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Comment by mvdtnz | Hacker News Reader

Did I miss something in the article? His only evidence that he was banned because of python (supposedly a ban on dealing in live animals) is that some other guy on Linked In who also advertised for Python courses was also banned and he claimed, without evidence, that it was because of the live animal constraint? This is not very convincing evidence.

It definitely sounds like something has gone wrong, but OP is jumping to conclusions on pretty thin evidence. I'm also conscious we're only hearing one side of a story here. How many people have come to HN to complain about being banned from Stripe only for it to turn out they were running an illegal crypto casino or whatever.

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> but OP is jumping to conclusions on pretty thin evidence.

But that's all he has, given the brick wall nature of the way Meta (and Google) work in this respect. You broke the rules, we'll point to a vague document about it but not give you any details.

I had a similar thing (with far less consequences) recently, getting a new Mobile Phone contract in the UK. Failed the credit check three times. No reason for it - I've got a good credit history, own my own home, and have a reasonable bank balance (certainly enough to pay for the contract 20x over on hand, plus other savings). And the response was "You have failed the credit check. We can't tell you why because of sensitive business operations. If you attempt too many times, this may alter your credit score".

Phoned them, got an account without issue in about 5 minutes.

True, I don't know for sure that I was banned for Python. But it's the only information that I have so far, since Meta isn't telling me anything. And the other person confirmed that he had this problem multiple times.

And it's true, you're only seeing one side of the story here. But I promise, I can't think of anything nefarious I've done that would get me banned. Well, aside from my crypto casino run by drug-smoking, underpaid children engaging in the illegal ivory trade, that is.

Would aa GDPR request be worth filing to try and glean some additional info?

I doubt it, but it's a fascinating idea.

Facebook did ignore all my requests after they banned my account. I know I could sue or something but it's not like Facebook did give any fu*k about the laws.

You're also not providing us a single example advert.

I don't think that I have any of the ads around any more. But please believe me when I say that they are extremely innocent, nerdy ads promoting my courses on Python and Pandas. Nothing weird or illegal in the slightest.

It’s actually a well documented issue. For years. You can do a search (at least you could before google turned to shit) and find many similar cases.

Even people who worked there through Oops barely could get these things fixed and often accounts were left in halfway restricted state as the company is shipping its org chart and nothing is anyone else’s problem.

> How many people have come to HN to complain about being banned from Stripe only for it to turn out they were running an illegal crypto casino or whatever.

How many people have come here, complaining that they’ve been banned from Stripe or blocked by Cloudflare, when it turns out they should not have.

We’ve seen folks from Stripe and Cloudflare on HN, effectively saying “reach out, let’s look in to this.” I expect Meta has many more employees than Stripe and Cloudflare.

I think if someone complains about a problem, the other sides are justified in responding, and should.

I've got help from Google when I had a bigger account issue. Stripe isn't the fastest in responding but they really helped avoiding account issues before they became a problem.

Facebook ignored my HN rant, my GDPR requests, any emails and the 'please check if the ban was right' button was solved in less than a minute without answer and disappeared forever.

Facebook doesn't care

Well yeah, that's one of the problems with user account suspensions, app store review issues etc. with Big Tech: they don't tell you why they did it, so you're forced to guess! And if you're waiting to hear "the other side of the story", I wouldn't be holding my breath...

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