Stop giving FB the benefit of the doubt
But alas, we humans love our conspiracy theories because they tell a more interesting story.
I would be overjoyed if someday that changes, but that still wouldn't be relevant to a flagging today.
Accidentally a perfect analogy, because elephants do think about ants, and take steps to avoid them. The only other small animal they avoid is bees (not mice).
And just like ants, the EFF are one group that could have lots of tiny little warriors scaling up inside Facebook's fleshy trunk.
With a fence, the mass of the elephant helps to knock it over. With a ditch or a hole, the elephant's mass works against it. It risks getting stuck or breaking important bones that are already under a lot of stresses.
> The MythBusters hid a mouse under a ball of elephant dung, planning to flip the dung over and reveal the mouse when the elephants approach it. When they flipped the dung and revealed the mouse, the approaching elephant was startled and quickly moved away from the mouse. The MythBusters then flipped dung without the mouse under it, but the elephants did not react at all. They then repeated their first experiment to confirm their results, and the elephant noticed the mouse and actively avoided it. Even though the elephants did not panic at the sight of the mouse, their acting cautiously around them was enough to have the myth be considered plausible, as it was not known whether the reaction was due to fear of or empathy for the mouse.
... Note how they were wild elephants, in an unnatural environment, facing weird dirt behavior.
In any case, elephants still avoid ants.
We're not talking about capital punishment here, we're talking about social media, and Facebook appears to have made the very reasonable decision that it's worth accidentally rate limiting some innocent accounts in order to keep spam lower than would otherwise be possible.
That sounds reasonable.
Well, reasonable unless you happen to be (or care about) one of the innocents being accidentally punished, because some corporation's algorithm said so.
Scholars have been worrying about this kind of thing in the real world's justice system for a long time (think of William Blackstone's "it is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer" quote, which is over 250 years old[0]; of the 1895 U.S. Supreme Court's "it is better to let the crime of a guilty person go unpunished than to condemn the innocent", and these weren't novel ideas, they go all the way back to the Romans).
Where are the checks and balances for the online world?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentaries_on_the_Laws_of_En...
Yes, it is.
> if i am talking to a customer on facebook and i get blocked for a few days this could cause me to loose a job. (and no, sometimes i can't choose how to communicate with customers. if they insist on facebook then that's where i need to be).
This scenario feels contrived. In this hypothetical, you're talking to a customer using your personal Facebook account and that's the only way you have to contact them? And your employer somehow would see you getting blocked from Facebook as the problem, not their nutty customer relations practices.
> same for my grandparents. they may be upset if i can't talk to them and i can't reach them in other ways.
Again, this is super contrived. You act like you have no other contact method for your grandparents, and no way to get another contact method.
> the risk of this makes facebook an unviable option for me to communicate in the first place.
This is a very decent conclusion to come to. I wish more people would do the same. But there's no sense blaming Facebook for using moderation practices that any other platform in the same position would also choose.
apart from that, i have relatives in another country, and neither of us have our phones set up so we can make international calls (because that costs extra money), so while we could get in touch, we wouldn't unless it was something urgent. instead either of us would just wonder why the other is staying silent for a few days. and some relatives just refuse to use any other way to communicate besides the one of their choice. it's not facebook fortunately, but still, the example is not really that contrived.
i also have many friends that i can only reach through one method. if i loose that method, they are gone unless i am lucky and i can reach them through intermediaries.
ADDED:
temporarly blocks may not be that serious, but permanent blocks exist too. we have seen many of those stories even here on HN.
the problem is really that i fear many do not think that this could happen to them, so when it happens, they are caught unprepared and unaware.
i certainly lost contact to some people because we didn't consider this a possibility.
And unfortunately, some conspiracy theories are true
Not saying this is true but sadly sometimes it is.