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The dark side of account bans

madelinemiller.dev

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Re: The dark side of account bans

#41

Post by OsrsNeedsf2P »

db48x wrote: post #35

> She recommended a few cafes, and I went to look at their menus. To my surprise, I couldn’t access their menus. They were only on Instagram, and it’d force a sign in before showing me the content. Wow. There are over 30 restaurants within a mile of where I live, and not one of them uses Instagram to host anything as far as I know. They always have a real web page, even if it’s cobbled together on Wix or some other h…

I doubt they'll stay with custom websites for long, given 1. The new generation grew up with Social Media as a native service and 2. How much easier it is to run a Business account vs your own website

Re: The dark side of account bans

#42

Post by OsrsNeedsf2P »

kranke155 wrote: post #33
j1elo wrote: post #15

> I couldn’t access their menus. They were only on Instagram, and it’d force a sign in before showing me the content. > so many restaurants and cafes here purely use Instagram (or sometimes Facebook) to host their menus. That's idiotic. Really, reaaaally idiotic. Like, "talk to the manager and tell them they are doing a very stupid thing" levels of idiotic. This "we're too modern and digital to get out heads out of o…

This is literally the new normal in a lot of places in Europe. I have no idea where you are that you think you could complain about this, they would just eye roll at you.

Not only Europe, it's common in Asia too. You can hate it, but you can't fight the tide.

Re: The dark side of account bans

#43

Post by ajross »

j1elo wrote: post #15

> I couldn’t access their menus. They were only on Instagram, and it’d force a sign in before showing me the content. > so many restaurants and cafes here purely use Instagram (or sometimes Facebook) to host their menus. That's idiotic. Really, reaaaally idiotic. Like, "talk to the manager and tell them they are doing a very stupid thing" levels of idiotic. This "we're too modern and digital to get out heads out of o…

> This "we're too modern and digital to get out heads out of our asses" attitude towards adopting "cool technology" with complete disregard for an analog Plan B gets to my nerves.

All restaurants have an "analog plan B", it's called walking in and asking for a menu. These are tiny businesses run by people who love food, not tech. It really is asking too much to expect them to work at and understand the ideas behind digital freedom, at least if you want them to serve you good food.

Notably Google Maps curates a photo set of the physical menu of basically every restaurant in the urban USA, if not everywhere. I find a lot of people don't actually know this. I never bother looking at restaurant sites anymore except for places where I know they're likely to have changed the menu (and even then it's a crapshoot, per your original point).

Re: The dark side of account bans

#44

Post by chrismorgan »

teddyh wrote: post #10
chrismorgan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This unfortunately is why anonymity is so important on the Internet. I’m not convinced by your argument. I acknowledge that maintaining an isolated identity for the Discord/whatever accounts would have limited the scope of the damage, but it’s often not very practical for a variety of reasons, and perhaps more importantly, the anonymity is part of the problem too: the trouble-maker has anonymity, and uses it for ba…

I see that it’s time to link this again: https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22R... >

That doesn’t invalidate what I said. Anonymity protects both “good” and “bad” people. My argument was just that it doesn’t seem fair to use this case to justify anonymity, when removing anonymity would also probably have solved it.

It’s not the conclusion I’m disagreeing with, just the logic. (Perhaps I undermined this aspect by indulging in the thought experiment where accountability was actually held. Do I think such a scheme would actually work well? Not at all. People are involved.)

Re: The dark side of account bans

#45

Post by raverbashing »

decimalenough wrote: post #39
fweimer wrote: post #34

> I did end up speaking to a few engineers at Meta through connections, either directly or through others, many of which recommended suing Meta to unlock my accounts. This was extra complicated due to me living in Australia, so it’s not something I tried. Why is this complicated? Do the Meta ToS include a choice-of-venue clause for consumer accounts?

Suing people across jurisdictions is a nightmare. As a trivial example, anybody can theoretically sue any Singaporean entity in Singapore's Small Claims Tribunal, but if you don't have Singaporean ID, you need to show up in person in Singapore to register for the CJTS Pass system. Then you need to send registered mail from Singapore to the person you're using, apply for a special exception to be able to appear over Z…

Or: hire a lawyer in Singapore (or a solicitor, I'm not sure how's their legal system) to navigate these small bureaucracies

Re: The dark side of account bans

#46

Post by Rebuff5007 »

There is so much that is sad and infuriating about this.

How can a stranger have so much hate towards someone who's content they want to consume? Why are meta engineers suggesting suing their own company instead of pointing to someone to walk through a basic appeals process? The obvious, why do so many things in the world not work without a smartphone and a google/facebook account with internet access? Why isn't anyone doing anything about any of this? PMs at facebook? Congressmen/women?

The system is not working.

Re: The dark side of account bans

#47

Post by Macha »

lynx97 wrote: post #24
antonvs wrote: post #7

I had a reddit account permanently banned for saying something to the effect that a certain out of control billionaire could be dealt with by launching him into space in an electric vehicle that one of his companies manufactures. Apparently "reddit legal" thought that was a credible threat. I find that strangely encouraging.

Reads like a good decision on the side of Reddit. If you can't see how this type of statement is not OK, even after the fact, shows banning you was the right decision.

I can understand the motivation for acting on death threats like someone claiming they would like to stab another person. Who knows how plausible that is? Without knowing much about the poster, you kind of have to assume the most plausible interpretation in a lot of settings.

Launching someone in a rocket to space is clearly beyond the reach of any single individual. It's also not particularly violent in the scheme of things. It's clearly intended to be hyperbole, and hyperbole against a public figure is common. Musk himself, despite his thin skin, has often said much worse, I guess his ban from Twitter should be coming any day now?

Re: The dark side of account bans

#48

Post by cube00 »

n4r9 wrote: post #6

Sounds like an awful experience. It's easy to create fake FB or Insta accounts to get around the restaurant menus problem, but getting WhatsApp banned must be a nightmare. I didn't even know that could happen!

Good luck getting past the sign up flow to even get an account if your fingerprinted device is on their ban list.

Re: The dark side of account bans

#49

Post by chrisldgk »

I have a similar, though less horrible story. We recently launched an app where we wanted to have a Facebook sign-in button since our target audience would be people that use Facebook a lot. Being Gen Z and not having a Facebook account at all (anymore) I made one for Meta developers, set everything up for development and tested stuff for a few weeks. When we finally did want to go live, we went through the Meta for Business verification process, which succeeded, but a minute later my account got banned. I got to appeal (sending a video of your face looking multiple directions), but for some reason that wasn’t enough for them. I got fully banned with the only option to appeal going to court. So now apparently I have a Facebook developer account and a verified business, both of which I cannot access at all anymore.

We do not currently have a Facebook sign-in button in our production app.

Re: The dark side of account bans

#50

Post by antonvs »

lynx97 wrote: post #24
antonvs wrote: post #7

I had a reddit account permanently banned for saying something to the effect that a certain out of control billionaire could be dealt with by launching him into space in an electric vehicle that one of his companies manufactures. Apparently "reddit legal" thought that was a credible threat. I find that strangely encouraging.

Reads like a good decision on the side of Reddit. If you can't see how this type of statement is not OK, even after the fact, shows banning you was the right decision.

[flagged]
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