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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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!

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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