The dark side of account bans

It's currently at 5, wich is 7 more than the last one I did suggesting a similar idea.

LinkedIn is especially egregrious in the account restriction aspect, especially with how essential it is to many people's lives.

Recently, I found that I couldn't log in to my LinkedIn account. They made the issue seem like an error, so I spent a lot of time trying to log in on different device/browser combinations. Eventually, I folded and tried to submit a support ticket, just to be met with a login page.

After some searching around, I found direct links to the support forms, but none of them worked — they all displayed the same error when I tried to submit a ticket. The only other option was to contact them on Twitter. Tried to create an account just to be met with a generic "something went wrong" error, after wasting my time with what was easily the most awful CAPTCHA I've ever seen.

Tried creating a new LinkedIn account — no good, they ask for phone verification and won't let me reuse my phone number.

For some time, I thought my only option was going to be legal action, until a lightbulb lit up in my head. I went back to the support form, and instead of providing the email I used for my LinkedIn account, I used another email. The ticket was submitted successfully.

At that point, it was clear that my account had some shadow ban in place. My only guess is that I tripped some psychotic automated system. How is it in any way acceptable that a company can essentially, and completely arbitrarily, blacklist someone from the job market like this? No notification or warning, nothing — they literally try to gaslight you with fake errors.

I'm hoping that my support ticket will have some effect (not sure it will, given what I've experienced so far), or else I'll once again be left with legal action as my only recourse. So far, nothing.

I disagree. There has been some criticism of his experiments, but don’t forget that the experiments were successfully replicated many times, by different researchers and in different countries. Don’t forget either that Milgram was surprised by the results; his advance prediction was that Americans would comply with authority far less often and that he would have to repeat the test with Germans to see a high level of compliance. Instead there was essentially no variation between the nationalities that were tested. If he had been deliberately faking the data then that would not have happened. He also repeated the experiment a number of times with varying circumstances. His best results were that he could get both more compliance out of his test subjects as well as less compliance by controlling how closely related the test subjects were to the supposed victims. People who already knew the supposed victim were much less likely to comply than strangers. This suggests that he was measuring a real effect.

Some of the criticisms are valid, and the results to not reflect well on us as people. The 33% of people who can keep to their stated ethics in the face of authority probably have a really hard time believing that 66% of people cannot. To them it seems easy and obvious that you just don’t violate your ethics. But imagine it this way: for hundreds of thousands of years humans lived in tiny tribes wandering in the wilderness. Failure to heed the orders of the tribe’s leaders would have been a virtual death sentence for most of that time. That environment literally breeds for people who obey even when they think it’s a bad idea. That’s apparently not long enough for the trait to have become universal, thankfully.

I don’t know about the TPSE though. I didn’t cite it either.

I'm in Australia, so I kick it to the Australian Federal Police (FBI equivalent) via https://www.accce.gov.au/

Kinda? Lots of people use FB Messenger, but outside of facebook marketplace I haven’t found anyone who wasn’t able/willing to use something else.