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Comment by lbriner | Hacker News Reader

The whole issue around not telling you what rule you broke "because then you might work around it" is total BS. It's like a company I complained to the other day because they didn't label one of the inputs on their password reset form because "it would help a hacker know what to type in it" (it was the password reset password they expected but you wouldn't know).

How much quicker would this be resolved if the first AI said, "your account has been blocked because we detected an advert related to live animals" to which you could appeal with your one sentence reason, "these are not animals, they are programming languages with the same names as animals" which would take a very cursory check and continue to bring in advertising revenue.

I think like another poster it is probably true that if you were spending a lot, you would have been given more time to argue your case. For someone who brings in $10 a month, it's not worth their time.

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In 1984 they don't have laws, only crimes, so whatever you do, you have to guess if it is illegal and will be punished or not. It is on purpose to keep the population in constant fear

Don't need for book references, that is how it is today in many countries, and it has been always in less democratic societies.

Yeah! How dare they, referencing literature.

That wasn't the point, no need for literature references when you can enjoy that kind of life today when living in less fortunate regions.

Draconian IT laws mean that in many countries you could be persecuted for threatening national security as a blanket rule with indefinitely the long harassment called investigation.

They are already in place in such countries, plenty of people suffer through them daily.

Or, just dealing with FAANG

Your sarcasm has been noted and recorded.

Everything you do has been noted and recorded. We'll determine later if it's something we don't like in the future.

This concept scares me more than most.

The fact that is scares you has been noted. Someone will contact you shortly.

The fact you noted that has been noted.

It's not that somebody might contact me shortly.

It is that somebody might contact me in 10 years, and at that point I'll have no idea about the context or how to "defend myself" because I won't know what they're talking about.

Maybe it's far fetched, I don't know, but it's a possibility. An interesting thought exercise if nothing else.

Referencing 1984, Brave New World and that quote about freedom of speech that Voltaire never actually said make up the holy trinity of pseudo-intellectual posturing on the internet.

Yeah it was Voltaire's biographer who was describing what she thought was Voltaire's thinking at the time. Still a good quote though regardless of source.

“1984 was dystopian, and anything I don’t like is dystopian, therefore anything I don’t like is straight out of 1984”

When you see a phenomena described in literature, you have some emotional distance to it. It may be more easy for you to accept the possibility that such a phenomena can exist.

Sometimes people cannot bear to see the phenomena in real life even if it is very clear for many people. Life is complex, so there are always many opportunities for weave a narrative to explain away phenomena that you cannot bear to see.

Having been born as the first free generation on a post ditactorship Portugal, I definitly have another relationship growing up to stories from PIDE/DGS and colonial war survivors.

And I should note, compared to some countries, things were relatively soft on our case.

Yes, I believe you. However, other people may react differently from you, and they may react even more strongly if they have been living in the dictatorship themselves. I have spent some time in dictatorships, and it is not uncommon for some people to admire the strength of the dictator. Living in a situation changes how you think, and the more stressful the situation, the more you become emotionally committed to how you think, making it difficult to change it.

Fear isn't the point here. It's just normal corporate ass covering. If you don't know, you can't complain coherently.

Having been part of conversations with a corporate legal team about making clear policies available to explain these types of decisions, I’m sad to say it’s this and they sort of have a point.

One of the problems is if you make a specific policy available and for whatever reason you can be shown not to follow that policy (like say you’re being an intelligent human being and exercising discretion) and someone is harmed they can potentially have a cause of action. So lawyers will often bias towards making the process as opaque as possible as a defence against litigation. Someone can’t claim to have been harmed by relying on a policy that says you will take a particular action if you never commit to doing that.

It’s one of the ways a culture of civil litigation makes things worse for people by creating perverse incentives.

Secondly you can see from the whole SEO industry that people will actively try to game and evade any system you put in place and by making things crystal clear you are giving much clearer guidelines to people who are trying to do that.

None of which is intended to let Facebook off the hook. There are better ways of doing this that don’t involve banning people for life without explaining (clearly) but I at least do understand how we got to this ridiculous state of affairs.

> None of which is intended to let Facebook off the hook. There are better ways of doing this that don’t involve banning people for life without explaining (clearly) but I at least do understand how we got to this ridiculous state of affairs.

The conclusion people should draw from this is that companies as big as Facebook should not be allowed to exist. They can get away with this because they have too much leverage in the vendor-client power balance.

> companies as big as Facebook should not be allowed to exist

how would you solve that? A big problem is that the primary product isn't in and of itself that profitable. So it's hard to encourage competition there. And if you can't ask for money from the consumer you resort to ads.

Em, this is a private company. I see what you mean, but this hardly points to some dystopia.

That's cute. With sufficient size and influence over your life, a private company is a form of government.

sounds like an argument for nationalization.

Meta only has as much influence over our lives as we give it. I don't use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or any Meta product. What influence does the company have over me that even remotely rises to the level of "government?"

Bingo.

Even a relatively tiny company can have a huge impact on your life. Say you're interested in a niche hobby, so niche there's only one company who organises meet-ups and events around that hobby. The best friend of the chairman runs the main online forum for that hobby.

If you have a falling-out with either of those people, or their friends - you're going to lose all the social aspects of your hobby, and they're probably going to slander you to everyone they know. And people will repeat the lies, assuming that the chairman of the major event of the niche hobby wouldn't lie... and on and on.

The people who seek these roles absolutely love this, though homeowners' associations are probably the more familiar example of the same power structures.

>so niche there's only one company who organises meet-ups and events around that hobby.

If it's that niche that no one else forms groups around it, that sounds like an issue in and of itself.

>If you have a falling-out with either of those people, or their friends - you're going to lose all the social aspects of your hobby, and they're probably going to slander you to everyone they know.

sounds like your average small town experience. People can be cruel, they don't need a company to enable that.

That's your choice, law is not

sure, ok... but in some places it functions as a public utility

further, there was a principle of roman law that forbids this... then again the USA is not following those principles (civil law) but common law which means you can disregard what I say

you seem like you haven't actually read the referenced book, but only heard about it

When a company becomes pervasive enough to become a feature of the ambient social, commercial or economic environment, the argument of “its a private company” loses its validity.

At that point the company serves a vital public function, and its rules and actions bleed into public governance.

Which is a great argument for limiting the scope and size of companies that interface directly with the public.

wasn’t this mere private company recently in the spotlight for a scandal related to getting a us president elected through manipulation ?

maybe you should be holding them to a different set of standards

This endlessly parroted argument argument is so tired and lazy already. How big do these companies have to get before you turn your brain back on?

Exactly. This is a private company, and unlike a nation in which you can still have some word with your vote by becoming automatically a citizen from birth, you must buy your place as a shareholder in order to have a voice in whatever direction the company is going to. Now imagine a private company that slowly eats every spot in which users could buy or sell product and services; what would happen if say they one day decide to limit your business in there? Indeed you can still breathe, but the western world you're pretty much dead in every other way.

1 in 4 people in the world has an account in this private company.

And they would do well to understand what that actually means

Franz (not Apache) Kafka's The Trial also fits the situation:

"[..] the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka

every time someone mentions Kafka here i get reminded of his works and every time the comment is about Apache Kafka :)

In the 90s I had heard about this software you needed to publish web pages called 'Apache' so I googled it on Altavista expecting it to be hard to find amongst all the content about the Native American tribes. To my big surprise it was the web server that was at the very top of the search results.

Today I searched[1] for 'Kafka' on Google before I made the comment above and I got 'Apache Kafka' first and I'm still surprised. I never learn;-)

[1] I was tempted to write 'altavistad', but it's such a clunky word, no wonder Altavista lost.

> googled it on Altavista

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Maybe I can bing it in Hotbot.

I sometimes find myself saying "maybe do the math in Google's Excel"

The fact that it's at the top now is not surprising, Google probably knows you're a programmer and is likely to show you programming-related results.

Even if you turn off all tracking and use a private window, there are ways. In my case, the combination of a Polish IP address, Safari on Mac OS and English as the browser language is enough to profile me as "tech-savvy, probably interested in science and edutainment, not in funny cute cat videos, Polish politics and sports." The Youtube home feed is a testament to this. If I change my location to the UK (with a VPN), that feed suddenly becomes a lot more generic.

No. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=kafka also mentions Apache Kafka before Franz's wiki page. DDG's very existence hinges on NOT profiling you, in any way.

For me DDG shows a fact card at the top about Franz Kafka, linking to the Wikipedia page about him. After that comes the search results, of which the first one is about Apache Kafka.

I see the same on DDG, but Bing has Franz first for me.

DDG's userbase is also pretty particular, though.

Your average DDG user is somewhat privacy conscious, so they probably know much more about tech tan your average Google user, and are a lot more likely to be a programmer than anybody studying literature.

If you base your algorithm purely on what results get clicks (but not on who clicks them), you essentially target your average user.

I think it's just the combination of a direct match in a subdomain name, the popular and widely linked to domain name, and lack of any other context in query.

I don't remember whether DDG does anything to the scores it gets from Bing. They might, but then - taking into account how particular its users are... - the poor Franz K. would be on the third page, far behind even a Kafka library for Franz Lisp. (No, that's not a thing. A shame, I know.)

"Google probably knows you're a programmer"

I do everything in my power that it doesn't, but your point still stands.

My somewhat creepy story about this is that at some point I got lots of COPD related search results and ads and I didn't even know what this is at the time. After a few weeks my neighbors wife died from it.

I can only assume that my neighbors and other people in the house searched for it a lot in these weeks and Google thought I must be interested in this topic too.

Big Tech went in so hard on right-libertarianism that they reinvented Maoism.

True Marxism is called that by / the extreme left. / Occasionally the true left calls / a spade a spade and tells the left it’s right.

https://www.opera-arias.com/adams/nixon-in-china/libretto/

And some of these companies pride themselves as AI technology pioneers. Yet it seems their automated systems in this case are simply doing keyword matching.

Mind-boggling!

To be fair, it's also a failure of empathy for a user who might be flagged as a false positive.

True. Sometimes we pursue technology to its own ends forgetting that technology is supposed to help humans.

Another sad anecdote: A bank in Finland suspended an account for a text in free-form message field of a bank transfer. The message was for a vet visit of a dog named Ira. When you say "Ira's payment" in Finnish, you add suffix -n, so the text field said Iran, which of course must indicate money transfer to a sanctioned country. It is comforting to know that the bank system catches all the illegal activity that the sanction-busting criminals helpfully announce.

A bank in France (Boursorama, now Boursobank IIRC) locked someone's account because they did not provide the document.

Yes, "the document", without telling which document. When calling the support, they first said that it must be indicated, no kidding. And then they said that it was not possible (despite getting screenshots).

It is sometimes a matter of having the wrong attribute set somewhere in a database and welcome to hell.

IRA is also a possibly shady acronym in some parts of the world.

Likewise ISIS: https://isismagazine.org.uk/

Isis is the name of a main ancient Egyptian goddess; I can imagine many researchers triggering alerts when mentioning her in their emails.

A friend's daughter got her email blocked the other day because she mentioned "Niger" in the message (talking about her school assignment).

An acquaintance of mine (in Europe) had a default bank transfer message "al-qaeda terrorist fund" for years and years. That did finally raise some flags, but a visit to a bank office was enough to get the account unblocked.

Being a bit stubborn, he still kept the message and just applied rot13 to it.

I once wanted to make a small network of bots hosted at frriend's homes. These bots would talk each other by sending some Shakespeare's play excerpts where you would replace the names of the characters by names of various criminals. Just to see how long before I get caught :-)

Until I read that the law in my country explictely forbids "deceiving" the police...

how is that deceiving the police? it is a performance of fiction.

You got my point. That's why I was thinking about being backed by a lawyer 'cos at some point the discussion between "deceiving" and "acting" could be raised :-)

What's funny about this is that multiple people at this bank think that a terrorist group would just freely advertise itself this way. Like some local cell leader names his accounts "Groceries", "Home Repair", "Bombing Supplies"

I chuckled. And I know you have a point. I just immediately translated the story to US and this person would have a hard time keeping that account ( or any if he continued ).

Still, actual terror group would do it the same way intelligence agencies call their division 'room 10' as a code for something else. As a species, we certainly are a little weird.

No, they don't. The banks know perfectly well that this doesn't catch terrorists. But by law they are liable if a terrorist uses their services if they don't have a program to detect terrorists. A key-word match on Iran, bomb, ISIS, etc. is enough in the eyes of the regulator.

No it isn't (at least in the US). Banks have to adhere to Know Your Customer laws, and have to refuse services related to any person or group that's been sanctioned. OFAC has a search tool for such persons[0], but notably says that even using their tool isn't enough to avoid liability. Just saying "we looked for 'bomb supplies' in the memo" isn't going to cut it.

You might see dumb things because banks will do anything they can think of to ensure they comply, and enough in the eyes of the regulator is that they don't allow banned transactions.

[0] https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/

Person, group or Country. e.g. Iran.

Yes, you're meant to do KYC checks, but also be on the look out for things that your non-sanctioned customers might be doing (post KYC checks) that involves interacting with Sanctioned entities.

Hence lots of pattern matching on names of sanctioned countries/organisations/people.

> but a visit to a bank office was enough to get the account unblocked.

What would have happened if your acquaintance was from Middle-East or Middle-East looking? Probably the story would not have ended so happily or at least not so fast.

They're scared of the bad press that that one criminal that does announce their payment's purpose and later gets caught will bring "See, it even said in the note field that it's for Iran and they didn't catch it. Bank X is so incompetent"

Fun fact: one of the biggest banks in France has a branche on “Avenue de Cuba” in some city in South America (maybe Buenos Aires but I can’t quite remember because it was about 10 years ago I found this out). They get bank transfers to and from that branch blocked from time to time for “sanctions busting” because people just string match on the name “Cuba”.

Got the exact same with a bank located rue de Téhéran :p

At least you got an explanation, I had my Vivid account blocked without one, the only interaction was by chatbot, the only response I got was can't disclose the reason because of compliance issues. For extra fun trying to get the funds on the account back I had to go to an online form, which didn't have the fields I was told to fill in, and again was met by no response. Eventually had to go through EU dispute settlement to get a human response and an email link to an app for digital identity validation, eventually I at least got my funds transferred to my main bank. Why the account was blocked remains a mystery, I only used it for online payments and never even contested, refunded or failed one.

Anyway, it's utterly bizarre to me that banks can get a license to run their business with what seems only a marketing and it-team with virtually no recourse for the customer, it was a WTF moment for me and I hope to never get in such a dystopian situation for something I really rely on, be it banking or (utility) services. (and I got a slightly better understanding how it must feel like for the victims of the Dutch childcare benefits scandal (https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-scandal-serves-as-a-wa...))

I had a financial company attempt to withhold my money so I skipped the chatbot and went straight to the CFPB. They were suddenly able to ACH the funds back to the account they originally took them from. Just goes to show how arbitrary and capricious all these companies are.

Honestly I’m not so sure it would help, as these bots would be trained on previous customer service interaction.

I’ve been trying to get an Instagram account deleted for the better part of a year, and even with quintuple (!) ID verification and threatening to bring an GDPR case to bear, all I get is what amounts to “computer says no”, in such a talking-in-circles kind of way I am not sure I am talking to a human.

Just an idea, but try looking for a gdpr specific email/contact form. Usually companies have a specific one for that purpose because they actually have to comply with them.

In case that leads nowhere, you should raise a complaint with you local data protection agency, for example https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/

I already did that, otherwise Instagram provides no support.

I’ve been trying to escalate it to a manager, because I feel once the Irish data authority gets involved it will be handed off to legal.

Is it your account you want deleted or someone impersonating you?

Because killing your own account can be easily done by posting objectionable content.

Sounds like a great way to get yourself on a watchlist, too. Or banned from other things.

>on a watchlist, too

honestly spam is the easiest and safest way to get banned. easy to automate as well. doubly efficient if you scrape the site to power your bot.

>I feel once the Irish data authority gets involved it will be handed off to legal.

that's ideal if they are ignoring GDPR protocol, right? it'll make for glacial progress, but you did say you've been at this for a year as is.

Not telling you whats wrong should be highly ilegal, given how important these systems can be for modern society.

I'd prefer it if we legislated that organisations can't exclusively rely on closed systems like Facebook/Meta to run their services.

I saw a sign last year for forestry service work happening locally to me. Apparently they're only going to provide safety announcements on Facebook.

Shit like that grinds my gears.

Meta's users aren't citizens, they're serfs. :(

Serfs were at least tied to the land and somewhat entitled to live there. It's a lower status than serfs.

Not human beings.

Things.

A surprisingly large number of people chose to become serfs due to the benefits it provided. It seems wacky, but companies really are treating users in ways that lords were legally prevented from treating their surfs.

The privileges vs obligations of serfdom would be unpleasant by our standards, but it wasn’t slavery.

> I saw a sign last year for forestry service work happening locally to me. Apparently they're only going to provide safety announcements on Facebook.

There probably are (and should be) laws or regulations forbidding that, especially because "safety".

OTOH, from the PoV of the lower-level Forestry Service people who decided to do that - I'd guess they're stuck in a miserably understaffed and low-budget bit of a pretty dysfunctional government, and doing traditional safety announcements would cost them 100X the time and headaches of "just put it on Facebook".

You are most probably right, it's just the effect is the same unwanted de-facto monopoly on communications... so what's then there to do???

From "forestry service", I'll guess they're under state or federal authority, so "just be a squeaky wheel in local politics" is not an option.

Sadly, this is something that needs reliable, local news coverage. Doesn't much matter if that's a "for profit" newspaper magically transported from the Good Old Days of local journalism...or ongoing, ~thankless work in the trenches by a person or few with the skills to set up and run some flavor of local news web site (which could be very niche - say, forestry service stuff, parks & rec news, road closures & construction, etc.).

"Technofeudalism" is a term that already exists, actually. Here's Cory Doctorow reviewing Yanis Varoufakis's book about it: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/

> they're only going to provide safety announcements on Facebook.

While I understand, what's the alternative you propose? I have seen HN threads ridiculing some govt website for being outdated or not fixing the latest vulnerability or not using the latest version etc. Or if they do allocate a bigger chunk of their budget for tech and there will be unreasonable HN threads about how one user feels he/she could build it over a weekend and question the budgets. Worst yet, I have seen numerous HN threads talking about big ad tech (which most big tech are), claiming their services are totally non essential and a waste of time, and how their life improved since they stopped using these services. This comment goes as far as to call all the users as serfs totally ignoring that many real people and their real use cases :(

I feel its used because it's free and it simply works for most people. I feel the status quo is there because of the lack of a better one. You simply cannot make everyone happy on HN, let alone all people.

"While I understand, what's the alternative you propose?"

Simple: Strike the word "only". It's not that hard to post to several sites and also your own. I'd like some RSS on the main site too. It's not that hard for an individual and it's even easier for an organization with thousands of employees.

Yep that's it exactly.

I'd prefer the government to host its own data.

I'd also like any site hosting public information to be compelled to serve that information to everyone.

Facebook may not know they're being used like this, and it would be fine for them to object, but if they do want to carry government alerts they should be open to non-users without tracking or shadow profiling.

Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere.

(https://indieweb.org/POSSE)

> I have seen HN threads ridiculing some govt website for being outdated or not fixing the latest vulnerability or not using the latest version etc. Or if they do allocate a bigger chunk of their budget for tech and there will be unreasonable HN threads about how one user feels he/she could build it over a weekend and question the budgets.

So? Public institutions are free to run "outdated" web sites and ignore random people ridiculing them on HN. "We're on a budget, stop whining" is a perfectly valid response, if a such behavior even warrants a response.

>Public institutions are free to run "outdated" web sites and ignore random people ridiculing them on HN.

And people are free to ignore them and rely on trillion dollar corporations.

I understand your point, but the main point here isn't internet elitism. It's how you justify hosting servers for stuff no one is already visiting. "Not relying on Meta" is an equally HN take.

> organisations can't exclusively rely on closed systems like Facebook/Meta to run their services.

these organizations can barely update those sites sometimes. what hopes are there in maintaining and posting on their own blog?

Isn't it already under GDPR where entity using AI to make decisions need to provide an explanation how it arrived at it?

Not just AI, it applies to any form of automated decision making (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/):

The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.

But there's the usual "explicit consent" caveat, which Meta will argue they have because the user (as in: habitual consumer of harmful substances) has agreed to it in their TOS.

But then there is also a transparency requirement on automated decision making (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-15-gdpr/):

[data subject has access to] the existence of automated decision-making [and] meaningful information about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of such processing for the data subject.

This explicitly says that the user has the right to know what logic is employed by automated decision making systems.

Yeah, you could definitely take a case here, as not allowing someone to advertise is relatively consequential.

The UK ICO has some guidance here: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...

UK organisations are quite impotent. As in a lot of talk and very little walk. Unfortunately.

ICO has brought fines. Perhaps more significantly, privacy activists are starting to bring cases in courts.

Data rights enforcement is nascent/emerging but certainly a space to watch.

Not sure about that, gcc is pretty important to society and still gives out the most cryptic error messages.

To be somewhat fair to Meta; the "violation of unclear rules part" part is an appropriate response for spam detection.

Usually any entity dealing with the web don't want to reveal how their spam detector works because doing so could in turn reveal information on how to circumvent it[0].

The issue is that Meta thinks they're large enough that they can apply this to every single one of their business customers and all other parts of their policy as well - normally a company will be inclined to keep the businesses it's partnered with happy because losing their business can have a knock-on effect that could result in a bigger knock-on effect.

The sad thing is that Meta is probably correct in this assessment - losing one business wouldn't hurt them, regardless of spending. Even if you put a few thousand a month on the line, it's not worth for them to consider you. Heck even if you tell your friends about it - Meta doesn't give a shit.

The true Kafka-esque nightmare here though is that even just knowing someone at the company is apparently not even enough to get it properly checked out and fixed (even corporations like Google who have similar black box policies to most users have the means to do that). It seems Facebook runs on "computer says no" logic when it comes to cases they don't have data on anymore. That is truly disgusting.

[0]: This in part because most spam detection is ultimately still just checking heuristics; revealing the heuristic simply reveals what stat to adjust for. There's very few "sophisticated" detection methods - even the big email providers still just rely on heuristics combined with an internal trust score that they gain by checking how users respond to email.

Or they could, you know, spend some of their billions on employing humans to review these cases.

Would that generate even more billions in revenue, though?

Meta does spend on humans to review cases though.

Which is why it seems really strange that this was a lifetime ban, and so quickly at that.

Maybe it didnt even get to human review?

According to one of the screenshots in the article, both the ban and the appeal were decided on by technology.

But then where would all the money to burn on VR product pipe-dreams come from? /s

The spammers can produce far more cases than the humans can review.

Welcome to the world of automation.

You can put review on a system requiring additional ID/information/escrow payment.

A genuine business will be willing to put down some information and a cash payment for a review; spammers won’t have the time or resources.

You run the risk of a perverse incentive to trigger it for revenue but make the fee refundable or something.

Can you? I don't know that I've seen anyone try, but I would expect the PR blowback for "pay us $1 to appeal" to be worse than "you're just not allowed to appeal".

This is b2b, so it probably wouldn't really have that much PR.

Besides, I think for modern society, paying $1 rather than presenting your government ID is an easier ask.

There's a few easy checks to prevent perverse incentives:

1. promise (yeah, an impossible task already) a human will review your appeal

2. if the strike was a false positive, refund that appeal cost.

This is a solved problem for a long time now: require upfront payment, even if it's just $1.00. Many website owners have reported that this has killed 95% to 99% of all spam they were receiving.

Genuine business wouldn't mind paying their $970 bill by first paying $1 and then paying $969.

me looks at twitter blue bots

When we submitted our game's store page for Steam to review, they told us exactly which rule we broke and how we needed to fix it.

That's how you tell companies who care about their users and those don't.

(Not saying Steam never did shady stuff)

> Not saying Steam never did shady stuff

They seem very opaque on rules broken whenever you submit VN's. Which is odd given the... variety of VN steam offers. You can have stuff rated by the ESRB rejected, you can have sequels to games that are still being sold on Steam rejected. some SFW VN's are also rejected, so it's not as simple as sexual content not being allowed.

Then you go on the page and are recommended "Sex with Furry Hitler 3" and can't help but wonder if you simply got the wrong reviewer.

Yeah exactly. Imagine if our laws worked like that. Complete dystopia.

There is a book on that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial

Kafka is about human bureaucracy. This case is about AI bureaucracy.

Someone needs to re-write “The Trial” for this millennium. The new title can be “The Algorithm”.

(Re-post of <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27378230>)

There is no AI bureaucracy, at least until now, it's all human.

if u think about it - laws that govern lives today, are predominantly these rules of the information systems. these rules impact us more than the laws governed by the judiciary. so we ARE in this complete dystopia, question is whether we'll see any sort of uprising or dark IT ages are just beginning...

Sadly it's becoming true - the use of closed sessions where the evidence against you is seen by the judge in secret is becoming more widespread.

Against all natural justice - in the name of national security.

I'm not sure where the threshold is for spending. I have an account that was spending over $500K/yr on Facebook ads and we were blocked by AI with no recourse for over 6 months before we finally found a human who was able to reverse it.

I would have ended all spend with Meta. I suppose you don't have much choice if you're spending $500k on acquisition there.

Ah just like Microsoft who randomly locks my email I account I use only to receive spam email. Suddenly I’ve violated something in the terms of service and here’s a copy of the 200 page legal document. So my account is banned despite not sending emails or anything, just receiving spam email.

Oh unless I provide my phone number. Then they’ll unban me and I can continue presumably breaking the terms of service.

Only your phone number? That's almost benevolent. Here's a list of things companies have asked me for (including Facebook), and which I refused to provide:

- Copy of unspecified ID or driver's license

- High resolution copy of national ID, front and back

- Copy of birth certificate

- 3D video of face

I've been banned from Reddit several times for absolute b**** reasons. Most recently I was banned for report abuse. But it has an incredibly huge problem with a particular style of spam account that reposts old content on certain subreddits. I was reporting those and also commenting on threads as to why I was reporting them so that others could see it. Without any discussion, comment, or initial warning to say " hey stop using this report mechanism ", my year old account was banned outright.

So I created a new account, but I assume found out that despite posting pretty benign comments they were uncontroversial, that account got shadow banned. I'm not sure what mechanism i triggered.

So now I created another new account which seems to be functional for the moment. I think the lesson I should be taking away from this is that almost all of Reddit is absolute garbage, and I should only be going there for niche hobbies and professional support forums. Let the rest of that God forsaken site burn.

Anyway, I thought this was relevant because of the fact they didn't inform me of my sin before banning me.

You are 90% probably a goat. A troublesome edge-case. A poor investment.

They want sheep. Only sheep.

A while ago my Reddit account of over 10 years (zero prior issues, bajllions of comments and karma) was randomly killed via a Kafkaesque process I'm calling "Schrodinger's Ban":

1. With zero notification or reason, you are shadow-banned, and every post/comment you ever made vanishes from public view.

2. You use the "Appeals" page, and get a canned apology that it was a mistake withtheira spam-filter, and a message claiming your account has been restored.

3. Except they lied. You're still blocked, and now the Appeals page stops working because it falsely claims your account is already in good-standing!

4. All your messages through unofficial channels (modmail) are also blocked/filtered-to-uselessness so that you can't reach out to anybody.

5. If you load up another established account, like a job-search throwaway from 5 years ago... the exact shame shitty sequence of events kills it too.

>But it has an incredibly huge problem with a particular style of spam account that reposts old content on certain subreddits.

Well that's your problem right there. That type of spam boosts a number of activity and usage KPIs and increases engagement.

Reddit has even been caught using bots to artificially build out new subreddits by Google translating and reposting existing content from other subreddits to give the illusion of popularity in order to bootstrap new subs.

Why would they want to cut down on any of that when it would affect their bottom line?

>Most recently I was banned for report abuse

yeah that was one of the last straws for me. When you get banned instead of the spam or harassment you report, you know the site no longer cares about real people. I don't bother browsing with an account anymore. just quick checks on some niche communities I have yet to replace.

Sucks I can't hide posts, but I can still ignore annoying users or subs with RES. So I get most of the benefit.

You do not possess sovereign rights on digital platforms. I am curious about how much time it will take for the entirety of humanity to recognize that we are currently inhabiting a digital medieval era.

"digital medieval era" - this is a frighteningly precise characteristic.

It should be legally required to state a clear broken rule and example.

Right now they do this to avoid legal issues but as a citizen, I want them to be legally responsible.

They also do this to save on staff costs; if you don't tell someone why they were banned, they won't have any counterarguments either, nothing to try and argue with.

No room for arguments = no time needed for a human to interact.

For a while now, it's become pretty common knowledge that the big tech companies do not want anything involving people, because people don't scale. This is also why they invest so much in "AI" tooling, so there's even less people needed.

It is BS, the real reason they don’t tell you is because they genuinely don’t know

Oh they know, it's just that giving you the time of day costs them money and effort. Which is weird because they were earning money off of the adverts.

I’m saying that they don’t bc their algorithm is totally opaque

They won't change this unless some huge government body forces them, unfortunately. The market just follows the big players and there is nothing we can do. Something like EU should step in.

Even a mediocre fraudster won't need to be told what they did wrong. That bullshit line of reasoning is to cover their asses from litigation.

Yup, I'm sure that I'm just not big enough for them to notice or handle personally. That said, this is still absurd.

>a company I complained to the other day because they didn't label one of the inputs on their password reset form

That sounds like an accessibility issue, if they're American it could be an ADA violation.

In theory the GDPR means you should be able to request all your data as well as opt out of automated decision making (which would address the "why was I flagged?" and "stop being stupid this is clearly not a snake") side of things.

Of course, that's only in Europe and it's not a very easy law to avail of, sadly.

> you should be able ...

And then you get banned for life

retaliation against legal compliance sounds like an easy lawsuit, even for the EU.

Hell, if they let ChatGPT handle this and make a decision it would be better. At least you’d feel like you were interacting with a human.

This is the most common "security" measure in the payments industry(i.e paypal)

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