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Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

What about people use the platform to spam, harass, or threaten other users?

those are a matter for a court to decide. noone should lose their account without due process.

in germany some law firms offer a service to help you get your account back with a well crafted letter from a lawyer

You didn't answer the rest of my questions, which are sort of relevant. If I run a small platform of a couple hundred users, and one or two of them are actively harassing and threatening other users, my only option should be taking them to court? To say nothing of jurisdictions, or anonymity, or any number of other issues, you should realize that this gives an unfair advantage to platforms that can spend more money on lawyers to argue their case, or lobby for legislative change, etc.

please use a more generous reading of what i said. clearly small companies shouldn't be held to the same standards as big ones. but even small companies should be able to provide an explanation for account closures, and no terms and conditions can abrogate the right to sue. so you don't have to take them to court, but they may well take you to court after you close their accounts. however if you have done your homework, and documented the abuse you'll win, and they will have to pay your court fees.

but until someone sues small companies will probably fly under the radar and the focus is on big companies as it should be. and yes big companies do have an advantage, that's why their actions deserve closer scrutiny.

I dunno. One of the core skills of bullies in school is taking advantage of "due process".

Funny in American schools teachers and administrators are known to show allyship to bullies in that they take no action to stop them unless they go really too far and kill somebody. I took a summer course though that was taught by two German instructors who actually led the bullying directly. Maybe they have a more toxic culture than the US.

I know the EU has a "right for embezzlers to reoffend" law which must have been an example of people who use their social skills as a weapon against other people using their social skills to turn the law into a weapon against the rest of us. The "right to be forgotten" is itself a crime when embezzling is concerned because embezzlers have a very high recidivism rate, essentially 100% when behavioral addictions like gambling are involved. This is a crime which can destroy businesses, ruin lives, deny people a secure retirement, and cause unemployment. I can think of no reason why embezzlement treason should ever be forgot.

ignoring that in my opinion bullying is an entirely different issue that has nothing to do with what we are discussing, if bullies can take advantage of due process then the rules are bad or unsuitable, and just because that may be the case in schools that doesn't mean that due process is a bad idea to begin with.

yes, the laws are not perfect, may need to be changed. actually that is the core of most of this subthread. the example that for this case in germany the laws are better than in the UK, and that it is possible to improve the protection of users against these big companies.

I can think of no reason why embezzlement treason should ever be forgot

this is another example of a law that may not be perfect. again, laws can and should be changed when evidence emerges that the current laws are not suitable to protect people from harm.

in this particular case i would argue that we may not have enough data to decide. there may also be a component of believing that people can change, and the question is what causes them to recommit such a crime, and what can we do about it to change that. one problem here is that a permanent record does not stop people from recommitting a crime, but it does make it very difficult for them to reform because reform requires that past transgressions are forgotten.

but we could go on endlessly finding examples of laws that are broken, and argue about how they should be fixed, or claim that because there are other broken laws, then the one we are discussing must be broken too, or whatever the argument is here. but doing so while we are discussing one such law is not really helpful, and feels like whataboutism.

facebook has billions of unique users (ostensibly) - so, c'mon, person.

So, again, I ask: what size does this sort of argument start applying at? 100 users? 1 million? 1 billion?

say, when 1-10% of a country's (or state's, or whatever) citizens are users of the service, someone should pop their head in and say "we need a different legal strategy for retention and user onboard/offboard."

It should be taught in MBA, and VCs should tell startups that aim to get "millions" of users that they need to plan, in advance, for this sort of thing.

This isn't really a gotcha, i'd put a hard line somewhere around "10% of the global population" as needing extreme scrutiny.

Due process? Tell me you’ve never read the Terms and Conditions without telling me. You don’t have a legal right to anything on Facebooks servers. Just because you invest effort and time into something doesn’t mean you have a right or ownership. You aren’t squatting on Facebook’s land. They just haven’t forced you off yet.

In some countries you have legal rights to information collected about you. This can include information collected by social media sites. Just because Facebook has a forced arbitration agreement in their TOS doesn't mean it's valid everywhere, especially in countries that nullify those clauses. The same goes with information collection clauses. Laws supercede terms of services.

And personally, while I don't mind users being able to be banned for harassing users, I do think everyone, including trolls, should have the right to information collected about them and their account

It’s valid in the UK where this person is limited to their rights. Sure people should have right to information collected about themselves but a lot of countries don’t extend that right. Perhaps in a different reality or in 10-15 years time things will change. Not while Zuck is sucking people dry of their data and people use Facebook because they see identity as a valid reason to give up their freedoms so they can sell something to someone they’ll never communicate with again.

Perhaps in a different reality or in 10-15 years time things will change

germany is neither a different reality, nor does it live in the future. but it provides a real example of a place where things already changed.

Not for people in the UK where it matters. Yes I understand hypotheticals and navel gazing at Germany’s data laws. That doesn’t make them more real or possible for this incident.

Sounds nice but the UK doesn’t benefit in regards to laws from another country.

this person doesn't benefit, but the country does. people could demand a change based on the german example. i don't know how likely that is to happen now, but some time ago the UK used to be part of the EU, which means there was a time when such a change would have been quite likely actually.

Sure, that could have happened. I’m not going to argue whether something hypothetically probable is possible.

the german federal cartel office forced for example amazon to change their terms and conditions so that they may no longer arbitrarily close accounts. account closures also must include a reason. further german users can now sue against closures in germany.

so yes, companies can not arbitrarily ignore due process in their term and conditions

Well this person lives in the UK where such protections do not extend so I do not see such relevance to this topic. I would also be curious to find out if there is a difference between “account closed” and “account disabled indefinitely”.

the point is that it doesn't have to be that way. and the examples in other countries show that it is indeed not like that everywhere. it is a fair question to ask which way is better, and looking at other ways to respond to these cases is relevant in my opinion.

It doesn’t have to be that way but it is and won’t be anything different until many variables change. As far as this case is concerned: no there is and never will be due process for this situation nor does any UK law allow for that.

Maybe the user could make an argument in court that Facebook was hurting his business but hard to prove with a free service. No real harm has come to this person.

losing access to a number of customers is a real harm and actually quite easy to prove. the service being free has nothing to do with it.

Usually a “losing access to customers” argument is tied to loss of capital to make the argument stick. It is harder to tie a customer to loss of capital in a free service. Especially a free service that isn’t the only offering.

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