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Comment by craigds | Hacker News Reader

Why do they even have this process? Who cares if someone in prison uses Facebook? This is pretty absurd.

yeah, the fact that facebook locks the accounts of people who are currently incarcerated is the most interesting part of this post to me. why is that any of their business?

Maybe they don't want to have, e.g. convicted rapists going on the books as 'liking' ads for paying customers

Then they ought to make people agree to a background check before signing up for an account.

The way American society treats convicts and ex-convicts is baffling to me. It's as if rehabilitation is not even a pretense anymore.

Innocent until proven guilty. Never innocent once proven guilty.

I didn't talk about innocence. I am talking about human dignity and rehabilitation.

The plea bargain system in the US pretty much guarantees a fair amount of convicted people aren't guilty of anything other than making a very tough risk management decision.

We are talking about current prisoners, not ex-convicts. Prisoners are generally not allowed to access social media outside the US, either. Are you saying that they should be, because it would help with their rehabilitation?

They seem to be fine with convicted rapists browsing Facebook as long as those convicted rapists have release papers.

So much the more incentive to not get caught next time.

I don't think we should be relying on Facebook to incentivize people to not rape.

I too think its the most interesting.

But of course its their business to know who usess their service and choose whom to allow to use it.

Facebook use is not a right!

I agree that they should have the ability to choose who uses their service and who doesn't.

it just seems like a really weird decision - the benefits of removing people who are currently incarcerated seem minimal compared to the risk of mistakenly flagging somebody.

When a service is getting to the point of universal usage, where you can't even keep contact with your friends without it, it gets close to being a right. What if you get innocently banned and all your friends are only contactable over facebook? You can't even book a time with the hairdresser because the only contact way they use is facebook?

Even if you never mistakenly flag somebody, there's still the developer cost to create the feature and maintain it. There's the cost of slower development whenever this feature interferes with another feature. And assuming it's not 100% automated (which it sounds like it's not because it sounds like both police and Callum were asked to submit papers), there's the cost of humans to manually respond to submissions.

> Facebook use is not a right

I always get downvoted for saying this but ... it’s getting that way. Facebook has become the primary social and contact mechanism for a large number of people. The network effects start to transcend the point where someone unelected in an office in California should get to decide who benefits from it and who doesn’t.

Facebook needs regulating, urgently.

It actually is that way to some extent in Germany already. There were a number of court cases against them where the court forced FB to undo a ban or restore a deleted post.

Facebook monopolization of the market is not a right, either. And I think they'll find that out the hard way - sooner rather than later, precisely because they're so clearly abusive of that monopoly position.

Maybe it is because the company Securus already has a monopoly on inmate communication and they don’t want Facebook to take from their pie, be it via fees or personal data: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180511/09405239819/priso...

Speculation: some government official asked them to provide this feature and they decided that it was in their corporate best interest to grant the request (positive relations with government are beneficial to business, especially when a low cost feature like this is all it takes). Once they offer it to one government, might as well offer it to most. It also helps deflect various government demands they don’t want to do with “we won’t do that but here is a long list of things we are doing for you...”

Why do governments ask for it? Many prisons have regulations banning social media use, even indirect use in which a friend or family member posts on the inmate’s behalf. Why do those regulations exist? Well, all it takes is some odious figure (murderer,rapist,etc) to have a social media page, then victim’s family gets upset, then tabloid media wants to exploit it, then politician promises to “do something about it”, then bureaucrat does the politician’s bidding and amends the prison regulations...

I wonder how the process is supposed to work normally. The article mentions a form for law enforcement to report incarcerated people which asks for an ID and badge number.

Obvious questions: how are these checked? What prevents someone from submitting a fake ID?

I'm sure the people responsible to check this are outsourced monkeys who aren't paid enough to care and will approve anything, so in the end Facebook created a built-in way to DoS a user's account, potentially forever unless you have a contact inside to restore your account.

Came here to say this. Facebook is not the state. Facebook is not law enforcement. Facebook should not bother to pretend it is either of these things.

Although "facebook police" sounds like a great term to use in an ironic sense.

facebook is attempting to become the church which all the Puritans came to the U.S. to get away from.

Does it matter the country? Do you lose fb access if you get locked up abroad? Or is just US?

Probably just US for the time being.

I remember a couple years ago, there was some sort of public outcry over sex offenders using Facebook, and since the US already has a public sex offender registry, it is only natural that Facebook would face pressure expected to block anyone on it.

I can only assume that this is some perverse extension of the same idea; protect society from the bad people.

you're not allowed to use social media in US prisons. not sure whether facebook is cooperating with law enforcement here, or if it's some misguided attempt to prevent account hijackings. a person without access to their accounts would be particularly vulnerable to having their account hacked.

Federal prisons? State prisons? If state prisons, all 50 states?

Inmates do not have first amendment rights. Courts were routinely ordering Facebook to censor them. You don’t pay lawyers and engineers to handle a stream of menial, identical work orders. You pay them to develop a structured process to be operated in a call center type environment.

Why is this Facebook's problem, even? It's up to prisons to ensure that somebody who shouldn't be using Facebook, isn't.

It’s typically visitors on the outside posting on their behalf.

> Inmates do not have first amendment rights.

Which part of the first amendment states that?

(OK, it doesn't - the first amendment, and indeed the constitution, limits what government can do, not what people can do)

Don’t inmates communications with the outside world need to be monitored?

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