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

lerner.co.il

461–470 of 514 posts

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

#461

Not surprised by this at all. “Animal trading” is such a touchy category within Meta. Once you get flagged for this, you can basically kiss your account goodbye. It is impossible to get support, even in cases like this where it clearly has nothing to do with animals. Meta simply will not touch it. There are other categories like this too. Ultimately it is easier/safer for Meta to just wholesale ban any use of terms e…

> This will only continue as Meta continues its exit from detailed ad targeting. Google is doing the same thing too.

Meta and Google are exiting "detailed ad targeting"? How so?

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

#462

I'm banned for life from all Facebook properties (except for WhatsApp) because of my surname. They believe it's fake (or too controversial) and a copy of my passport hasn't changed their minds. I used to have a Facebook account ~13 years ago before their real name policy came into force, but I closed it because I found it awkward to refuse or accept so many contact requests by people from my distant past. Now unfortu…

That is particularly egregious because there are plenty of people running around FB with obviously fake names. In a couple of the picture-oriented groups I'm in, I'd say more than half of the posts are from people with fake and sometimes even offensive names, but nothing ever gets done despite what I know to be multiple reports. Even a bad policy can usually be made worse by enforcing it inconsistently.

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

#463
post #425

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 no…

In the early 2000s I couldn't download Winamp 3 at school because the URL contained the string 'mp3'. I'm sure the school did not care about the distinction.

Ha, I worked at a place that blocked ebay. Not because it was ebay, but because for some weird reason they used .dll in their extensions.

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

#464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swift was also a pretty well established interbank communication format which struck me as a strange choice of name. It legitimately confused me back in those days because I was working with swift messages every day.

After decades of global product launches the namespace is really full. Some overlap is unavoidable.

The lack of imagination in using unicode characters is astounding!

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

#465

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 no…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

There's a lot of shitakemushrooms going on.

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

#466
post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People named Guido not being able to create an account because apparently my name is also a racial slur in some part of the world where I do not live.

I cannot register with my nickname in a LOT of online services/games. Sony even sent me a scary letter with intention to suspend account. Also I utterly hate all those online services that require at least 6 letters in nickname...

Richard?

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

#467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All existing pandas are owned by the PRC so the chance of somebody selling a panda for real, vs selling some sort of panda themed toy/book/etc, is virtually nil. No human would make this mistake; their filter is braindead.

Pythons, on the other hand, are often (illegally) sold, and can be extremely difficult to eradicate as an invasive species. Florida's Everglades are in trouble because people buy Burmese pythons and release them when they grow too big to handle. That's not to defend Facebook's approach to ad management whatsoever. I definitely agree that it is far too blunt a tool for the problem. Pretending the problem doesn't exist…

That is true that the python trade is somewhat problematic and is accordingly regulated, but there are also a lot of people who are legally selling pythons on facebook and evidently don't get banned for it. Search "facebook python breeder" and they're easy to find. My conclusion is that the filtering system is totally and inexplicably capricious. A braindead computer program making indefensible decisions that it probably can't even justify to facebook employees themselves, let alone to the people it's banning. Maybe mentioning pythons or pandas alone would be fine, but both together gets you classified as an exotic smuggler dealing in literal bears? Who knows. Probably not even facebook knows.

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

#468
post #441
post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other "we can absolutely totally build ai, no really guys, this shit works" news: A friend is losing some weight via diet and exercise changes. We have a messages convo wherein I congratulated him and we discuss both our exercise routines. One of Google's autosuggested response emojis was a kiss. This has happened repeatedly over the 6 months-long conversation.

Do a screenshot, send it, and ask if the "ai suggestion of a kiss is a good case of semantic understanding of our conversation, when viewed by an AI?"

But it may very well be correctly understanding that people like to end sentences with an emoji, combined with that being the most likely emoji used in conversations like this. That becomes plausible when combined with most such conversations using little to no emojis (more professional and dry) but those that do (more emotive) tend to be between partners. Texting a partner about these topics might be more common than texting others, or at least more commonly emoji-heavy, which would be below the noise floor until also mixing in the probabilities of sentences being followed by emoji versus being followed by any particular word. These particular conversations would tend to express passionate love more than happiness, sadness, sarcasm, taking orders, or various other emotions. Suddenly a signal emerges from the noise, which is both interesting and statistically most useful.

This would all be solved if the predictive text engine knew the context beyond what was recently typed. I don't think this is typically true (yet?) -- it would be interesting if all predictions were at least binned by partner vs slang1 friend vs slang2 friend vs business acquaintance et al. with structured data coming to it from the app. Bit of a privacy question I suppose.

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

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That department should upgrade to a modern LLM which would do a better job than many humans in understanding the context of python and pandas.

There would still be need for some sort of appeal/correction process, which doesn't seem to exist in a useful state now and would be required no matter what automated system you put in place.

I think if the front line bot was an LLM, rather than what is probably regex, they would probably have more true positives and less false positives that would potentially allow them to have a real person handling the exceptions - then train the LLM on the exception for the next release.

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

#470

Not surprised by this at all. “Animal trading” is such a touchy category within Meta. Once you get flagged for this, you can basically kiss your account goodbye. It is impossible to get support, even in cases like this where it clearly has nothing to do with animals. Meta simply will not touch it. There are other categories like this too. Ultimately it is easier/safer for Meta to just wholesale ban any use of terms e…

It sounds like an interesting opportunity for a DDOS / social engineering type attack
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