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Comment by cgtyoder | Hacker News Reader

One would think FB would have in its data store a "This account has been flagged in the past and it has been reviewed and approved no need to review again" checkbox by now

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Reminds me of customer service:

1. gets through

2. spends a few minutes explaining the issue

3. “I’ll connect you to <other department>”

4. spends a few minutes explaining the issue

5. “Wait 24h. Call again if issue persists.”

6. go to step 1

Y U NO WRITE DOWN MY ISSUE FOR FUTURE USE?

I had terrible issues with Comcast, and after the fourth or so call I made sure that the agent wrote down all the necessary details, and I would tell agents in later calls to read the details. Not that my problem was ever resolved, but at least I didn't have to explain it every time.

Sadly, they don't.

I'm transgender, and I've heard of several people in my community who are repeatedly targeted by hate groups who report their profiles for using a fake name, and each time they have to scan their legal name change papers and send them to Facebook.

After you've sent a passport scan, you'd think they'd keep the scan on file (though that might be problematic) or at least keep a "legal ID verified" flag.

Facebook really don't care, do they?

> Facebook really don't care, do they?

Mr. Bich one of over a billion users of their service; no, they really don't care. Even the negative PR from this situation is a blip on the radar, and will be forgotten by everyone except Mr. Bich a month from now.

I find their treatment of transgender folks even more egregious, but again, Facebook can afford to not care. Even if they caused 10,000 people a day to stop using the service, it would take over 300 years for everyone to leave.

For Mr. Bich, I can sort of understand it. But transgender and e.g. other groups like first nations / Indian groups that have also reported problems having their names recognised could quickly escalate to anti-discrimination lawsuits if they're not careful.

Mr. Bich is also a potential lawsuit. Yes, his name might be perceived to be a bad joke by English speakers. Doesn't mean it's not discriminatory.

The problem is that it's likely to be harder to demonstrate a pattern of behaviour that would be sufficient to convince anyone that it's not just an unfortunate set of misunderstandings that can, and do, also occur for people of other ethnicities and nationalities. Discriminating based on your name would generally not be illegal. Most places it would first become illegal if you are discriminating a protected class, which would tend to mean race, religion, ethnicity, gender, age or some subset of those depending on jurisdiction.

Ah, yes, you have a point there.

It is ironic isn't it. They pride themselves in fancy, fast, optimized graph storage and querying. Best minds at works, yadda, yadda. But they don't seem to manage to implement a flag like that.

> They pride themselves in fancy, fast, optimized graph storage and querying. But they don't seem to manage to implement a flag like that.

There are massive organizational worlds between optimized graph storage and the operations/customer support processes that lead to a bit like this being introduced and maintained. So it's not really ironic at all, because it's almost certainly not a technical issue.

But it's one that has an easy technical solution.

And it's not like it required creativity to think up. Anyone here could have recognized the feature that was missing to improve the procedure.

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