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Comment by mercury_craze | Hacker News Reader

My wife's floristry business has been blocked from being able to access facebook advertising and permanently restricted in how she is able to interact with her customers in part because a bot flagged and suspended her for trading in trading exotic animals. The exotic animal she was accused of trading? Aphelandra Squarrosa - The zebra leaf plant.

There's no way of getting this ban reversed, there's no way of invoking any human to perform a manual review on the ban. It is a permanent restriction that impacts her ability to communicate with her customer base.

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> There's no way of getting this ban reversed, there's no way of invoking any human to perform a manual review on the ban. It is a permanent restriction that impacts her ability to communicate with her customer base.

You know you're doing it wrong when the the Ministry of Information in the movie Brazil has better customer service than you do.

Edit: add "the movie" to remove ambiguity.

> You know you're doing it wrong when the the Ministry of Information in Brazil has better customer service than you do.

Care to explain?

They mean the film “Brazil”

It is a reference to the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil.

chinathrow said that tivert said "> You know you're doing it wrong when the the Ministry of Information in Brazil has better customer service than you do."

But tivert didn't say that! tivert instead said "...the Ministry of Information in the movie Brazil ..."

chinathrow should read more carefully.

giardini said "But tivert didn't say that! tivert instead said '...the Ministry of Information in the movie Brazil ...'"

giardini said "> chinathrow should read more carefully."

tivert said "I will direct you to other thing I added when I edited what I said: tivert said 'Edit: add "the movie" to remove ambiguity.'"

Such a fantastic film

Such a realistic film (2026)

Every time someone complains about being kicked off of Facebook or Youtube or some other such service for political reasons, the response from just about everyone is "they're a private business, they have a right to kick you off for any reason they want to with no explanation".

How isnt that also true here? They're a private business, they have a right to kick you off by automated systems if they think it's cheaper to have a couple of errors in the automatic system than to pay for manual reviewers. Hey, they're a private business and don't have to justify themselves, right?

Not sure if you were responding to the right comment, but yeah, this is a pretty major argument for who unchecked private centralization is very dangerous. The main solutions to this contradiction are website keeping healthy competition between firms to have a rich ecosystem of competition or to place everything in a centralized location controlled by the govt where things like access are intensely regulated (i.e why every subway and post office is ACA accessible)

Getting lawyers involved is one guaranteed way to talk to a human at Facebook. It won't be easy or cheap though, so I can understand why a business like a flower shop wouldn't want to do that.

Is there a specific type of attorney?

Depends on the country. In the UK I'd probably go to the Law Society website and search for a B2B lawyer under "Business -> Dispute Resolution" or "Media IT and intellectual property" (https://solicitors.lawsociety.org.uk/). Having used lawyers like this at start up companies in the past they are not cheap. However in the first instance you'd probably just want them to send a letter on headed notepaper, which might be enough to get someone's attention at Facebook and get the matter resolved.

Is it possible to leverage another case filing, to reduce lawyer fees? Or some sort of Nola Press DIY process? Since it seems so common.

Odds are you won't need to involve any judiciary institution, just lawyers. On that case, there's no case and no filling required.

If your country has a working small-cases court system, there are good odds you can achieve the same result without any lawyer involvement at all. But if you are discovering this from a random internet comment, you are almost certainly better talking with a lawyer about it anyway.

Take Facebook to small claims court. They can't bring a lawyer, it will cost them a small fortune and they'll lose.

What exactly is the claim you would sue for?

Finding that out is why I'd consult a lawyer.

This is a political problem manifesting as a legal one.

Call your US Senators and Representative. Explain the problem.

Call your State Senators and Representative. Explain the problem.

Contact the FTC and file a complaint.

if you're based in Europe, try framing it as a GDPR issue. Article 16 says that data processors have to rectify data that is inaccurate or incomplete within 1 month. If they don't do that, you can raise it to your national privacy ombudsman as an incident. This being Facebook, there is a chance that they'll act on it.

Be sure to CC privacy@facebook.com and legal@facebook.com

Only issue: not sure that the GDPR applies to companies. And it's a 'pro' account I guess?

Maybe article 22 (“automated individual decision-making, including profiling”) can be useful here, too. This will not work if the account is not nominative though.

GDPR protects individuals 'natural persons' and not businesses 'legal persons'

Recital 14 - The protection afforded by this Regulation should apply to natural persons, whatever their nationality or place of residence, in relation to the processing of their personal data. This Regulation does not cover the processing of personal data which concerns legal persons and in particular undertakings established as legal persons, including the name and the form of the legal person and the contact details of the legal person.

At least in German juristiction there is the viewpoint that a law should also be applicable to a legal person if it indirectly affects a natural person behind it (so-called "Durchgriffstheorie"). In other words, the GDPR applies when it comes to protecting the natural persons behind the legal person, including their economic existence.

Sorry to hear this. Floristry is pretty cut throat with all the shipped direct sites that undercut prices. (Used to work at FTD.com, which bought ProFlowers, a very large flowers-in-a box operation.}

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