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Comment by deepdriver | Hacker News Reader

To how many parents has this already happened? I get the feeling "Mark" who lives in SF probably knows folks in media or tech. How many nameless, powerless people in Middle America or the Global South had their digital lives nuked and suffered in silence?

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My dad ran for mayor in a small town. The opposition kept flagging our (I was a sort of campaign manager) posts as being nazi propaganda (hint: it wasn’t). They did this until my dad’s account got banned.

There was no way I could recover his account after this. Ultimately he just created a new account, with reversed first and last name and the same profile picture which seems to have fooled the almighty AI.

I've had an ex get banned (still banned) from Facebook's suite of products for supposed extremist or terrorism materials. She suspect that a former Meta employee she dated and ended up bad terms may have something to do with it, but all the normal appeal channels end nowhere and I don't know any Facebook employees.

It was however, trivial for her to make a new account.

Would people risk their 200k jobs for stupid revenge like that?

Is this a rhetorical question?

If not, the answer is: obviously yes.

People risk their entire lives for significantly less.

Yes.

People will risk anything for anything if they are convinced they’ll get away with it.

Obviously and reliably yes. Happens constantly.

This is delirious thinking.

I work for another FAANG, and I would never be able to take any action on any part of a customer's account.

I guarantee you Tommy that works in the team that handles tags on marketplace listings cannot do anything about any other system in Facebook.

“Hey Jimmy, while we were smoking yesterday, you know how I mentioned that suspicious account. Here it is.”

Humans are great at solving technical issues with human solutions…

Facebook is significantly less privacy concerned than any other FAANG. It’s caused a few issues.

Of course, that also has the added benefit of boosting Facebook's numbers.

There was a link here a few months ago about a stranger getting access to someones wifi, doing some illegal stuff and then the police come and seize all of the wifi owners devices for several months resulting in them losing their job as a teacher, access to everything and having to go through a very difficult process to sort everything out.

Even if you eventually resolve things, its a life ruining event to even have to go through this process.

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