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Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

lincoln.metacannon.net

211–220 of 246 posts

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#211
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m banned from Twitter without explanation. I made an account, followed 3-4 tech celebrities like Paul graham, and posted a single tweet similar to “I finally got pressured into making a dumb Twitter account...” The account got banned for community violations within an hour and my support email said that my requests for support would not be responded to. Years later, I’m working on a video game and I’m worried this…

Your account was probably hacked and used for something that broke the rules. I got an email warning of someone trying to change my password within a week of making an account.

The account wasn’t hacked. It was a day old

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#212
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your account was probably hacked and used for something that broke the rules. I got an email warning of someone trying to change my password within a week of making an account.

I agree with this comment. The article and parent comments probably were doing some scam, either by the people themselves or if they were hacked. Lots of people criticize Facebook all the time and have no issues.

You just accused me of being a scammer for creating a Twitter account and making a single tweet and getting banned the same day. What is wrong with you?

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#214
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming a user:moderator ratio of 10,000:1, they would need to hire 200,000 moderators to cover their 2 billion users. Then at that scale, they’d need to hire thousands of meta-moderators and meta-meta-moderators too.

Where's the problem in that? FB makes 18.5 billion $ a year in profit. 250k employees @ 30k would work out to 7.5 billion $ in cost a year, it would hardly leave them bankrupt. Also, Facebook could offset a part of that cost by charging users a token amount - say, five dollars or something like that.

First, it’s $7.5 billion freaking dollars. Of OpEx.

Second, it’s 250k human moderators who will feel obligated to, you know, moderate stuff. They’re not paying $7.5 bil to just allow people to post whatever content they want now! Very quickly they will run out obviously clear-cut cases and will be moderating anything and everything under the sun.

How anyone could think 250,000 people running around with mod powers on people’s Facebook walls is not deeply, deeply problematic... I cannot imagine.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#215
> I don’t know for sure why Facebook disabled my account.

THAT should be illegal. Suspension should provide a clear statement of the exact reasons for suspension of the account (a generic 'it did not follow our Community Standards' is far from exact. It's a totalitarian standard), and should offer a path to satisfactory resolution. (And not an 'adjudicated' one.)

Disabling should only follow a refusal to abide by those standards. Else, probation. Companies that profit from operating in democracies need to be strongly encouraged to follow democratic principles or move elsewhere. Otherwise they are disruptive agents.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just don't use them. And try to convince people you know not to. A ban isn't even necessary if enough people decide a platform works against their interests and cease to pay attention to it.

This argument is basically “I don’t need privacy because I have nothing to hide”

Not at all, I would very much like to protect personal privacy rights. I'm saying a small number of businesses have convinced the general public to invest a massive amount of time, money, and attention in virtual spaces. These organizations intrude in our lives because we use their platforms. We need to quit using their platforms.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#217
To those of you who were cheering and clapping when these social networks started banning people like President Trump, or those who questioned the election results, or other right-wing people. Welcome to your new world. Now it's your turn to get silenced for wrongspeech.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censoring content rather than refuting its claims is counterproductive. If skeptics are not able to be argumentatively refute a claim, they will not succeed in changing minds. The current strategy of trying to silence view points will eventually fail miserably. The issue is that when a platform outsources its censorship (“moderation”) to a third party that it still controls, rather than a third party that is actually…

I'm talking about lead in the gasoline and you're talking about more speech. I don't disagree with your point but it isn't relevant to mine.

Totally fair

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#219

I think FB has a fundamental issue here, which is that: 1) they don't feel they can NOT police content 2) they are wayyyyy too big to police content manually 3) any AI they train to police content, is not going to be able to state clearly why a given post/account was banned, and anyway... 4) if you state objective, clear rules that are automated, it will be pretty easy to game them (e.g. using euphemisms or code word…

They need to be forced, by government regulations, to have to talk to people who have had their accounts banned and to provide them some kind of legal recourse. The law needs to recognize that for massive social networks like Facebook and Twitter and for the Apple and Google App stores that people are actually entitled to those services, and have a right to use them, and shouldn't be kicked off of them without any form of recourse. They've grown too big to just consider them like the corner coffee shop and allow them to kick anyone off of their platform for whatever reasons they cook up.

And that means that they will need to staff up and that will come out of their profit margins, and that's okay. That's why they need to be forced to do it by regulations.

Re: Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them

#220
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censoring content rather than refuting its claims is counterproductive. If skeptics are not able to be argumentatively refute a claim, they will not succeed in changing minds. The current strategy of trying to silence view points will eventually fail miserably. The issue is that when a platform outsources its censorship (“moderation”) to a third party that it still controls, rather than a third party that is actually…

> will eventually become common knowledge and the censors will be implicated in the coverup thereby harming their trust. But by that time almost no-one would care. And this is probably what they're counting on.

Probably true. And can always spin it later as well, especially when people subliminally need to agree with the spin so as not to explode their own head by challenging the very basis of all their thinking.
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