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Meta is banning people from advertising after running ads for Python and Pandas

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Re: Meta is banning people from advertising after running ads for Python and Pandas

#341

Post by josephcsible »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #58

I've had similar problems with Fabebook/Meta before and eventually gave up on buying ad services from them. One solution to this problem would be a law that 1. mandates to give users the information when they are dealing with an algorithm only, and 2. forces companies to make it possible to contact humans within a specific time frame. I very much hope at least the EU will enact such a law soon. Apart from monumental…

> make it possible to contact humans

More specifically, it'd need to make it possible to contact humans with the authority to overturn the algorithmic decision.

Re: Meta is banning people from advertising after running ads for Python and Pandas

#342

Post by swayvil »

unethical_ban wrote: post #339
lbriner wrote: post #47

The whole issue around not telling you what rule you broke "because then you might work around it" is total BS. It's like a company I complained to the other day because they didn't label one of the inputs on their password reset form because "it would help a hacker know what to type in it" (it was the password reset password they expected but you wouldn't know). How much quicker would this be resolved if the first A…

I've been banned from Reddit several times for absolute b**** reasons. Most recently I was banned for report abuse. But it has an incredibly huge problem with a particular style of spam account that reposts old content on certain subreddits. I was reporting those and also commenting on threads as to why I was reporting them so that others could see it. Without any discussion, comment, or initial warning to say " hey…

You are 90% probably a goat. A troublesome edge-case. A poor investment.

They want sheep. Only sheep.

Re: Meta is banning people from advertising after running ads for Python and Pandas

#344

Post by miki123211 »

Other similar cases I'm aware of.

* The Scunthorpe problem, AOL didn't let users set their hometown to Scunthorpe because of the "cunt" substring. This is a classic.

* Amazon banning sales of Guns N' Roses merch (because guns).

* People named Miranda having issues with bank transfers (because of the substring "Iran").

* Some games displaying the nickname "Nasser" as "N*er", suggesting that it is the n word.

Alexa not being able to say "pussycat" properly, which is an issue to this day.

* Parental control software that filtered on "anal" in URLs, which also affected "analysis".

* Another parental control software that removed any file with "sex" in the name. This also included "sysext". I know of a school whose entire computer room got bricked because of that bug, the IT person decided it would be a good idea to update all the computers to Windows 10 at once, without checking for software incompatibilities first.

* The British politician Dominic Cummings not being able to set up a Twitter account.

Re: Meta is banning people from advertising after running ads for Python and Pandas

#346

Post by squarefoot »

jjgreen wrote: post #255
specproc wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRA is also a possibly shady acronym in some parts of the world.

Likewise ISIS: https://isismagazine.org.uk/

Isis is the name of a main ancient Egyptian goddess; I can imagine many researchers triggering alerts when mentioning her in their emails.

Re: Meta is banning people from advertising after running ads for Python and Pandas

#347

Post by klibertp »

miki123211 wrote: post #330
weinzierl wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 90s I had heard about this software you needed to publish web pages called 'Apache' so I googled it on Altavista expecting it to be hard to find amongst all the content about the Native American tribes. To my big surprise it was the web server that was at the very top of the search results. Today I searched[1] for 'Kafka' on Google before I made the comment above and I got 'Apache Kafka' first and I'm still su…

The fact that it's at the top now is not surprising, Google probably knows you're a programmer and is likely to show you programming-related results. Even if you turn off all tracking and use a private window, there are ways. In my case, the combination of a Polish IP address, Safari on Mac OS and English as the browser language is enough to profile me as "tech-savvy, probably interested in science and edutainment, n…

No. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=kafka also mentions Apache Kafka before Franz's wiki page. DDG's very existence hinges on NOT profiling you, in any way.

Re: Meta is banning people from advertising after running ads for Python and Pandas

#348

Post by scbrg »

ggybdese wrote: post #317
Lio wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd prefer it if we legislated that organisations can't exclusively rely on closed systems like Facebook/Meta to run their services. I saw a sign last year for forestry service work happening locally to me. Apparently they're only going to provide safety announcements on Facebook. Shit like that grinds my gears. Meta's users aren't citizens, they're serfs. :(

> they're only going to provide safety announcements on Facebook. While I understand, what's the alternative you propose? I have seen HN threads ridiculing some govt website for being outdated or not fixing the latest vulnerability or not using the latest version etc. Or if they do allocate a bigger chunk of their budget for tech and there will be unreasonable HN threads about how one user feels he/she could build it…

> I have seen HN threads ridiculing some govt website for being outdated or not fixing the latest vulnerability or not using the latest version etc. Or if they do allocate a bigger chunk of their budget for tech and there will be unreasonable HN threads about how one user feels he/she could build it over a weekend and question the budgets.

So? Public institutions are free to run "outdated" web sites and ignore random people ridiculing them on HN. "We're on a budget, stop whining" is a perfectly valid response, if a such behavior even warrants a response.

Re: Meta is banning people from advertising after running ads for Python and Pandas

#349

Post by xen0 »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #165
halukakin wrote: post #67

There are many digital marketing executives who are banned to advertise on Facebook. FB decides they did something wrong once, and now they cannot advertise anymore. So effectively they cannot find a job in digital advertising because Meta wants you to use your personal account for advertising even when you are working for a company. This needs to stop. Maybe this could be moved under the scope of "EU Digital Markets…

Why should Meta be forced to give people second chances who didn't read the rules the first time. A lot of the times when you actually dig into this stuff, the person banned did break a perfectly reasonable rule.

You never made a mistake?

Re: Meta is banning people from advertising after running ads for Python and Pandas

#350

Post by swayvil »

queuebert wrote: post #311

The elephant in the room is that this happens because these companies are too big . They command such monopolies over their walled gardens that everyone must advertise with them, so there is no requirement to provide customer service to any but the largest accounts. With many smaller companies in a competitive environment, some would be forced to provide a good customer experience to differentiate their service. Theo…

So there should be a size limit corporations. Too big and it starts interfering with the system. The system that maintains the lives of us citizens.

I think that's straightforward enough.

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