How you can get banned from Facebook permanently | Hacker News Reader

How you can get banned from Facebook permanently

elliott.org

156 pointsGNU_James129 comments

> Unfortunately, for safety and security reasons, we can’t provide additional information as to why your account was disabled. We appreciate your understanding, as this decision is final. (Facebook team)

Exactly this should be outlawed. Every action of this kind should be accompanied with clear and very specific (including time and date) specification of the reason.

> What kind of %#*& customer service is this that it takes over five months to even try to get ahold of a real human being to help with a problem!!!! This is horrible.

As well as this - not a single banning/unbanning/whatever decision should be automated. An automatic system can only pint to what is suspicious.

> And the unique nature of Facebook makes this type of case impossible to mediate.

It is not unique. And everything has been unique at first anyway. We just need to define and regulate this kind of service.

Nevertheless users who are stupid enough to actually rely on Facebook without having backup communication channels and backup picture storage just have to be educated about this is stupid. Whenever somebody says they want to communicate via the Messenger I don't even consider this because this is just insane, even to install this app is crazy. Sadly, too many people say this nowadays.

Have you never been involved in an effort to counter spam, either via email or comments?

Leaving aside how incredibly illegal your proposal is, it's also unworkable and would make the internet worse if even attempted.

If I have to communicate to every bad actor how I identified them as a bad actor, that only helps them sidestep my prevention mechanisms.

I'm sure it can be frustrating to face a blank wall, but fortunately, Facebook is a waste of time that nobody should be using anyway.

Would it be acceptable if the government set up a regulatory body that could force Facebook et al to communicate why a user was banned? Here's how I imagine it would work:

1. User gets banned by Facebook without an explanation

2. User asks Facebook for an explanation

3. Facebook declines to answer

4. User goes to the government regulatory body with a complaint

5. Regulatory body forces Facebook to provide a reason

6. Facebook tells user what they violated and when

Step #5 would allow the regulatory body to require identification to make sure that the user is under their jurisdiction (or you just have to show up in person). This would allow them to identify bad actors and would decrease the chance that the system could be abused.

Obviously this should only apply to platforms/services that are beyond a certain size (>1M users?). Also, I wouldn't be surprised if some consumer protection agency doesn't already have powers akin to this.

I can easily see that being abused to only force an explanation if the one banned is a politician, and the bannee(?) is the same political party as those in charge. Not to mention that the FTC is already a thing.

I wonder if something similar could be accomplished with a group helping people file specific Freedom Of Information requests. I feel like the reason would have to legally be in there

Acceptable, sure. As burdens go it isn't crazy.

Useful/good idea is one for the debate floor. I imagine in this case, for example, Facebook would send Mr. Birch an email telling him that he distributed nude photos via Messenger and they have a 0 tolerance policy towards that. That doesn't really move the situation forward from what is already being publicly written about in an article. It increases the cost of competing with Facebook too, which is probably an own goal given the outcomes the regulation is trying to achieve.

There are a lot of things in life that do not need a legislative response. Being banned from Facebook is one of them.

I dislike the direction for society you are proposing. Each bad actor should absolutely know how and why they are identified as a bad actor. How else could they possibly even attempt to defend themselves as not bad actors. The same kind of idiocy is allowed in banks now under the guise of BSA. The only difference is, banks typically face much harder restrictions and are actually heavily regulated. For that reason, I believe the parent's post makes more sense than a blanket 'it is too hard for us to do it'.

In short, you are proposing that we penalize good actors for actions of bad actors for no other reason that it creates inconvenience for a platform. That is not acceptable.

Well, the good actors misclassified as bad actors should be told, so they can fix it. The bad actors should be told nothing, because that only helps them become more effective bad actors.

How you differentiate, I dunno. That's the problem.

I am not certain this is the actual problem though. It is not about misclassification. It is about the underlying system.

Would you argue that a person accused of crime X should be told nothing about the nature of their transgression? To me it sounds very problematic.

Would you be willing to live in society that has a legal system that works like this?

Some times you might have done/said something bad according to the context of a particular culture or rules of a particular platform (and even inflicted some actual harm or danger on somebody this way) but have no idea what, even after re-reading the rules.

I have been banned from a couple of forums/groups and I really have no clue about what might be the reasons but I don't insist there were none.

You suppose that a bad actor at one point will always stay a bad actor in the future.

How exactly does it help when Facebook tells a bad actor what part of the publicly available guidelines were violated?

Why can't Facebook just have a hotline/chat that can verify a user's identity and tell them more, preferrable in less than 5 months of spamming their email?

And in the case of a permanent ban the user should at least be able to download all their account data; this feature is already implemented for compliance with GDPR anyway and the online platform wouldn't lose anything by at least not making pictures etc. inaccessible forever.

And how do you propose to unilaterally and absolutely define what a "bad actor" is?

Whatever. It is known that it often is sufficient to reach a real human at Facebook or Google to find out it was a false positive and unban you. But actually reaching a real human who would check your case consciously and competently is extremely hard - you have to know one personally or pay some agency (the lowest price quote I have seen was $500) and hope for the best.

What actually seems going on here (as well as on YouTube with copyright stuff) is a wild misuse of AI technologies. Like if the police was giving people life sentences just because they had a weird accent or suspicious face triggering a neural network signal - perhaps deploying such measures on global scale could help catch a lot of murderers but undoubtedly it would also ruin many innocent people and this can hardly be considered OK.

So we don't even have to regulate Facebook in particular, just regulate large-scale AI usage.

> If I have to communicate to every bad actor how I identified them as a bad actor, that only helps them sidestep my prevention mechanisms.

It really depends on the level of detail you give, and how timely you are.

"You were banned for bot-like activity" and no further clarification at least lets the user know this was definitely in error, and gives actual spammers very little information.

"You were banned for bot-like activity due to low activity and engagement" gives spammers a bit more information, but only the really incompetent ones haven't figured that out by now - you might not want to advertise it for the first month or two, but real users might not realize they need to be fairly active after making an account (I'm from the older generation where we'd lurk for a while to observe social norms before commenting)

"Your account was banned for posting nudes / racism / etc." actively increases the effectiveness of those policies since now people will be more worried about edge cases and less willing to get near the topic.

Since you're using automated tools to catch people, you can also automatically communicate this. If you're really paranoid about bad actors, you could even hold on to that information and only include it in an automated email when someone contacts support (and then only replies to that first automated response actually go to your REAL support process)

> If I have to communicate to every bad actor how I identified them as a bad actor, that only helps them sidestep my prevention mechanisms.

If you don't, you're the bad actor. If specific actions lead to a ban, the way to sidestep that is to not do those actions. If you don't even look at the actions but some BS meta stuff, or have wishy-washy rules you enforce randomly, you're the bad actor.

Have you never been involved in an effort to counter spam, either via email or comments?

It is often the reason for corporation like fb and google for closing account. It is totally BS. Spam is NOT a big deal compare to censorship. Any competent developer can use Bayesian algorithm to counter spam on a personal level, and the code can be just sitting on the client side. The big problem is these data company won't be able to get your data.

Not getting tech support lowers the profit margin for the big corp. However, automation and AI are NOT a replace for good customer support. Get some freaking real humane tech support in relation to the number of active user you have Google/FB. This is one of reason why the world hates you.

> If I have to communicate to every bad actor how I identified them as a bad actor, that only helps them sidestep my prevention mechanisms.

If an innocent gets banned and there's no explanation or way to reach anyone, you're Josef in The Trial.

Have programmers and marketing people in the Valley ever read any Kafka or Orwell?

If they have, it would seem they’ve been taken as a template rather than lesson in authority and bureaucracy gone wrong.

Or they just ignore the likeness and go about as if nothing.

If meeting these requirements is too difficult for your organization, then that's a sign your organization isn't mature enough to take on the responsibility of running this service in the first place.

An oil refinery is able to make it another year because they dump all of their waste into the river behind the factory. Proper disposal is expensive and difficult. Is this fine?

There's a very valid argument that rules like this would just entrench existing players and hurt startup competition. I'm fine with this.

Running globally distributed, massively critical services like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc do, is a similarly massive responsibility. Parler incited an insurrection. Telegram is used to incite violence. Jeeze, plenty of this happens on Facebook & Twitter too. We're far, far past the golden days of scrappy startups deserving to be able to connect the whole planet without consequences.

The only reason why the oil refinery metaphor sounds so obvious is because we understand the consequences of dumping toxic waste. We understand them, today. We did not understand them 100 years ago. We lived through the consequences, and built laws to dampen them. The internet is, what, thirty years old? Its a baby. We don't understand its impact on society; we want to believe its positive, but we can't say for sure, and there's a ton of evidence pointing to it being just as negative as positive.

GDPR is a step in this direction; it does enable existing players to reinforce their moat against scrappy startups. Its especially harsh when one considers that it happened in Europe, which has almost no homegrown mega-tech sector like the US and China do. But, its still necessary. You're saying we should enable tech companies to act with essential impunity because it would be difficult for them to run their services in a way which is ethical and just. I refuse to sacrifice ethics on the altar of capitalism; I don't care how hard it is, and I don't care how much it costs them.

As for the legality: Many things are legal, or illegal, until they aren't. The funny thing about laws are, we make them. They're not etched into a big stone on a mountain, forever static.

> If meeting these requirements is too difficult for your organization, then that's a sign your organization isn't mature enough to take on the responsibility of running this service in the first place.

Or you just use a wrong business model.

In the world of today I can see no reason why Facebook (I mean as a social network, not just as an advertisement and analytics store) could not be a paid service. People pay for Netflix anyway while they would probably choose Facebook if required to choose and keep access to just one of the 2 services.

are you saying that it's illegal to regulate facebook?

> Every action of this kind should be accompanied with clear and very specific (including time and date) specification of the reason.

I can see Facebooks side of this - when you give a specific reason, you open yourself up to a lot of counter-arguments, possibly outraging news articles for a bad formulation or a not fully specific reasoning and you give intel to spammers on how you detected them. Additionally, having service reps find and cite the exact violated terms costs a lot of time and it would not even matter - FB is free to ban you if it wants, the specific reasoning would be more of a FYI.

And, of course, in cases like this, where the ban was presumably unjustified or unnecessary, this is rather cruel. I fully agree. But on the other hand, FB bans probably hit bots 99% of the time and, even if not, are usually justified [0]. Opening up such a large attack surface and spending large amounts of money for the few cases where it hits a innocent (?) person is just not viable, and, as bad as it is, I can understand Facebook here.

The moral of the story is, as mentioned in the article, that the actual error was to rely on Facebook.

[0] I have obviously no hard data on this, but if this would happen a lot, it would be quite bad press. So I'm very sure that FB would tackle this problem if users would actually become scared of a false ban.

> I can see Facebooks side of this - when you give a specific reason, you open yourself up to a lot of counter-arguments, possibly outraging news articles for a bad formulation or a not fully specific reasoning and you give intel to spammers on how you detected them.

If the counter-arguments are reasonable, then Facebook _should_ be attacked.

> Additionally, having service reps find and cite the exact violated terms costs a lot of time and it would not even matter - FB is free to ban you if it wants, the specific reasoning would be more of a FYI.

I think the implicit implication is that Facebook should _not_ legally be allowed to ban you only if it wants. I would personally get behind such legislation. Sure if Facebook were just a social platform that's one thing, but it is tied to other services (e.g. Oculus) and is an identity provider for many other services. I don't believe Facebook should be able to have it both ways.

> If the counter-arguments are reasonable, then Facebook _should_ be attacked.

Yes. But this will probably end in a lot of arguing, which is good for spammers, offenders and innocent alike, but bad for Facebook in practically all cases - so seen from their side, it is all downsides, especially when the innocent make up a small proportion. Don't get me wrong - I don't think the result is good, but I can understand FB acting the way it does.

> I think the implicit implication is that Facebook should _not_ legally be allowed to ban you only if it wants. [...]

I'd agree to that, but I think we need to treat carefully to not create something wrong here. Forcing FB to allow you to have an account might lead to required identity documents across the industry, for example, which would hurt privacy even more.

OTOH, FB should not be able to simply "void" your hardware. Steam and the Nintendo Switch, for example, only ban you from multiplayer and social functions, but you can access anything you bought still (I think). That would be a reasonable solution for the Oculus as well. Generally, removing the need for an account from hardware by legislation, unless proven to be required, seems good.

Still, this would not help the guy in this article and I actually don't think we should force Facebook to allow anyone to ping random people or justify retracting free services. He should not have relied on Facebook as backup or sole point of contact. Yes, FBs conduct looks bad[0], but if he would've been realistic about the problems of a free services, the ban would be more of an inconvenience.

[0] I don't want to take sides here without knowing the details of the story.

> FB bans probably hit bots 99% of the time

Greatly doubt that given overt spam being so prevalent.

Confirmation bias.

If, hypothetically, 99% of bots were banned and there's enough lingering, you would doubt it to be true.

Although, I tend to agree with you about spam prevalence. I've reported dozens of spam/scams/fake accounts and almost every time, I'm told that the post/account "doesn't violate [their] community standards."

|Nevertheless users who are stupid enough to actually rely on Facebook without having backup communication channels and backup picture storage just have to be educated about this is stupid. Whenever somebody says they want to communicate via the Messenger I don't even consider this because this is just insane, even to install this app is crazy. Sadly, too many people say this nowadays.|

This isn't necessarily the issue now that Facebook has linked their hardware platform (Occulus) to your Facebook account.

I'm glad they did it right before I've almost bought Occulus - so I just am not buying it (even though I actually have a Facebook account I occasionally use - like once in some years).

I wanted an Occulus and was considering getting one when they dropped this nugget of BS. I dropped my Facebook account years ago and am not reupping my account, so .... No Occulus for me =/

>What kind of %#*& customer service is this that it takes over five months to even try to get ahold of a real human being to help with a problem!!!! This is horrible.

If you aren't buying ads on FB, you aren't a customer,no matter how you look at it.

Is there a good alternative to Facebook where you actually are a customer and treated accordingly? I don't mind paying a reasonable subscription to access a social network if it really satisfies me.

Outlawed?!

Facebook is not an essential service; it is not a monopoly; and access to it is not a human right.

By freedom of association, Facebook ought to be able to drop users arbitrarily as they see fit.

You are correct but there's an interesting question here with ramifications worth thinking through. Would we stick to this view if 90% of the world's population used it instead of the current 34%? Is there any % at which we might question your three statements? And if selected, why that figure? Seems odd that one person, a single smart lucky entrepreneur, would continue to be the moral arbiter for postings by its users irrespective of any view taken by democratically-elected governments anywhere. Of course one trusts that soon, alternatives will arise and allow those who want to, to jump ship.

Alternatives have been around for decades: https://friendi.ca/

People can't jump ship because of network effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect That's why you see mass exoduses, like what happened with WhatsApp; there's no interoperability between Facebook and the rest of the social media space, so you lose contact with nearly every Facebook user when you leave Facebook. You can put up with a lot when it's the only way to talk to your family.

By the same standard of freedom of association, users should have a say over whether Facebook collects any data about them I.e. no shadow profiles, and ability to sever one’s relationship with Facebook and purge all data.

> Facebook is not an essential service; it is not a monopoly

Depending on your social circles, it de facto is, and refusing to use it or being refused from it will result in being excluded from real-life social events.

What do you mean outlawed? Facebook.com is private commercial property, they can define rules and decide which customers they work with. The only thing they cannot do is restrict users by categories, protected by law.

The solution is to decentralize and connect our own facebooks.

1. Due to network effects, there's an argument that some types of online services are natural monopolies [0], and should be regulated the way we do for electricity, water, etc. There are reasonable arguments against such regulation (in any domain); but it's potentially within the purview of the state to set "rules of the road" for the market, which in this context could mean digital due process, algorithmic transparency, interoperability, etc.

2. While I don't disregard Barry Goldwater's argument against the Civil Rights Act [1], the fact is that right now we do actively interfere in the marketplace to mandate transactions not be constrained by "protected categories": race/gender/creed/etc. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to proactively extend this protection to include political alignments or even epistemic opinions.

(One of the things I find most curious about CRA, is that while most of its categories are "immutable characteristics", one's faith is more a matter of choice than genetics. If I claimed my religion was "I worship $POLITICAL_PARTY", would it then be protected? What is the scope of what defines a "faith"? In a neighboring FB banning instance [2], Lincoln Cannon even describes how his inciting post advocating decentralization derives from his Mormon beliefs.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1964/06/19/archives/text-of-goldwate...

[2] https://lincoln.metacannon.net/2021/01/facebook-disabled-my-...

How would you actually ensure that they aren't (for example) banning customers of a protected race or other class if they refuse to provide any information on why a user was banned? All you can do is act on faith if their policies are secret and their decisions are also secret.

This is less far-fetched than you might imagine. TikTok moderators were ordered to prevent disabled users from appearing in feeds [1], which in practice is blatant discrimination against a protected class - but you'd never know about it directly since even if you figured out you were hidden from feeds, why would they answer unless they were forced to?

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/2/20991843/tiktok-bytedance...

> What do you mean outlawed? Facebook.com is private commercial property, they can define rules and decide which customers they work with. The only thing they cannot do is restrict users by categories, protected by law.

It's pretty clear the GP wants to change the laws to make such actions by Facebook illegal. Facebook is private of course, they still have to follow the law. Are you saying you don't know specifically what the change in the laws would be (of course we can't expect the GP to have all the details worked out) or do you not understand the concept that we as a society can change the law to regulate Facebook's actions?

Facebook.com is not a simple private commercial property anymore. It obviously has other attributes which make it different from any other. It's too influential and too important for too many people.

So in other words, a company that does too well and is too successful at making a product popular should lose the same basic property rights and freedom of association every other person and organization is given under the constitution, as punishment for their success

To be fair, anti-trust laws are based on that principle. There's nothing inherently wrong (or illegal) with having a billion users, but a company that takes advantage of that power is a bad thing.

Perhaps. Id this gives them too much power over too many people. Facebook isn't something everyone uses just because it's fun. It's the standard way to communicate, the standard way to identify yourself and the major political medium for common people.

Fortnite is also important to a lot of people, that doesn't make it actually important.

Facebook acts as an identity provider similar to gmail. That is pretty different from Fortnite, losing your account could mean you lose access to tons of important sites.

I'd argue as a general rule that there are no important websites that require Facebook to access your account. Also, you can typically use an e-mail to recover access to an account that you used social media to authenticate with.

> I'd argue as a general rule that there are no important websites that require Facebook to access your account.

Many local governments, for example, use Facebook and no other mechanism nowadays.

I don't agree with this but that is reality. Until you change reality, you have to deal with it.

I'm in the Philippines, and the local electric co-op does not have its own domain, but a Facebook Page. You cannot find out who to contact without the information on this page. Essentially a public utility prefers to use Facebook than to spend time and money developing their own site.

Now, this is bad for many reasons, but the point is in many parts of the developed world, people do think of Facebook as the internet.

This makes me think Facebook and alike websites should be legally forced to randomly blackout particular countries for months once a year so people would learn to avoid relying on them.

when Facebook can highlight lies about a candidate and allow them to perpetuate without issue... and then suppress lies about another candidate with extreme prejudice...

Saying that a company that can literally affect global elections based on whims of political people at the top... isn't important?

the scope of Facebook in no way shape or form compares to Fortnite... unless fortnight is enforcing rules for one group but not another and fortnite affects elections and the global conversation.

Strawman here: Let's say there was a large corporation that owned an airline. Can they not you on the airline because you are a spanish matador? Airlines leak into our tax system: we protect the air space, fund traffic control, etc. This is where I get pissed off. If you are this large you are no longer a "private commercial property".

Don't know why you're downvoted, your comment is definitely interesting.

> also have several family members that I can only get in contact with through Facebook.

This is a key failure imho. You find a long lost cousin, classmate, friend. First thing I would do is say "hey, what's your number" or "let's jump on a skype call" (come on, almost everyone has skype). Basically establish an 'independent' communication channel.

That is a bit uncharitable to call users stupid in this context. From the story it seems that there is not even a warning before the rug is completely pull out and burned.

Every action of this kind should be accompanied with clear and very specific (including time and date) specification of the reason.

GDPR gives you the right to have any algorithmic decision explained, people just need to start using it and complaining to the commissioners.

mbasic.facebook.com <- (you can use messages feature w/o app)

Facebook appears to store the personal data of banned people indefinitely, you can log in a year from now and you'll be greeted with the same message. There is a link to download your account data, but they offer no option to permanently delete it.

Stripping you from your right to exercise control over your personal data is illegal in the EU.

They don’t stop you from exercising control over your personal data. Try sending an email or formal legal request to FB and see if your data is still there in 31 days.

If true, that practice is also illegal in the EU, because requesting account deletion must be as accessible as creating an account.

You can permanently delete your facebook account: https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674

You cannot access the link to request permanent deletion once your Facebook account is banned. The web is full of unsolved threads with people trying to find a way to permanently delete a banned Facebook account.

Correct.

I have a Facebook account that was banned three years ago, and I just tried, I can still create a download archive with all of the personal data on it, with no way to access the account deletion capability.

Woops.

Maybe I should inform my country, who just passed GDPR-like legislation, that there is a test case against a company everyone hates.

Win win!

Does that delete the data?

"After 30 days, your account and all your information will be permanently deleted"

And does that delete the data?

The last published DPC audit found that it does [1]. There's not much reason to subject themselves to huge fines and lie about it, a very small fraction of facebook users delete anything.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20171218060100/https://www.datap...

If they no longer have your information are you no longer banned? Is data about your ban deleted?

Does it delete the coefficients?

Instagram doesn't seem to. I deleted my account a few years ago, but they still notify me with the updated terms of use. I assume my account is still there, regardless of GDPR.

"Your account has been permanently disabled for not following the Facebook Community Standards."

One problem that is less-discussed is that Facebook is absolutely not a community. It's a collection of millions of communities, and even then just one medium for them, which all have different norms, standards, goals, beliefs, and types of people.

Facebook's position is inherently unwinnable because they will be hated regardless of how they attempt to moderate their platform. It is all too easy for us to say 'just do better moderation' without realizing how intractable that problem is, due to 1) differing communities/people, and 2) scales in the billions of users (for example, imagine one employee is tasked with monitoring content from 10,000 people. If you needed to moderate 2 billion people, you would need 2B/10K = 200,000 full-time employees just for moderation. Hiring enough employees is also not enough, as they need to be consistent with each other as well).

This isn't intended to be a defense of Facebook, but rather just another point demonstrating that centralized platforms for all of humanity are not the right solution for how we should communicate.

If it can’t be done without harming society then it should be destroyed. This is why we don’t have nuclear powered cruise missiles, by the way.

This sort of aggressive banning over sexual content seems to have really taken off since the passage of FOSTA/SESTA a couple years ago. Social media sites were never libertine, but they were at least more relaxed about sexual content before anything that might turn out to be linked to sex trafficking was carved out of the section 230 safe harbor.

They're dealing with a wildly asymmetric risk profile. It would be almost impossible for them to reliably distinguish legitimate sexual content from illegal content related to trafficking in a way that scales to the size of their platforms. But even one slip-up in doing so could expose them to serious criminal liability. So, while I agree that these policies are wildly non-linear, I don't see them having any realistic choice in the matter. A puritanical value system has effectively been forced upon them by federal legislation.

I lost my Google account because I changed my phone number, and when I logged onto it using another device it asked me to verify myself by inputting the code from an SMS message, which I couldn't do. I went through their automated account recovery process and tried to get in touch with a human to the best of my ability, but no luck after hours of effort.

It really sucks, I wish there was I way I could've paid $50 to them so that a real human could review my case, I'd be happy to make the payment given that it's a free service and I realize that mistakes like this can happen. But I guess they'd be criticized if they were to implement something like this, not to mention the incentive to start blocking many more accounts.

As it stands, the $ value of each customer is less than the cost associated with manually reviewing cases, so a financial decision is being made. But I wonder if it's a bit short-sighted given the PR and goodwill that could come from doing it properly. Given their monopoly status it probably doesn't factor much into their decision making, though.

> not to mention the incentive to start blocking many more accounts

I’ve seen this simplistic “incentive” thinking in many many arguments of this kind recently. I don’t see why this would at all be the case here. Do you think the team responsible for this service will be graded on the total amount of fines collected as one of their OKRs? What does the chain of decision making from top to bottom look like for that to be the case? Not everything is as straightforward as revenue = more of that thing.

You're right that there's not a good reason to expect incentive to block people, a priori, even though it's vaguely plausible.

I do expect that they would certainly be accused that that's their motive whenever someone gets blocked unfairly, which could lead to some bad PR, notwithstanding whether that's what's actually going on.

From the article:

> 1) Facebook is a free service. Users are not customers. And although Birch was outraged by the “terrible customer service” he received from Facebook, he shouldn’t have been. Facebook is providing an online social community free of charge to the user. The Facebook Team is not a “customer service team,” and users should not expect the type of personalized attention a complaint would receive from a company of which they are actually paying customers.

> 2) When you sign up with Facebook, you agree to its terms and conditions. If you violate any of those terms, you can get banned — with no clear-cut methods of appealing the decision.

> 3) Facebook doesn’t owe you an account. There are no current laws that require Facebook to allow anyone to participate.

Please try to make your friends, family, circles understand this, and offer an alternative by setting up interest based services for them. Let that be a messaging service (Prosody XMPP server + Conversations on Android or Siskin on iOS); an image board (Pixelfed); a file sharing service (nextcloud); an email server (mail-in-a-box); we can do it, we can move them. Appeal to them being their friendly neighbourhood IT person/sysadmin, and that if they have any problems, they know an actual face to turn to with their problems.

The network effect is somewhat overrated in the light of interests, especially niche ones. Give people what they want - image of grandkids for grantparents, etc - but in exchange, ask them to use your service.

"You aren’t a customer of Facebook" Is this still valid for Oculus users, that bought apps from the app store? They paid, so they are customers, right?

The quest2 was cool. Infact I was going to start developing apps for it, but I decided to return it because you HAVE to connect to facebook and people are getting banned left and right for "bad behavior" which could be as little as dropping an "f-bomb"

Ban reasons also include making a Facebook account just for the Quest and not using it for anything else.

This has got to be illegal. It sounds like a bait & switch to me. I truly hope that there's a class action lawsuit underway...

Turns out folks are trying to rally one, and that it's specifically illegal in Germany https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jht6kx/class_action...

Ya, thanks to FB, VR in the mainstream is effectively dead.

I think is effectively delayed. Sooner or later someone else will develop competing products. Both Microsoft and Sony have a stake in this game.

There's also a nascent jailbreak community that will eventually crack it.

They already did, but I'm not into voiding my warranties.

The Vive exists. Windows Mixed Reality from a dozen vendors exists. This misstep only affects Oculus.

The Quest is the only device that appeals to a broad market. Vive is for PC gamers only.

"Unfortunately, for safety and security reasons, we can’t provide additional information as to why your account was disabled. We appreciate your understanding, as this decision is final." Could not have been better formulated by Kafka.

Well, yes, superficially a lot of rejections feel like Kafka in that sense.

The difference is, of course, that Kafka's protagonist gets stabbed to death after his conviction.

the bigger question is if they stop collecting data on you if you're banned ? ;)

If so sign me up. I quit using their platform years ago and haven’t missed it. But I’m sure my information is still being collected anyways.

Of course not

Fairly certain they have to in the EU. Given that you always have a right to have your data deleted I assume they'll just delete the account after a ban.

There is no way for them to delete all the shadow profiles that they haven't conclusively linked to your real-life identity, even though they already contain enough information to make it identifiable if someone were to really try.

I call bullshit. I’ve regularly sent nude photos and full on videos using Facebook messenger. I’m also a member of many group chats and private Facebook groups where this kind of content is shared.

Facebook's content and ad moderation is known to be aleatory, as is anything related to appeals or contacting representatives. My personal suspicion is that the company is both technically incompetent and has confused internal handling and supervision.

It's no problem as long as you don't rely with your business on them, i.e., as long as you don't rely on Facebook ads, messenger, your Facebook page, or any other paid or free service they offer for your business.

Weird, I'm pretty sure I've sent and received nudes recently via FB messenger and nothing happened.

Unfortunately, there are no simple or direct instructions to follow in the article - just hints.

It sounds like the meat of the article is:

> “After a concert, I logged onto Facebook and was talking to a friend,” Birch recalled. “I was on my laptop and I accidentally sent a partial nude photo. A few minutes later, I received an alert that Facebook blocked me.”

I'm not adventurous enough to try this, but that sounds like the reason. It could also not be and the banned person is leaving out information.

The rest of the article is detailing the massively one-side "appeals" process and how it did nothing to help.

The guy's actions after getting professionals involved may have guaranteed that even if they're was a chance he completely eliminated it. He'd better avoid any actual legal trouble because he's clearly shown that he's incapable of SHUTTING THE F UP and letting paid counsel work.

On a related note re: Lincoln Cannon's Twitter thread, there was at least one response saying '[yeah they banned me for no reason as well]' where just looking at the profile pic with a QAnon quote was enough to give some indication of why...

The 'reasons' given in the article are vague and onesided.

Now that they have tied Oculus accounts to Facebook accounts, they may have to revisit this policy of arbitrarily banning accounts from all services unilaterally and without explanation. The headsets from Oculus are not inexpensive and I imagine some people end up downloading a fair number of applications for their equipment. Regardless of their click-through terms of service, they will have a more traditional relationship with the Oculus customers.

I tried to read this article, but instead got greeted by "I am human" checkbox, then (after successfully completing captcha) "Error 1020 Access denied". Article opens just fine if i use EU or US proxy. But when i try to access it directly, or through my work VPN, or through russian proxy, it's Access Denied.

It seems that authors of the article how "facebook can ban you for whatever reason" banned whole country.

In a very similar situation, I posted a pair of "Waxed Flesh" boots on eBay from my 13 year (albeit rarely used) account. They had plenty of pictures, waxed flesh is a very well known term with regards to boot leathers, but within 2 minutes, my long term eBay account was permanently terminated with no chance for recourse.

Besides it being exceedingly difficult to find someone to talk to about this, when I finally did in the chat service they offer, as soon as I brought up my account they terminated the chat with some copy/paste message about how they cannot talk to me about it as it might compromise their fraud detection. People I've talked to have mentioned that it might be due to the fact that there was "Flesh" in the title, but that is a valid description of the good I was trying to sell.

I guess what I'm trying to say, is that it felt entirely arbitrary, I had no recourse with regards to the discussion, and eBay is similarly shitty with regards to service.

One the plus side facebook finally gave people the ability to permanently delete your account.

Today i listened to a show on German radio https://www1.wdr.de/radio/wdr5/sendungen/europamagazin/index... that was discussing some planned regulation regarding the rights of social networks. It included the right to appeal bans and to even sue the networks. It seems like something along these lines is a necessary evil.

By the way, what if somebody who wants to play a prank on you steals your phone and sends a porn picture or some hate speech to somebody in the Facebook messenger? Will this block you from Facebook for life? Will cops arrive and jail you for sexual harassment or whatever? This seems like something quite possible to happen e.g. at school.

I'm in a similar situation right now where I am unable to create an Instagram account. I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts nearly a decade ago. Recently, I've been searching for artists to commission for work, but everyone uses Insta for their portfolios now instead of an openly accessible website. Browsing Insta without an account is a PITA because you constantly get blocked from content until you log in. So I caved and tried creating an account.

Go to the registration screen, enter all of my info, and submit. Get a weird error message along the lines of "your information is incorrect; please enter your phone number to verify your info." Enter my phone number; "your information is incorrect." Get booted back to the login screen. Try to log in using the credentials I just entered and get an invalid email address message. Try to create an account again with that email; "that email address can not be used to create an account."

So I tried two more times, first registering with all the correct personal info and a different email address. Same result. Try again with yet another email address that I have never used to sign up for an account, this time entering random personal information, using a different web browser, and connecting to the hotspot on my phone instead of my wifi. Still the same result. Ask my significant other to log in on my browser with her account; works just fine.

Funny, why do they claim to know my personal information better than me? How would they even know all of that information? I don't know what criteria they are using to decide that I am not a valid person and therefore not allowed to sign up for their service. The only option I have left is to create a new email address and try registering an account using it and some fake identity.

I personally don't understand why anyone feels they have a "right" to use Facebook, or even the right to expect a statement as to why Facebook does not allow them to register. They're a corporation offering a service in exchange for data-mining everything you do, why wouldn't they be free to choose who gets to use the service, and why would they have to justify it?

If you, the reader, launched a website and allowed anyone to register and use the service for free, do you feel that you then would be obligated to offer the service to anyone, or that if you denied them service, that you should be required to explain exactly why?

Presumably the answer is no, but I'm guessing most people feel that there's a difference between Facebook and just one guy launching a website. I would question where that line is drawn though, at which point, at how many active users did Facebook become public domain?

If everyone stopped using Facebook then the problems with Facebook would stop

> "Facebook is not a photo storage service."

That doesn't matter, what matters is how users perceive it, almost everyone I know keep telling me that it is (if it walk like a duck...)

If not customers, then what else could they be? Data entry workers?

That just makes Facebook’s behaviour all the more egregious. Perhaps there needs to be a social data a try worker’s union.

Seems like a good situation for an Oversight Board appeal.

> She is a consumer advocate... and psychotherapist

I guess you would have to be, in that line of work, wouldn't you?

"Customer service" lol

You're not the customer.

Something to aspire to

You are not Facebook's customer. You are the product.

There are clear antitrust issues here. The consequence of his misbehavior using Messenger includes no longer being allowed to use a competitor of Messenger (WhatsApp), along with Facebook, Instagram, Oculus, etc. These services are leaders in their respective markets and are unrelated to each other except they are all controlled by the same guy. This is why too much power in two few hands is bad for capitalism and humanity, and one of the major reasons antitrust law exists.

> too much power in two few hands is bad for capitalism

too much power in too few hands is an inherent feature of capitalism.

If you’re still using Facebook at this point:

You were warned.

i banned from facebook, because i m posting against islamic terrorist in my country.. they thought i am supporting them.. stupid.. -_- no longer using facebook now..

previous case was: - sharing meme that making a joke about hitler with comment "heil hitler", they thought i was supporting hitler -_- - sharing meme about feminism (2 person holding panel female: "men are stupid", male: "woman are equal to men"), they thought i was doing hate speech..

well, if admins can't even understand a joke, why would i stay there anyway.. (i have another account that i deactivate after got decision about the permanent ban)

I was banned permanently from facebook in 2017.

my crime I downloaded a twitter embedded video and uploaded it to my facebook account , it was for copyright violation.

losing account was bad but worse was losing 10+ years of posts and thousands of photos which I had uploaded of my kids. I never took backups .

I appealed multiple times also tries asking help from facebook employees, nothing materialised. I never got my backup .

I now have multiple hard disks for my backups

I posted this today in another discussion, sorry for the spamming but I think it's relevant to this one as well:

We need laws that: 1) Will force social media companies to provide, publicly, reasons for their blockings and takedowns, potentially exposing themselves to libel charges.

2) Allow individuals and organisations whose accounts have been blocked to download all their contents within a period of time after the blocking or removal happened.

3) Enforce standards so that the downloaded contents can be easily uploaded in bulk to alternative platforms.

You can already download your data if your FB account is banned.

I can still try to log in today and get access to my data as a download, but can do nothing else. Was perma banned a couple of years ago when I decided to return to FB and re-friended all my friends from before in the course of a few hours, and promptly got banned. For bot like behaviour, I assume, I never found out the cause!

The data itself is innocuous posts about what I’m eating and drinking, nothing political or otherwise objectionable in any way...

Amusingly, their recruiters have also approached me a few times after that via email and LinkedIn, they must not check if a prospect is banned.

I have no idea, but the article mentions people distressed because they have lost their pictures. ("if you should find your account disabled [...] you won’t be able to get your photos back"). Now in the EU there is the GDPR that forces anyone who has your personal data to provide it on request- but I'm not sure it would prevent FB from deleting it right after the ban.

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