What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)
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On the other hand, well, that is precisely what some people warned us of - give a single company that much power, and it will inevitably be abused, be it by malice or incompetence.
But it is not easy to give any useful advice, because there is basically no alternative to facebook - you can go with the flow or stay away from it. But there is not "something like Facebook without all the problems that come with it being a single large profit-driven corporation". The only solution I can think of is for lots and lots of people to pool their money and start a non-profit Facebook. And even then, I am not overly optimistic, because by now the network effect is far too strong.
See https://diasporafoundation.org/
Not that they've actually made any sort of dent in the problem - as you say, the network effect is just too strong.
BTW https://mastodon.social is making some headway. I see a lot of security people have switched to it.
(My point is that IMO twitter was the most useless of all the mainstream social networks until snapchat arrived.
I reached this conclusion by seing that you can get to twitter functionality from both facebook, instagram and google+ just by removing features and introducing limitations.)
I Twitter is the most honest social network. Everything is public, the end. Unlike Facebook's "privacy" settings.
I realize a lot of people will not agree with me, however I tend to think way beyond the general human conception and as a consequence hold to a very different perspective.
I agree with you that that should not be the case. When I look at all the good things human beings have accomplished over the millennia, I cannot help but think that we can do better than this if we set our mind to it.
But life is not the way it should be (IMHO) in so many different levels in so many different ways I would not even know where to begin counting.
If facebook was required to have some level of across-platform access, this might level the playing field and give us actual choice. Unfortunatly, I think this will take legislative action to accomplish. Until then, luck and time might change the course of things.
That would be very interesting, and I think it would be a good idea. But I imagine it would be rather hard to pull of on the technical side, even if Facebook full-heartedly supported such an effort, and I don't want to begin to think of the kind of pressure we would have to put on our politicians to create such a law without making humongous mess out of it.
Whatever replaces Facebook will have to be "cool" enough to get people to actually want to use it. "Facebook but with better privacy" just isn't cool, so the average person isn't going to bother.
Facebook is NOT a backup. If you only keep stuff in your Facebook account, then it is as 'at risk' as if you only kept on the hard-drive of your ageing laptop that you bought on discount in Walmart/ASDA ten years ago.
This oft quoted adage also applies: 'If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product'. The author seemed to think that Facebook owe him for some reason, and that he is fully justified/entitled in begging for his account back. Facebook is a private company who most of the time let the general public mingle in the lobby of its HQ[1]. As their lobby is still their property, they can refuse entry whenever they like.
Something needs to be done about Facebook's near dominance of the Social Media space. If we let this run unchecked for much longer, there won't be an 'internet' - just millions of stale, abandoned websites all simply redirecting you to their respective Facebook Pages instead. It also wouldn't surprise me if at some point, new phones will be released where the browser app is no longer installed by default, but the Facebook app is. Even if this happened today, most non-technical users wouldn't even notice.
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[1] Because the lobby is full of adverts from Facebook's business partners and Facebook gets a nice cut if you buy something being advertised.
Facebook is a significant part of our society. It is not clear why it should be free democratic oversight.
And in all fairness, FB originally started that way when you needed a university email address to join.
My point was more that it is not unreasonable to look to regulations to deal with Facebook. The regulations do not necessarily have to be "public accommodations", I just cited them as the most relevant legal concept I was aware of.
No worries though, other sovereign entities are trying to do what you suggest, so we get the best of both worlds. It's a wonderful demonstration of why nation-states should defend their independence.
Rely on them for convenient access to your files...but not as your prime copy, or your essential backup. You use their services at their whim.
Why not? Our UK micro-business's (PLC's) internal motto is "be nice" seems to work well.
> Lol, yes, of course if it makes lots of money then it doesn't need to be run morally or with any degree of humanity. /s
Why did you add the sarcasm tag? The proof's in the pudding: When Facebook throws people off their platform, the first, second, and third reactions of the victims seem to be trying to climb back on. Apparently, they don't "need" to be run morally.
This adage is beginning to show its age - virtually all services that can get their hands on your data end up selling it nowadays, whether you pay them or not. I heard even some restaurant chains sell data on who they served and when.
Landlords cannot just evict renters based on the landlord's own terms of service, not even a renter's non-paying children or girlfriend with whom the landlord didn't contract, and not even the renter himself although the stopped paying: The landlord needs to follow the rules of society, go through a bailiff's court or follow similar strict procedures defined in society to ensure that mandatory law is followed.
Not everybody can set up a medical clinic on their private property, even if they offer their services for free.
TV stations in many European countries can't show hidden ads in programmes and cannot show ads for kids for certain products. Even though the viewers didn't pay. Even though they are free not to watch.
In most places landowners cannot freely decide to do what they want with their land, like building a factory, without taking into consideration zoning laws and without hearing the neighbors or wider community as well.
For millennia, what we today call criminal laws, have applied on private property as well. You can't just hit somebody in the face because they are in your house and the terms on the door clearly says that you can. Think that's ridiculous? Well, it used to be that restaurants in America could chose to serve whites only. It was the choice of the property owner. Until it wasn't. Courts and congress decided that such practices were so despicable that the general interest of non-discrimination outweighed the interest in business owners getting to decide for themselves. Same with businesses hiring men only. Today most of us regard it as obvious that non discrimination laws trump the interest of private owners. A few decades ago, most people thought the owner could choose freely whom to hire.
I hope we will start regulating the new advertising industry comprised of social networks and search engines more tightly.
This may be worth a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_doctrine
Your response is especially bad because according to the linked article:
"..as a place in which that person has protections and immunities permitting one, in certain circumstances, to use force..."
Note that is says, "in certain circumstances". Flexie wrote that you can't just hit someone in the face in your house. Flexie is correct in this and the castle doctrine in no way disputes this.
I think this answer missed a (somewhat) negation in the middle of the parent posts' argument
It's intuitive - I'll give you that - but we need to decide amongst ourselves whether this behaviour is something we want to encourage or discourage into the future.
It's not about business or legality, it's about being a dick or not, or, as demonstrated here, about being a coward or not when someone's being a dick to your friend. Of course, seeing how hard Facebook and other middlemen try to insert themselves into fucking everything, it's about a bit more than just being a dick, but it's pointless to discuss the ocean before we're clear about what is the water drop and what is the sophistry.
That's not what a back up is. Facebook can be a backup for your photos.
Nonsense. Try getting the originals out of Facebook.
That seems... impractical for a lot of use cases.
Not gonna stop now, they just have the money to buy market share. If people had jumped ship after the Insta acquire then it could have been a blow to them wasting all that money on a dead space but nah people still kept using it and fell for it because they didn't change things right away and now Instagram is a mess of ads and stolen features and the creepy data sharing from FB is oozing in through friend "suggestions".
The whole ordeal, in hindsight, was the best thing that could happen to me, it taught me a good lesson on data sovereignty in the internet world and opened up a small passive income stream.
I always tell people I know to atleast use an email address with their own domain, if they can't set up their own server.
In another line, you say have your own domain and let FastMail or google apps manage your mail.
I don't understand ./?
2. You get to keep your email address if you ever get banned.
I do not think there any benefit in operating your own mail server.
Whereas most of my closest friends have me on WhatsApp, so I could reassure them I was ok, it was really fucking horrible getting a bunch of Messenger messages asking if I was ok and being completely unable to respond to them.
Poor timing I know, but if they expect people to use and depend upon Messenger, it's actually really irresponsible to take away the ability for people to communicate with each other, plus I see no benefit in doing that.
Most of my friends I eventually managed to get in contact with in other ways, but others I couldn't. Sure it's technically my fault for posting smut whilst drunk, but hindsight is 20/20 and we all make mistakes.
Furthermore, there appears to be absolutely no form of appeals process or a way to say, get the ban suspended due to it being some messed up times.
With great power comes great responsibility.
Apparently a stray nipple is more of a threat to society.
This is why it's very frustrating that any equivalent of "the public square" on the internet is almost always owned by a private entity.
The think about the nipple ban is it is a really simple rule and it is really easy to decide if a picture contains a nipple or not.
Like hey, do you want to use one of these messengers where you wont get banned for utter bullshit, or do you want to entrust your communication to a service where you can lose it for an arbitrary period for breaking some of our shitty prudish rules?
It's a common problem with these giants (Facebook, Google, Twitter). Being an area that does not generate profit there is not attention paid to it, or just the bare minimum.
Though I understand the difficulties to scale something like that to hundred of millions of users. Even if a small fraction want to appeal whatever ban they received that could be quite the mass of people to deal with.
I don't buy that. Amazon Associates/Google adwords/etc have a long history of silently banning people who are actively generating revenue for them with no recourse.
I agree though that they should have let your friends know that you cannot answer any messages for X amount of days.
My tip is to just stop using any social networks when you are intoxicated because their will be a permanent record of the things you have done and said which is almost never good. It is so much more fun without a mobile fun anyways.
No, they banned him because they can do what they damn well please, and their approach to content moderation starts with a hammer and escalates from there. It would've sufficed to delete the offending post and issue a warning, even ban him from the group where he misposted the nude. Completely severing access, for a week, from a primary means of social interaction, is vastly disproportionate - that's something you do because someone has demonstrated a clear pattern of deliberately shitty behavior, not because he got loaded and acted the fool one time.
Considering the extent to which Facebook has inveigled itself into so many people's social lives, and the consequent scope and impact its moderation actions may have, I think it's long past time that some severe regime of external regulation be imposed on the corporation, whether by legislation - although that's a forlorn hope at best in the US, where Congress is largely useless no matter who's in it at any given time - or by shareholder activism, as someone else here suggested. I'm not the man to run that project, but I'd surely buy a few shares to participate in it.
To be clear, I don't want Facebook fixed, because I don't think it can be. I want Facebook gone, engineered out of profitability - and thus out of existence - and replaced with a world in which no new Facebook can arise because everyone can both own her data and identity outright, and participate in what we now call "social networking" without having to make herself beholden to any corporate behemoth at all.
It's possible! There are a lot of smart, capable people working on it, and more join in every day. Eventually, someone's going to hammer that stake into Facebook's heart. Before then, finding a way to enforce nuance upon it is a good place to start. Facebook hurts people every day, and cares not at all that it does so. As we work toward the ultimate goal of killing it, we do well also to reduce its ability to do this sort of harm.
In facebook, this is just a lot harder. There is no outside. The tools to upload and manage content as a small enterprise are much less clear to me. What I've seen suggests most people treat it as the repo, and write into it as the repo, and operate in it. They don't upload to it from an external state or use an API.
But it would be true in AWS, in any hosted solution, in any space which you think is your space, but is actually a brand like myspace: if you don't own it, you run it under their terms and conditions.
Its a contract. you might not like it, but that 30 page ream of randomly mutating text T&C matters.
I've talked to people who got shut out. It sure hurts. I do not like to think what I would lose, should I fall into breach of my T&C or be detected as being in breach, and blackhole the notices.
My colleagues who do, or did work in google say that whilst it looks arbitrary, if you respect their mails of warning and commitment, if you reply in sequence through the hoops, you can survive being called out. If you dis-respect their sequence, or try to avoid hoops, you will suffer.
My experience with FB is similar, helping persians who suffered abuse of yahoo emails by opponents of their world view, marked as recovery accounts for facebook pages. If you do the right sequence (mutating) of things with FB, you can recover. But its not well documented at any specific point in time what that sequence is and you cannot easily get third parties to help you.
What you can (and often should) do for critical services is to use providers that don't create huge dependencies on a particular provider. It's probably a lot easier to switch from sites hosted on Digital Ocean to AWS than it is from Facebook to X. Furthermore, if you're hosting sites on a site that actually exists for that purpose, I have a lot more confidence I'll be able to work through issues than one hosting sites more or less incidentally (as in the case of Facebook).
Just create a new account, now.
I am not at all convinced that Facebook just deletes accounts for no reason. Sure, high-profile people get maliciously flagged sometimes, but I seriously doubt these randoms who get deleted are telling the entire story.
Maybe I am inflating their role.
People, please use alternatives
I'm gunna add one obvious thing to that list... fb is not your product.
As I was reading through that article, it was all - client this, client that. "I can't admin my client's fb pages." Admin. A fb page admin. Cuz it sort of reads like: I perform guerrilla social marketing, SEO, and branding campaigns for a myriad of clients on someone else's social network, and they banned my account for spamming their users.
"Why would fb do this to me", he asks himself, but then realized something, "something very important - I hate getting bullshit spam all day from facebook, so I filtered all Facebook updates to Skip Inbox, Delete. Surely the answer to why they blocked me was there somewhere."
https://web.archive.org/web/20170525042302/http://www.optimi...
[1] I criticize my city's law enforcement, by filming where crime happens, where the police really is and the faults they do. I don't think it's illegal but I still wouldn't want my identity shared to them.
Just delete your account. Find a way to share your photos without any of this nonsense: Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Flickr. Not only do you run the risk of Facebook deleting your stuff, but [when I still had an account] it was was a dreadful UX for exploring photos. Use products built for photos if you want to get the most out of your photos.
And: free for schools, with intuitive (and well-documented) features to let schools quickly share photos with parents.
And of course download a zip of your albums whenever you want.
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I started this site in 2005 to share photos of my growing family, as I was living abroad. I've never shared any meaningful photos on Facebook.
So we made Lyra, a better conversation service which lets you have whatever name you like (among other things). https://hellolyra.com/c/343
We're a nonprofit and don't take investment, so excuse the plug :)
I've only got challenges to identify people in pictures if too many people deny your friend request in some time window. But this is easy to solve as you can see the faces by searching their name in second window.
Imagining that your use case is the only use case is the great bane of geeks and developers. If you want to help build a world without awful tech companies, you need to stop doing that.
Also, the reason Facebook is popular is not because it adds extraordinary value for the user, it's because it caters to things like curiosity, narcissism, and ego that reside in all of us. It's feeding those things that keep the user hooked and coming back. Not "value". The extraordinary value you speak of is what the shareholders have.
I don't use Facebook much, in part because of how awful its policies are, but when I do use it, it remains a fantastic tool for keeping in touch with friends. At this point someone always declares that it's actually just narcissism, because email and IM exist and nobody actually needs Facebook, which is a lot like someone 20 years ago declaring that this email thing is just a fad because we already have phones and mail.