Huh. Posting a screenshot of the tweet just got my FB account suspended.
Meta just suspended the Facebook account of Neal Stephenson
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Re: Meta just suspended the Facebook account of Neal Stephenson
#72I believe I have accumulated two moderation strikes on my Facebook account for (relatively politely) calling out posts for being racist/xenophobic. Both cases my comments were flagged as promoting hate, ironically. The appeal mechanism is a joke: you press a button, and two seconds later you get a notification saying your appeal was reviewed and denied.
I got a week long ban for calling someone out for being a Nazi. The person openly praising Hitler did not get banned at all. At the time I thought it was mere incompetence, but in hindsight, it seems more like intentional malice.
It's not intentional malice, it's just 2025 - an age where calling someone a fascist or a racist is worse than being one.
If that doesn't make a lick of sense to you - it's simple. The latter is an offense against a nebulous, undefined outgroup of people, while the former offends a particular person.
It's the same reason why someone can steal a dollar from a million people, but why you'd go to jail for punching the thief in the face.
Re: Meta just suspended the Facebook account of Neal Stephenson
#73The problem with all big companies nowadays... Getting to a real (competent) support person that can help is almost impossible :-(
I called MS support once because some random dude managed to get my son's account registered under his "family", and then locked my son out of being able to update his own machine.
The MS support guy literally tried to get me to password crack the random dude's account. Like, he wanted me to help him guess the guy's password so we could log in as him and change his family settings.
That was the only "help" he could provide.
Re: Meta just suspended the Facebook account of Neal Stephenson
#74How would one go about suing in cases like this?
You would start by reading the complete terms and conditions of service. Somewhere in there is a paragraph that states that your account can be suspended and/or terminated at any time for any reason, or no reason. Then you find the paragraph that limits you to mandatory arbitration. You conclude that you're wasting your time if you attempt to sue anyone over this. Eventually you realize that you're better off without a FB account.
Re: Meta just suspended the Facebook account of Neal Stephenson
#75If they suspend everyones accounts, the Internet will be a better place.
“Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.” - Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
Re: Meta just suspended the Facebook account of Neal Stephenson
#76I believe I have accumulated two moderation strikes on my Facebook account for (relatively politely) calling out posts for being racist/xenophobic. Both cases my comments were flagged as promoting hate, ironically. The appeal mechanism is a joke: you press a button, and two seconds later you get a notification saying your appeal was reviewed and denied.
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Re: Meta just suspended the Facebook account of Neal Stephenson
#77Meta has extremely opaque account policies. For example, I bought the Meta Raybans a month ago. It kept telling me the AI features were not available in my region, even though I am in San Francisco. I joined Facebook in 2006, and I have used my account for the Oculus headset without a problem. But no matter what I did, the AI function of the Raybans wouldn't work. I ended up creating a brand new account just for that…
I have recently had a need to create an Instagram account. I logged in from my home IP and it was recognized as coming from Vietnam (my home IP has been the same since 2016, always with the same ISP). Everything was in Vietnamese and I had to spend half an hour figuring out how to switch it back to English. But in the home feed I still got only Vietnamese influencers, and there was nothing in the settings to change t…
There's a mid-sized international bus company over here and once I bought a ticket for the wrong day, realized only after payment. I simply called the phone number, the lady spoke my language, reissued the ticket for a different day, that's it.
I was shocked that customer support can work like that.
Re: Meta just suspended the Facebook account of Neal Stephenson
#78The problem with all big companies nowadays... Getting to a real (competent) support person that can help is almost impossible :-(
I called MS support once because some random dude managed to get my son's account registered under his "family", and then locked my son out of being able to update his own machine. The MS support guy literally tried to get me to password crack the random dude's account . Like, he wanted me to help him guess the guy's password so we could log in as him and change his family settings. That was the only "help" he could…
The Microsoft family/organisation situation is fucking ridiculous. If you somehow get enrolled in either, good luck ever ridding your device of it.
For literal years after leaving university, my windows install was still linked to my uni despite multiple attempts to fix it. All this, because I logged in using my university Microsoft account once.
Re: Meta just suspended the Facebook account of Neal Stephenson
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was this within the last couple years? How much you wanna bet the appeal is handled by an AI.
Its probably just a variant on a placebo button.
Where if you have the temerity to complain, you’re immediately labelled a rebellious non-conformer and banned forever.
Re: Meta just suspended the Facebook account of Neal Stephenson
#80For people missing the irony here, the term “metaverse,” that Meta is named after, was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 book “Snow Crash.” In the book, the metaverse is a VR version of the internet with an emphasis on accurate sword fights and realistic facial expressions.
I was really hoping for a Snow Crash movie. That project has been in development hell for years. Instead, we got Ready Player One, which is like Snow Crash for dummies. There's a trailer for a low-budget version of Snow Crash.[1] It's awful.
I don't hold out much hope for that project. Snow Crash is about a conspiracy between a media baron and a televangelist to take over the world. That would upset a lot more people now than in 1992.