I do think making it so offering free services doesn't absolve you of all responsibility is something we should do, too, and is more directly relevant to this.

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