Tell HN: My wife was banned from WhatsApp without reason or recourse | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: My wife was banned from WhatsApp without reason or recourse

205 pointstempestn211 comments

Like many people, my wife and I use WhatsApp to keep in touch with various family and friends who prefer that platform. I actually use it more than she does—she basically just chats with close family and a few friends from highschool.

A few days ago, she opened the app to find the message,

> This account is not allowed to use WhatsApp > Chats are still on this device.

This didn't make any sense, as she only uses it to chat with family and friends and certainly hadn't broken any terms. Found the option to appeal and submitted that. A day later, the app now says

> This account cannot use WhatsApp > We've completed our review and found this account's activity goes against WhatsApp's terms of service

There's no way she's actually broken any terms, so it appears this is some kind of mistake, but given the speed of the "review", I doubt any human has actually looked at it. She's tried contacting them via their contact page, but given the review is already "complete", I'm not too hopeful.

Our only guess as to what could have caused this is that a week or so before the ban she received a spam message sent to a giant group and marked it as spam. Perhaps somehow all numbers in that group ended up associated with the spamming? Regardless, pretty frustrating situation since she has a couple of long-running chats with family and friend groups that she can no longer participate in. Always fun to be at the whims of the algorithm.

Posting in case there's anything to the connection between marking a message as spam and getting blocked (maybe it's safer to just mute spam messages instead), as well as on the off chance someone from Facebook ends up reading this and can help.

View on HN

I often wish that there was a law that says the larger a company is, the higher the standards it has to be held to.

So a billion dollar company that locks out a user and does not correctly and quickly handle an appeal would get a giant fee that really hurts.

Talk about a massive slippery slope.

This is usually the case, although through the form of safe-harbor exclusions which allow smaller companies to get away with more.

If this is the "usual" case, why do we never hear about big companies ever getting any kind of regulatory fine that actually hurts?

A fine for what? Meta has no obligations to provide service to anyone other than their advertisers who've purchased such service.

Why does the size of the company matter?

Resources available (fiat and people) for meeting regulatory requirements and the relative burden imposed by regulation. There are regulatory risk and compliance teams (finance specially, but also in other spaces) larger than most startups, with mid to high 8 figure budgets.

Meta can afford meeting regulatory requirements imposed by nation states.

Aside from burden on the company, the cost to the user from being arbitrarily locked out of a facebook property is much greater than some random start up.

Because of the impact their actions have on people's lives.

If my local barber tells me "don't come back here ever again", I'll find another barber within 15min walk from my place.

If Facebook bans me, I might lose a way to communicate with hundreds of people, I might lose access to managing my business and talk to my clients. And often there might be very few viable alternatives.

As Facebook and other large companies become dominant in certain areas, their responsibility should grow, too. And banning users based on some algorithmic detection, without the ability to contact human customer support to understand and fix the situation, should not be acceptable.

I just don't want more government regulation, we have enough

Were you equally against the FAA regulating the use of drones around airports?

No, because that's for safety.

What’s a viable alternative?

Don't use whatsapp

What should people use instead that is free and easy to use, has the same features WhatsApp does, and is ubiquitous? Realistic answers only, please.

Signal

Unfortunately Signal does not meet the "ubiquity" criterion, as far fewer people have it installed than WhatsApp. Signal can also terminate your number if they so choose.

Your criteria is arbitrary. Ubiquity is not a necessity, neither is feature parity with WhatsApp. There are dozens of messaging apps and people typically use many different messaging apps, if the communication is worthwhile your friend will install an app to communicate with you.

If that is true, why do some messaging apps gain critical mass, while others are relegated to niche use? I don’t think the data is consistent with your claims.

"Critical mass" is a subjective description, there must always be a most popular platform by definition, but there isn't actually a practical distinction you can point to that contradicts the fact that there are dozens of messaging options.

What do you suggest then? Without regulation we'll allow companies to ban people via algorithms without an option to appeal the decision and talk to actual human being.

We can keep saying "uninstall WhatsApp/Messenger/WeChat!" but for a lot of people this it not viable, because it means cutting social connections or losing clients. There are countries like Spain where WhatsApp is the way to communicate on-line and few people use other IMs.

There are a few things that can change it - either a technology shift (e.g. mobile revolution ended Windows dominance), black swan event (like pandemic that moved everyone to hybrid/remote work), or government regulation. If we don't want the government to intervene, we need to accept that we might be randomly banned by an algorithm and there's nothing we can do about it.

> And often there might be very few viable alternatives.

There are alternatives. If we don't want Facebook in general to monopolize every aspect of our lives, we need to actively refuse being assimilated by the Borg and prioritize these alternatives.

I like that Hacker News idealism.

Ok, your small online store is banned from advertising on Facebook and Instagram. What will you do?

My idealistic answer would be "go back to the drawing board to create a business is not built on someone else's land."

Do you mean advertising or keeping an internet presence? If you mean "internet presence", I'd would use one of the numerous site builders and I would create a pixelfed and mastodon instances to publish content.

If you mean advertising: I'd write a post here about how my account was banned without justification...

None of these options let you change the status quo. It's like arguing about tipping. Whether you like it or not it exists and the social norm doesn't change because of your individual decisions.

You don't need to change the status quo.

You just need to stop contributing to it if you believe that it is harmful to you and you are okay with the consequences of your choices.

I am not walking around with a soapbox telling everyone they should leave FB and Instagram. Instead, I am simply not participating in it and hoping that this can serve as an example for others.

If the value of a social graph with N users is ~N^2. The damage done by restricting access is similarly non-linear.

Because the larger the company, the more they should be able to afford it.

I've tried greenfielding this innovative technique here on HN, it turns out people will defend the world's largest company for a "magic mouse" that needs to be charged upside-down.

So your solution is to fine the cr*p out of it until it becomes a smaller company Hard disagree - in a billion users a few thousands are bound to be misclassified - no ML model (or HUMAN) is 100% accurate

I would rather the company focusses innovation on the next big step rather than incrementally taking care of these few long-tail and corner cases.

Moreover, its the users who make a company big or small, if there are better options users would anyway migrate away - the comment sounds a bit entitled if I am being honest - you want a great product + great customer service, for free. (I don't buy the 'but i am giving them my personal data in return' argument)

Users cannot simply migrate to a competing service, the concept does not apply to messaging or social media, as you have to successfully convince everyone else on planet earth to move with you.

Maybe it should apply. SMS works on any carrier. Why not have an open framework that allows messaging between platforms? The reason: Because walled gardens are more profitable.

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is coming to Europe and with it enforced interoperability of messaging software. Hopefully for 2023/2024. I'm curious to see whether companies will have the gall to implement different behaviours for European consumers and the rest of the world.

Companies implement different behaviors in different markets within the same state within the US; I think you may be giving major corporations too much credit if you suspect that deep down inside they're driven by trivial concerns like shame or genuine concern for customer opinion.

And to think in the Golden Era of the web people scoffed at those who clung on to AOL ... and now look where we are.

This should especially be true for communication services. If you reach a large enough threshold of users, you should be required to offer interoperability with competitors, and have 24/7 support humans available to help out with things like this.

For an essentially free service? Those sound like a pretty high bar.

It's not free. We pay with our data.

That’s free in the way grass is “free” for beef cattle.

If it was "free" then the company would have gone out of business long ago. So it is not free and she is a revenue generator for them. In return she might want some sort of basic support.

Given the market value of the company, then it should be able to comply with basic standards of say decency, honesty and perhaps ... transparency.

And I'd bet a hefty sum that even after they ban you, they continue collecting and selling any data they can still collect from the app installed on your device.

Of course: you gave it willingly if unwittingly.

If it were truly free it would have died many years ago.

A "free" service run by one of the richest and most profitable companies in the world. There should be a high bar.

They are a business, not a charity, so it seems appropriate. Nobody forces them to provide the service for free.

The other argument is that the major messaging platforms have collectively become an essential basic utility, and accordingly carry some responsibility.

Its 'free', and you are the product (Congratulations!). You pay with your metadata (address book). Metadata is invaluable. Facebook knows everyone's connections. I'm even included in someone's address book, even though I don't use WhatsApp or any other Facebook service. I'm not benefiting from Facebook's free services, yet I am the product. It is disgusting, I hate this company, but I can't blame them. They get away with their nefarious crap for fun & profit.

So ask for some money if you need to.

Taking on so many users means you get responsibilities to society that smaller companies don't get.

And of course, WhatsApp used to cost a dollar. A dollar a year, even! So "people wouldn't pay" just isn't true. I for one would gladly pay that just to have it not run by Facebook.

It was actually free in some parts of the world when it was charging a dollar to some others. It became dominant in many places where it was totally free.

A free service that is now a backbone of communication across the world is more of a utility than a service to me

Yes, especially for a free service.

I've been asking friends to get off WhatsApp forever, and everyone wants to get off it. But family members and clients are on it, so now everyone downloads multiple messaging apps, ones they want to use and the ones they're forced go use.

At this point even if WhatsApp explicitly says they'll sell your information to Satan, people will still use it because it's free.

It's not free, it requires handing over something of unknowable scope worth much more than money, and it's not a service if they've forcefully inserted themselves into the social graph as the only way of communication for many including being the only way to access community and government services in many places.

Crowing 'private company' doesn't absolve you of providing the functions of the town square when you've bulldozed and replaced it and repeatedly stated that you are the town square.

Communication, and financial services.

I made a new LLC recently and signed up for PayPal to pay an invoice.

I gave them my info, my tax ID, my bank account, etc.

And within five minutes, they told me that my account was permanently blocked and that I wouldn't be able to use PayPal with my business. No reason was given other than I must have violated their TOU.

I had to go onto Twitter and talk publicly about it, then talked to three different Twitter representatives over a three weeks period, and they finally unlocked my account.

I commend them for unlocking it, but it's certainly given me pause over using them for even sending funds. :(

You mean PayPal representatives?

Yes, it was a typo I'll see if I can fix.

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/complaint/

I work in fintech and there's a ton of internal policies for KYC (know your customer) compliance, where we immediately terminate customer's contract and are forbidden from revealing any information about why and what's triggered it.

I can see both sides of this process, and unfortunately, in case of an error, it's almost impossible to resolve the situation without an inside advocate who could influence the outcome and possibly correct the mistake.

The important part in what you said is "internal policies", not laws or regulations.

This is why we need regulation that protects people/businesses.

Those policies were created as a way to abide by laws and regulations, so I'm not sure what's your point here is.

I don't know which CYA laws say why you can't tell the consumer why they were rejected or not have a review process.

> Interoperability

The EU is working on it

the lawmakers know they don't actually have to code it up, right?

Funnily enough we do have those laws for the old.telephone service we used to all use (in aus). Sadly the internet was classed differently and avoids all that regulation...

How would that interoperability look between Telegram, Messenger and WhatsApp? They all have radically different paradigms as soon you get deep. How should a group chat work and be administered?

God, just install that other app or pay for Texts or Beeper if you really need it.

Publish an API. That's all that's needed for interop.

isn't there a term in their ToS that says they can ban whoever they want? don't see why a software company should be fined for banning users, you should be able to ban any non paying user whenever you want

I agree, but they should need to tell you why they banned you, and offer a chance to appeal.

Which they do, theoretically, but the reason is "see our terms" and the appeal is "yep, reviewed, still banned".

> the reason is "see our terms

So when you go to jail, do they tell you 'see the law'? No, they tell spesifically which law you broke.

If you are willing to accept this BS, how do you know they are telling the truth, what if you didn't break their TOS and the real reason they banned you is because they dislike your political views?

What if tomorrow they ban everyone who supports donald trump, or whatever.

Banning people on a global, worldwide communication network that has a reach of billions of users is not "I don't see why they can't just do it without any reason" material.

That's kind of what you get if everyone chooses to use walled gardens like WhatsApp or Signal.

My XMPP address will keep working as long as I have control over my DNS records.

You're always in someone's walled garden. Didn't someone get their domain seized by Cloudflare the other day?

There is no technology in the world that isn't vulnerable to this sort of thing. The only way out is legislating against companies cutting you off without reason or recourse.

> You're always in someone's walled garden.

Indeed! One has control on their DNS records only as long as they are allowed to have control on their DNS records. That control can be taken away as it once happened in my case when a domain name I was using was sinkholed due to a false positive. Full story here: https://susam.net/blog/sinkholed.html

Until the sinkhole incident happened, I was a firm believer of running my own email server with a domain name I have registered, so that it would not be possible for a large corporation to accidentally lock me out of my email. But now that I have seen how one's control over a domain name can be taken away suddenly and without warning, I am not so sure!

It is their private property, and they have an inherent and fundamental right to decide who they want to allow on it.

No, they do not. Facebook has worked hard to destroy competition by buying up every significant messaging service, which should never have been permitted.

They are a monopoly that people are dependent on - it's not as if you can just choose not to use whatsapp. You cannot just move to another messaging app unless you get everyone on the planet to move with you.

I, for example, am required to use whatsapp every day for my job. If I was banned from whatsapp, I would be unable to do my job and be immediately fired.

Messaging is an essential utility now, and just like the other utilities in your house, it is not fair to cut people off from them.

Whatsapp doesn't have rights, they have responsibilities, and they should not be allowed to ban people for no reason.

Facebook did not buy Discord which is currently the best messaging service on the market. They didn't buy slack either.

whatsapp is just a lame messaging app, there is literally thousands of them

I live fine without using any FB products

if your livelihood depends on a lame messaging app something is wrong with your business

In my world we call this victim blaming.

Go out and meet some people whose families are on Whatsapp. Whose parents or grandparents know exactly how to use the one app and that's it.

I boycott LinkedIn and I have enough trouble as it is because of that. And it's LinkedIn, a lame-ass feel-good social network. WhatsApp is a messaging app and has over 2 billion users, with a penetration so large in some countries (especially Europe) that it gets special treatment for ISPs, it's often the only way to contact some businesses, and has de facto replaced SMS for many. There aren't "thousands of messaging apps" with that kind of userbase.

Pointless for you? Good for you. Your life is not others', though, please have empathy.

Yes, there were viable alternatives right up till quite recently but unfortunately that wrong something seems to be ubiquitous now. My work and all our customers do most communication on Whatsapp now. My spouse's work is just the same. Ditto for most other potential employers / customers / clients now. Everyone I know pretty much exclusively uses Whatsapp for messaging now. It sucks and I don't much like Whatsapp but its the reason I even own a smartphone - and without it I doubt I'd even be able to put food on the table now.

> I often wish that there was a law that says (...)

Do you live in a democratic country? It's up to you and your neighbors then!

I think all fines should be expressed in days of revenue.

Permaban for no reason, and fail to respond to appeals? A fine of 1 day of revenue, per user, seems reasonable to me.

(Revenue would include revenue of all controlled foreign subsidiaries, tax haven shell companies, etc, of course)

We call those government utilities, and apparently, that's a bad thing.

Force a company to bear financial responsibility for locking a user out of a FREE product where EULA says they reserve the right to do so.

Do you see where your logic is failing?

Well the companies choose to own the network and run closed protocols. They are not just running a free service but gatekeeping an whole audience.

Either have standard open protocols or be regulated.

You're limiting yourself with this "logic"; is there a rulebook or something that mandates the use of "logic" when people are dealing with major corporations? If so, who wrote it and for whose benefit?

Should just be a proportion of gross revenue + a proportion of gross assets of the largest company in the stack that owns any part of it.

If it would take a 3 person team one employee 10 minutes to resolve, then fine based on about a hundred thousandth of total gross revenue.

Yep. If politicians really want to hold tech accountable this is the law to apply. There should be a way to escalate your requests to real people if we're talking about Google or Facebook, because so much of infrastructure depends on them.

It's good there are cons to big companies, hopefully this will drive people away from them until they're good.

I purposefully avoided doing mobile development to stay away from Google and Apple and it looks like, for some years now, web apps are buttery smooth on any device.

60 comments in the discussion already and no one is slightly curious about what kind of investigation they can do, if the messages are end-to-end encrypted?

OP: any chance your wife's phone was sim-swapped or cloned? I believe that this is the only thing that could trigger an alarm.

Also, just drop WhatsApp if you can. Install Element on your phone and ask your wife to do the same, if you want you can sign up for a 14-day trial on Communick [0], or just use the free service from matrix.org [1]

[0]: https://communick.com

[1]: https://app.element.io

why stop there? get them to install linux on their pc, help them tunnel through Tor and setup pgp for them.

Baby steps... Baby steps...

Seriously, though. My mother, well in her 60's and far from being a tech-savvy person, managed to install Element and login to her account simply by following the instructions on the email I sent her when I signed her up. The whole thing with saving recovery key is a bit confusing, but not a showstopper.

I don't get why people need to act like they can't even try a different service.There was life before WhatsApp, there can be life without it. Worst case scenario, you tried something new.

Yeah, no.

You even so much as search for TOR on a search engine, you're on a list.

You go to their site, you're on another list.

You click the "download" part of the page, you're on another list.

You click "download", you're on another list.

You open up the package in your downloads folder, you're on another list.

You install the package contents, you're on another list.

You run it, you're on another list.

People who never gave much thought to who developed TOR and believe it offers "privacy" have got to be among some of the most naive tech users to exist.

Then yet another reason to encourage everyone to do it. A list where half of the world can be found is as good as no list at all.

I sorta get your point; there was some tech freedom advocate or something during the early 2000s that offered a free script on his website which would automatically auto-meta-tag/SEO optimize your site with a small essay's worth of every conceivable flag word/term/name you could imagine; his proposal was similar: if everything gets flagged as a priority to have a human analyst scrutinize it, then by definition nothing could be a priority any more.

I can't help but wonder if "they" didn't start a separate list altogether with his name at the top.

I agree, but this is both a different threat model, as well as running into "Too much data leaving you with a haystack worth of needles" kind of thing. I mean just in general, Canada is on a list [0]. Not just some citizens or government officials, but the nation itself.

[0] https://www.wksu.org/government-politics/2022-06-02/ohio-hou...

This made me laugh; thank you.

It's totally Trudeau, Canada needs to be closely scrutinized – some very dangerous things have been happening there over the last half-decade or so, and not just in a religious sense.

> what kind of investigation they can do, if the messages are end-to-end encrypted?

When a user flags a conversation/user, it sends a number of historical messages with the report. End-to-end encryption doesn't prevent the end user from forwarding the messages to a third party.

And the messages are just entries in a local sqlite database. Can’t I just forge a message locally and report it in hope the other person will be banned? At least in the Signal app (WhatsApp uses a similar crypto) all messages have plausible deniability, nobody can prove they are real or forged because the signature will be deleted as soon as the message is received.

But did you read the OP's comment?

His wife uses it not because she wants to necessarily, but because her relatives in OTHER COUNTRIES are on it already.

You'd be surprised how popular WhatsApp is in other areas of the world, especially since it offers peer-to-peer fund transfer.

The problem is not his wife finding an alternative, the problem is finding such an alternative AND convincing all her relatives to install/start using it also.

The only thing that would make that worthwhile for a sizable group of people would be if they could also be able to convince other existing users on their previous platform of choice to ALSO ditch that platform for the new one.

Sort of a catch-22.

> the problem is finding such an alternative AND convincing all her relatives to install/start using it also.

Once upon a time, WhatsApp was also a system with a microscopic user base. And AIM, and MSN, and ICQ, Skype...

You have to start somewhere. For me, I told those closer to me that I wanted to get out of WhatsApp and offered to help my immediate family and some friends who wanted to try Element as well. Others said that they were on Telegram, which I am still keeping around, so it was not-ideal-but-acceptable.

The interesting thing happened when there was an outage of Facebook Messenger, and some of my wife's friends got interested in trying out Element too... slow and steady can win this race.

I see your point.

I think the main selling point of WhatsApp in other countries is the peer-to-peer funds transfer feature; family sending each other a bit of money to help get through temporary rough spots is deeply embedded in the cultures of areas of the world where WhatsApp is popular.

What I can't believe (this being run by Y Combinator) is how nobody seems to have come up with a meta-service top-layer; technical objections could be bypassed with a simple "You agree to temporarily waive the encryption capabilities of your core platform while using our platform" disclaimer, and then the meta-service could offer it's own encryption as an alternative.

I'm not saying such a service would be able to duplicate all features of the ones that integrate with it, but ...

I mean it would just make things so much simpler if you could link in your "whatever account" to such a meta service and then just add contact info of others on other services and just be able to speak/chat with them instead of signing up for a multitude of services just to keep in touch with extended family.

I'm sure it's not as technically easy as I made it sound, but I'm also sure there would be a market for that; I can't imagine people who regularly keep in contact with family members dispersed across the world scoffing at a modest monthly fee for such a service, especially since the definition of "modest" would be aimed at U.S./European users who need to keep in contact with family members in other parts of the world.

Remittance services existed forever, and it moves $500 billion every year. With Transferwise, it is almost instant. Why does this depend on whatsapp?

1. Simplicity 2. Intuitiveness 3. Phone-based 4. "Already there" factor for something people use on their phones already for other things, for example, chatting with each other.

I've tried sending money overseas with other approaches and was shocked at how fragmented and inconvenient it was compared to things like WhatsApp, etc.

Different services only seem to offer abilities in different countries/markets, some require complicated sign-up processes, others require a ton of information about the receiver, etc.

You are listing reasons to explain why it is easier, but not why they depend on WhatsApp.

If sending money is actually important, it doesn't matter if you can do it in the most convenient way possible. It just matters that it is possible.

So ... you're saying ... that it "doesn't matter" if you can send money in the most convenient way possible ... it just matters that it's possible?

Ok ... so then ... why do people seem to consistently en masse choose to do it "the most convenient way possible" with things like WhatsApp?

I don't know, it just seems like given the choice between sending money conveniently and sending money inconveniently, they seem to prefer to do so conveniently.

I could be wrong though, maybe WhatsApp flashes subliminal messages directing them to choose WhatsApp to send money.

No, I am saying that, when the convenient way is not available (for example when your account is blocked) you can still use alternatives.

I'm not sure how I'd determine if her phone had been cloned. There hasn't been any other evidence of anything strange, besides this whatsapp ban.

First they can tell if you’re using an unofficial client and ban you for that. Secondly other users can report spam by you, with their keys so WhatsApp can read the messages.

This is what happens when basic forms of communication are products instead of utilities.

This, I think I might be on of few people who uses XMPP with his wife

And that's what happens when only products can trigger push notifications on most people's phones.

[flagged][dead] so I vouched for it. Hope you get some help. I try and keep a spare account going for times like this but it's not always possible or convenient.

Appreciate it. It's not the end of the world as she wasn't using it for anything critical; she could get a new phone number, but not sure it's worth the hassle of juggling two numbers or devices just for whatsapp, nor is it worth changing her phone number for everything else. So if it's not reversed she'll probably just live with missing out on those chats.

If you get a phone with 2 sim cards you can use one only for WhatsApp and the other for everything else.

I was even able to use WhatsApp while abroad and my sim card not working for a month, it might be only needed for setting up WhatsApp once at the start and then swap the card.

You only need to be able to receive an SMS for setup - I ported my cell number to twilio long ago for spam prevention purposes, but can still use whatsapp / signal.

Or maybe she can get a new number just for registering on whatsapp and keep the sim around if she needs to re-register. I don't belive I have ever had to re-register unless I changed devices. Although, I think that might be circumventing the ban and should be pretty trivial to detect and might get banned again.

The [flagged] [dead] epidemic on HN seems to be going crazy. The number of well formed opinions I’ve seen recently flagged just because they’re out of the HN ideal is crazy

There are also comments that disapper, yet still visible at user's comments history.

Is that different than 'dead' comments (only visible if 'showdead: yes' in settings)?

These comments are not visible with showdead:yes. They are detached from article.

The difference between flagged-dead items and detached items is that flagging is done by the community for any reason, while detaching is done by moderators to fix specific problems. Flagging might be gamed but usually isn’t from what I’ve seen, and HN actively tries to detect gaming. OTOH, moderation is always done manually and thoughtfully. (And, most importantly, there is a human who will listen to appeals about either.)

Interesting, I've not read about that on the various lists of HN undocumented features like [1], not that that means it does not happen. Do you have an example?

[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#second...

See my reply to comment about Estonia.

I can see that users comments both when I go from their comments list and also when I go directly to the posts comment section. Is there something I am missing? It doesn’t seem to be downvoted or dead and has multiple replies.

Thay call that "shadow removal" in redditland.

From the perpective of the guy who posted it, everything's kosher, just nobody's replying for some reason. From the perspective of everyone else in the forum there's no post.

Ostensibly a way of managing spam while depriving the spammer of informative feedback. In practice a method of censorship with extra "screw you" on top.

HN censors heavily politics, economy and covid. See my comment about Estonia. I was shadow banned on Electrec, Tesla fan forum. My comments were visible when I was logged in, but gone when not logged.

HN censors unpopular opinions too.

Some of us express our disagreement with a reply by downvoting and flagging.

HN responds to that by rendering your reply progressively invisible. Throttling your speech. Shadow removal. And shadow ban. (While avoiding responsibility for the censorship, if you see what I mean)

Throttling comes with your comments also being deranked.

I wish the throttling error would at least tell you when you are able to post again.

Zero explanation appears to be the popular policy with all of our social media overlords.

'shadow banning' is just another method of avoiding responsebility and scrutiny, and stifling dissent. Goes with the times.

Just like not exaplaining reasons for banning what's app account, makin vague TOS, keeping salaries secret, it's the antithesys of a fair and just society.

This is not a support forum for tech companies. There is nothing interesting about or surprising about this event, and no discussion to be had on this subject that hasn't been already had on HN a hundred times this year. All this does is push some worthy content off the front-page.

If anything is an epidemic, it's posts like this one. Sure, each of them has a small chance of being useful to a single individual. At the same time, it's reducing the usefulness of this site for tens or hundreds of thousands. And the more they're encouraged with upvoting and vouching, the more of them will be posted.

Actually posts like this are very useful - the more of them they are, the higher the chance that something will actually change.

I'm tired of billion dollar companies that have achieved their scale by literally hooking us on their free services and have zero interest in us as real people, and then don't give a flying fuck if their shitty automated processes decide to unperson someone.

Is this realistically now a problem for regulators (FTC, FCC, etc.) or does our industry stand a chance of correcting itself?

I think it will have to be forced on them by external regulators.

I think the big mistake is in people thinking events have a single cause and in reality events can have dozens of contributory factors, most of them often invisivle

I agree, but since I doubt we can ever get insight or clarity... we must act with limited knowledge.

> If anything is an epidemic, it's posts like this one. Sure, each of them has a small chance of being useful to a single individual.

Then, perchance, we should be using the collective will to name and shame companies so that the source of these posts stops.

The fact that modern companies have taken Kafka's "The Trial" as a playbook instead of a warning is beyond infuriating.

> Then, perchance, we should be using the collective will to name and shame companies so that the source of these posts stops.

It is unlikely that any count of HN posts will change Facebook's behavior.

The attempt to convert HN into your personal megaphone will, however, ruin HN.

But if people are responding to these sort of posts, then it seems like a "collective megaphone" that would be useful for a variety of purposes, for example, designating a market need for new companies potentially addressing that need to pitch off of.

Market needs are not established by herd agreement on hn

Fwiw, I personally like reading these threads to keep an eye on the negative experiences people are having with various cloud services. I also think this is incredibly relevant to HN, where the default discussion is how to build scalable services. The inability for these tech companies to provide fair human review is one of the critically unsolved problems in tech, and it seems to be getting worse.

> If anything is an epidemic, it’s posts like this one.

That right there is a good reason to encourage it rather than discourage it, because it indicates a market need. This is exactly the forum to discuss how to address market needs, especially when it comes to cloud services and software, right? I hope, but also expect, that if posts like these get more popular, we will see some actual competition and the problem will begin to rectify itself, which will naturally cause these kinds of threads to diminish. If we suppress these conversations, it may take longer than if we allow it to reach public consciousness.

The irony of "we're an entrepreneurial tech forum that doesn't want to hear problems about tech companies that don't want to hear problems about their platforms" is just ... so delicious!

Just waiting for the inevitable next round of Congressional "What are you going to do about these issues?/Oh we're definitely going to read these legal department-prepared statements that vaguely suggest that we're possibly maybe definitely going to try do something undefined about these issues in the unspecified future."

Ironic that comments are false-positive banned in a discussion about false-positive banning.

Maybe someone needs to build flaggeddeadyc.com that has a list of recent posts that had a number of votes but got nuked, because I noticed this increasingly being a problem as well. I feel like on some posts the flagging is abused to block stuff that might otherwise be interesting to some people.

You can actually see dead posts right here on HN. Just click your username in the orange bar, then change "showdead".

I emailed the support@ email in a different scenario (my phone was stolen) and got help fairly quickly (within 24h). If that doesn‘t help shoot me a DM and I might be able to ask a friend that works at whatsapp about it.

She just got a reply from the support email:

> ##- WhatsApp Support -## Hi, Our system flagged your account activity as a violation of our Terms of Service and banned your phone number. Your account will remain banned as a result of the violation. We recommend carefully reviewing the “Acceptable Use of Our Services” section of our Terms of Service to learn more about the appropriate uses of WhatsApp and the activities that violate our Terms of Service. You can learn more about how to use WhatsApp responsibly in this Help Center article. Please keep in mind, WhatsApp reserves the right to enforce its policies in accordance with its Terms of Service.

If your friend can help, that'd be great. My email is in profile. Thanks.

And a new reply:

> Hi, We have reason to believe your account activity has violated our Terms of Service and decided to keep your account banned. We received a large number of complaints about your account and to protect our users' privacy, we won't disclose the nature of the complaints. Unfortunately, responses to this email thread won't be read.

Unless her parents are complaining about her account, this is nuts. There's no conceivable way there could be a large number of complaints about an account that doesn't actually write to anyone besides family and close friends.

Increases my suspicion that it's related to that spam group message. Likely there were a bunch of complaints about that thread, and somehow her account got rolled into the ones that were banned, despite doing nothing besides blocking the chat as spam.

> We received a large number of complaints about your account

> Our only guess as to what could have caused this is that a week or so before the ban she received a spam message sent to a giant group and marked it as spam.

Each person in that group marked each other as spam? I wonder if other people in that group ended up banned as well.

A possible explanation is that her number got SIM swapped and then used by spammers.

Or maybe somehow someone managed to enable WhatsApp web on her phone, or she used it on a public computer and forgot to turn it off? Otherwise, completely out of ideas.

I don't think it could be one of those. She only uses it on her phone and home pc.

This might be a bit esoteric but is WhatsApp the only such problems she's had?

On Reddit there is this group-stalking phenomenon where if someone (of limited maturity but rich in online contacts who seem to have nothing better to do with their time) for example disagrees with your post, they try to get their friends to get mods to ban you from subreddits by complaining of spam from your account via their inbox/messenger.

Failing that, they usually resort to bombarding Reddit with "concerns" about "wellbeing" which results in inboxes getting cluttered with "A concerned Reddit user reached out to us about your wellbeing" ...

I'm not saying it's that, but human spammers tend to work in networks that respond viciously to anything that messes with accounts they've set up as part of their networks, so if she reported them as spam and they somehow zeroed in on her or suspected her as one of the few possible causes of one of their accounts being flagged for spamming, perhaps they collectively retaliated against her out of spite?

I would think if that were the case she'd get some return calls and texts from people receiving the spams? There's been nothing aside from this whatsapp ban.

Perhaps her account credentials were compromised? Somebody could have used the web API to run a spam/abuse campaign.

> We received a large number of complaints about your account

I hope this system is smart enough to only consider complaints from accounts that this user has messaged recently, otherwise, a group of people could decide to maliciously report an account.

But how would they determine this if it is true that they do not store messages on their servers?

They don't need the message content to know whom you have messaged recently.

> We received a large number of complaints about your account

So if I get a bunch of bots I could file mass complaints about someone's what''s app account and det them banned?

I don't know about whatsapp but on tiktok you can easily do this successfully, without bots - they automatically permaban anyone who is reported just a handful of times.

All you have to do is make a few accounts or convince a few friends and you can remove any video or account on the app that you want.

Considering this thread, it looks like Whatsapp is the same way.

This is a known problem and (probably) there are systems which should monitor automated abuse of abuse.

However, all those social networks (including Instagram) are susceptible to another attack - just rent a horde of low-grade bots... and add the victim's account to their friends. This sudden increase in friends count are treated as an attempt to boost the rating of the bot accounts => ban not only for the bots (about whom you don't care) but for the victim too.

Perhaps OP is in the similar situation, though probably his spouse wasn't a target but a collateral.

Instagram banned my account without reason. Or rather, they turned off my ability to interact with the account. The account is still there. People can view my photos. At this point I would just like the account removed, but there's no way for me to do it.

If I log in on my PC it tells me to log into the app to regain access to my account. If I log into the app on iOS, I get a black screen. On Android I also get a black screen, but I can also navigate through the menu. Every menu item either gives me an error saying something like "challenge required" or takes me to the same message I see on PC. I've tried all the online guides I can find, but none of them seem to have my specific problem.

Is there any way to remove an Instagram account without going through the usual channels?

> Is there any way to remove an Instagram account without going through the usual channels?

It is amusing how times have changed that a highly technical person seeks help in a highly technical forum for things as basic as removing an account. We are truly entering interesting times.

This exact thing happened when I created a Facebook account so I could see our company's Facebook ads. It was a brand new account, no activity at all, and now I can't see or manage our ads even though they're running.

It's awful. This is why I would never, ever buy a product that requires a Facebook account to use it (coughOculuscough).

yeah, if you go out of your way to break the social graph, facebook will ban you quickly under the excuse of "spammers also do this". one way around this is to send a few friend requests (and get them accepted) during your first signin session.

Yeah, created a FB account for same reason (manage ads and org page). It is not usable anymore.

Can you imagine back in the day when Libra was a thing and they actually thought people were going to trust them with their real money that would have been used to purchase it?

Likewise, I still for the life of me can't figure out why people still use PayPal after the endless "I just logged on and they told me my account and funds were frozen/It's been 6+ months of trying to unfreeze my PayPal funds and still no luck".

Like if there was actual illegal activity, you'd imagine they'd report it (as required by law) and some government entity would freeze the funds; instead PayPal just does so and does who knows what with the money in the meantime, interest-free.

As of 2022 I have so far refused to install Whatsapp on principle. We deserved federated IM and 10 years ago we almost had it with XMPP. To me Whatsapp were the antithesis of this, by binding IM to mobile numbers and phones and making it an entirely closed system. By blurring the lines between themselves and SMS, they made using their platform ubiquitous. iMessage is much the same - people don't even know the difference between it and SMS.

We've all been robbed.

Commercial "social" media and chat apps are allowed to do whatever they want without any reason or process. If people had any sense, they would use subscriber-funded, employee co-op, nonprofit services. "Free" commercial apps aren't free or dependable.

The problem in this case is network effects. I prefer not to use whatsapp, but if I want to chat with people who are on whatsapp, that's what I need to use.

That's why the XMPP standard was invented: Interoperability even if you use a different IM provider.

Unfortunately almost no one seems to care about standards compliance when choosing their messaging app.

Yeap. Gtalk did XMPP for a while until it became another walled garden.

That's ceding to a popularity catch-22 from a view of learned helplessness, assuming an individual has no power, which is untrue. Network effects bring all sorts of new apps to the fore, one user at a time. Good and better things are difficult and take time. It's people who shrug and reinforce the hegemony who are at fault.

If you're in the EU you have a right not to be subjected to automated decision making. You can visit this URL [1] and get in touch with their DPO - they must conduct a human review and can look at all of the data and either reinstate your account or explain why it was banned. I have used this process successfully to overturn automated decision making as if they refuse you can complain to your data authority if you have one.

[1]: https://www.whatsapp.com/contact/forms/3022366361353546/

> banned from __________ without reason or recourse

That's the risk we all run when using services owned by others. The unfortunate takeaway is that you cannot trust other people.

This strikes me as unnecessarily defeatist

> This strikes me as unnecessarily defeatist

How so? I think it's just a realist view. What alternative would you suggest?

if they want users they gotta fix it ;)

If in the EU try a GDPR request for her personal data.

I did that once when hit with a similar situation with no reason given for refusal of service from a faceless corporation.

The request resulted in a human looking at the situation (because they had to in order to give me my data). They reinstated the service after realising a mistake had been made.

Facebook ignores the GDPR and gets away with it: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/

The fundamental problem here is that there's a guy squatting in the middle of the communications pipeline deciding who gets to talk and who doesn't.

Of course that's going to go bad, for several unavoidable reasons.

Any filtering needs to be managed at the level of me, the guy reading the stuff.

I think this is clear. But maybe I'm wrong.

My wife got banned from Apex Legends, a game she's invested quite a bit of time and money into. The ban says it's allegedly for cheating, and she's never cheated in her life, doesn't have any software that can even remotely be considered cheating, or did anything that could be misconstrued as cheating. In fact, she's pretty bad at the game and her stats are quite low, so there isn't even a chance she's been reported for cheating for being super good or anything. She's also appealed and got the ban confirmed and by the "manual review" process, whatever that means.

It's doubly frustrating cause she's got quite a bit of money invested in the cosmetic items in the game that she no longer can access.

Sorry this happened to your wife.

I actually can't for the life of me figure out why there's no business model to address this, as it is a common enough type of occurrence on numerous social media platforms; some examples I've personally encountered:

- Friend put in Facebook jail for being tagged in what Facebook found to be an offensive post; people tagged in the post were also put in FB jail, yet ironically the original spamming poster never was

- Friend put in Facebook jail for reporting a clear violation of Facebook's terms of service to Facebook, meanwhile nothing happened to the violator's account

- Myself having been put in FB jail because of a picture of a statue that showed side-boobage; meanwhile "artistic photography" FB pages featuring full, shaven frontal nudity (among other things) were allowed to persist

- Myself having been flagged by FB's "new Ai" during the outbreak of Covid for an "offensive post" ... because I put up a music video that feature zero nudity/sexuality/violence/racism/sexism, yet it supposedly "went against community standards"

- During the period the previous account was flagged by FB Ai, it was flagged again and I got a message that "Our records indicate you were previously flagged in the recent past, and being flagged in the recent past is now a flaggable offense in itself, so we're giving you another month in FB jail"

- While in FB jail, got another message that "I violated the conditions of FB jail (not even sure how this is technically possible) by posting more content "against community standards" (while ALL features of my account were disabled for a month), and so no we're taking this account offline"

Lost EVERYTHING including a contacts list built up over the course of years

Recent Reddit incident where Reddit spam filters mistakenly identified my own posts on my own subreddit that were crosslinked NOWHERE as "spam", resulting in the subreddit being banned (and losing shit-tons of info on the subreddit); Reddit agreed that this was done "in error" but has so far failed to help retrieve any of the lost data on the subreddit ...

Considering how many similar stories I've come across in my research and how important our social media lives/data/contact lists are ...

I would GLADLY either:

1.) Pay a reasonable fee for services with an actual liability clause/customer service contact number OR

2.) Pay for some intermediary service that would take up complaints and find a way to get through to social media companies and be like, "WTF?!?" on behalf of their customers

I can see a scrappy group of ex (or even current) Meta employees creating a service using their inside knowledge.

Can't you just pay for a service provider directly that does not build a business around offering "free" services in exchange of data harvesting and exploitation?

Most likely, her account tripped an abuse detection system. Of course, WhatsApp is not going to disclose how the system works (not even to disclose which factors were used to make the decision), because that will allow abusers to more easily circumvent it. Heaven knows there are enough spammers using WhatsApp.

If it’s worth that much to you, hire an attorney to send a letter demanding an explanation and restoration of service. You’d be surprised what can happen when a company’s legal team gets wind of a problem.

https://telegram.org/

Companies live or die on the size of their clientele.

Companies have to earn the right to your custom. If they don't shape up, make them ship out. Remove your custom from their income.

As Vlad said the other day :"You're either sovereign, or you're colonised. There is no other situation." Don't be colonised. Tell all the bastard companies to just piss off.

May be the algorithm calculated that blocking just that one innocent account would save the Earth from a future catastrophe.

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is a warning, not a how-to guide.

Lathe of Heaven has to be one of my all-time favorite ANYTHING book.

When it was recommended to me, at first I thought it was a bad joke or something because the first few chapters were so "middle school-ish" in quality.

Towards the end I both wanted to find out what happened next and stop reading altogether because I didn't want the story to end.

The closest thing I found to the experience was the anime Space Dandy where the first few episodes were excruciatingly painful to watch in a "WTF is this crap?!?" disbelief sort of way ... only to progress very quickly to be one of the best entertainment experiences I can remember in a long time.

> Our only guess as to what could have caused this is that a week or so before the ban she received a spam message sent to a giant group and marked it as spam.

Hmm that's mildly concerning if that's the reason. My acquaintance got a similar spam message yesterday and they marked it as spam as well. No account closures yet though...

Damn. Would you mind stating your country? I had only heard about this when invited to a spam group by malice with CP.

We're in Canada.

Is it possible that in one of those groups, kids photos were shared? Perhaps the algorithm somehow classified the photos being shared as CP?

She's probably shared photos of our kids with her parents and that kind of thing, but nothing that would reasonably be classified as CP (obviously) - although who knows what could cause a false positive. She did receive that spam group message though, and has gotten others in the past; anything could've been in there.

Somewhat related, anyway for Whatsapp gDrive backups to be restored to another account / phone#? I'm less afraid of Whatsapp ban since it's trival though still annoying to circumvent.

Another reason to use decentralized messaging. Any service which depends on a single point will be fragile to this point wishes and weaknesses.

Could be someone spoofed her number and so bad things

How do you know that she didn't violate terms of service? It's a mile long document, I doubt you have read it. I didn't read it either, but still, just because she's using it to keep in touch with friends & family doesn't mean she didn't violate ToS.

You're right; I haven't read the whole document. But I doubt it prohibits anodyne conversations with family members. And they explicitly said that a large number of people have complained about her account, and the ban stems from that.

now that every iphone has two sim card slots, and its so ubiquitous instead of having to get some random HTC Obsolete, I just add a new line to my cell phone plan

I'm aware of all the phone number workarounds possible, most of which are VOIP, some of which are using internet hosted real cell phone numbers that forward you access codes, but at this point I can just afford another line. VOIP numbers are getting randomly banned everywhere, and the internet hosted numbers have already been used for a lot of services.

definitely consider just getting a new phone number. they told me to "recognize my privilege" and so, calling all folks with a little financial privilege! get another phone line.

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