The dark side of account bans
madelinemiller.dev
madelinemiller.dev
We do not currently have a Facebook sign-in button in our production app.
We followed the process twice, really carefully. Both times Facebook failed to verify the business. No clear reason why.
We posted everything on their developer forum hoping for help, but got nothing back. Just silence!! Many people were facing the same issue like us.
Ended up having to give up and tell my friend I couldn't help. Honestly, the fear of getting banned mysel if I kept pushing stopped me from trying it one more time.
these platforms are difficult to deal with when things go wrong.
Meta seem to not actually check reports. My theory is that they just rely on some percentage of reports maybe relating to followers, reports, and time. If it exceeds a threshold, there's an action. Otherwise, no action.
So, in a sense, we live in the best world possible.
May I suggest that you just block and mute the prostitutes, if they offend your sensibilities? That's what I do. Because in the next iteration of censorship, we might lose the social networks altogether.
I have a throwaway account on Facebook that follows no pages and has no friends. In the absence of anything else to go on, Facebook somehow decided that I would most like to see anti-vax conspiracy, flat earth theory and child sexual abuse material.
Every report I've made about the CSAM has met the same "we found nothing wrong" response, and it keeps bubbling up in my feed.
EU, Canada, Australia, Japan, f'rex.
I have discovered an international child porn sharing ring which I believe to be much bigger than any previously known or imagined.
The ring operates openly on the Internet, without anonymous technologies. Therefore it should be easy to track down the perpetrators.
The name of the ring is Instagram. You can view their recruiting page at instagram.com.
Yours truly, anonymous reporter"
Don't tempt me with a better world.
All the most successful political actors are able to selectively control the flow of information. They don't put their beliefs in the TOS until doing so confers an advantage to them. Once it does, they do. The TOS still doesn't contain all their rules - only the ones that are advantageous for them to announce publicly.
Wow. There are over 30 restaurants within a mile of where I live, and not one of them uses Instagram to host anything as far as I know. They always have a real web page, even if it’s cobbled together on Wix or some other horrible thing, and the menu is invariably a PDF (because they had to send something to the printer, and they don’t know how to put something nicer on the web). Sometimes you have to allow third–party JS to get their webpage to render so that you can get the PDF though.
Well, I guess the national chains don’t post a PDF these days. They give you a real menu and even offer online ordering and delivery. Most people probably don’t need to look at a McDonald’s menu to know what they sell though.
I've been able to reliably target a restaurant 20 minutes away by bus, select my order, pay for it online, and have it ready for pickup by the time I disembark. It's a pretty sweet arrangement.
If your chosen restaurant directs you to some dumb QR code and Instagram, try just looking them up on Google Maps. You'd be surprised what resources are available there, including plenty of reviews and customer-submitted photos of the very dishes you're looking to order!
No more technical skill is required to use these service than is required to use Instagram, but the difference is that Instagram takes away all control from their users while these services give their users control over everything (except of course that hosting millions of restaurant websites lets these services collect a lot of data about the visitors that they can sell behind the scenes for extra profit, of course).
But also, shame on Meta and most other gigantic companies for having no due process for anything like this. I have no idea how they just go along with it and decide in favor of the reporter with zero evidence. Sure, maybe bans need to be proactive but there should at least be an appeals process.
There should probably be more laws that cover permanent bans for business platforms that have a marketshare above a certain size. You shouldn’t be able to be permanently banned from services like this that dominate their respective markets without a robust process. There should probably be cases where even the violation of certain aspects of ToS can’t get you banned permanently, where law overrides ToS. Imagine if you were banned from getting phone service from AT&T in the 1980s and how devastating that could be.
Every walled garden with a single corporate owner will 100% guaranteed abuse that ownership power.
The only way forward is open protocols that interoperate without anyone having a controlling interest.
I’m not convinced by your argument. I acknowledge that maintaining an isolated identity for the Discord/whatever accounts would have limited the scope of the damage, but it’s often not very practical for a variety of reasons, and perhaps more importantly, the anonymity is part of the problem too: the trouble-maker has anonymity, and uses it for bad.
Under the Law of Moses, a discovered false witness in court was to receive the punishment he tried to cause, explicitly as an enduring deterrent to dishonesty. Deuteronomy 19:16–21:
> If an unrighteous witness rises up against any man to testify against him of wrongdoing, then both the men, between whom the controversy is, shall stand before the LORD, before the priests and the judges who shall be in those days; and the judges shall make diligent inquisition; and behold, if the witness is a false witness, and has testified falsely against his brother, then you shall do to him as he had thought to do to his brother. So you shall remove the evil from amongst you. Those who remain shall hear, and fear, and will never again commit any such evil amongst you. Your eyes shall not pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.
I presume Meta knows who made the report. I wonder if they ever make diligent inquisition, and ban the troll. I doubt it, but suppose, just suppose they did apply a standard like this.
Imagine if the account-reporting procedure stated a clear policy: “if we find your report vexatious, we will ban your account instead”; or “if we find your report vexatious, we will tell your target your account details so they can pursue legal action if they desire”. (This is, of course, overly simplified, and would probably deter legitimate reports too.)
Such harassment and threats as these frequently break laws, but anonymity is one factor that makes it much harder to pursue in a legal system. (Though it’s hardly the only thing; jurisdiction problems are a rather big deal with online stuff, and legal systems are often not tuned for pettier squabbles.)
Returning to the original case: if there were no anonymity at all, and the guy had to threaten via his real identity, I doubt it would have happened, and remedy might have been easier if it did.
I’m not against anonymity, I just feel the total picture is more nuanced than you’re presenting it as. Anonymity has both advantages and disadvantages.
It’s not the conclusion I’m disagreeing with, just the logic. (Perhaps I undermined this aspect by indulging in the thought experiment where accountability was actually held. Do I think such a scheme would actually work well? Not at all. People are involved.)
I've attempted to archive the link at both Internet Archive and Archive Today, though both fail to show content.
And I just now added a new one: <https://web.archive.org/web/20250519201255/https://geekfemin...>
My condolences.
That's idiotic. Really, reaaaally idiotic. Like, "talk to the manager and tell them they are doing a very stupid thing" levels of idiotic. </Rant>
This "we're too modern and digital to get out heads out of our asses" attitude towards adopting "cool technology" with complete disregard for an analog Plan B gets to my nerves.
Here, since Covid, lots of places stopped offering physical menus, instead they put a QR code to some webpage or gigantic PDF file that contains the menu (and can be updated every day to push prices up if needed, heh).
I hate that services assume you must have a hundreds-dollar device on your pocket at all times to even be able to access the basic service they provide. I just power off my phone and tell them "look I ran out of battery, what should we do?". They usually do have a physical menu, thankfully.
But other things aren't so nice. My employer offers a restaurant card, and because now we live in a "digital era", they don't issue physical cards any more, only digital ones to be used with Google Wallet on Android. Turns out I'd like to install GrapheneOS on my Pixel, and you got it: Wallet doesn't work on GrapheneOS for payments! I'd want my physical restaurant card, please.
All restaurants have an "analog plan B", it's called walking in and asking for a menu. These are tiny businesses run by people who love food, not tech. It really is asking too much to expect them to work at and understand the ideas behind digital freedom, at least if you want them to serve you good food.
Notably Google Maps curates a photo set of the physical menu of basically every restaurant in the urban USA, if not everywhere. I find a lot of people don't actually know this. I never bother looking at restaurant sites anymore except for places where I know they're likely to have changed the menu (and even then it's a crapshoot, per your original point).
At least every second month I walk out of a new restaurant I’ve discovered because they don’t even care to have it.
Employees treat you like it’s your fault that you can’t see the prices behind a Meta auth wall. They won’t even offer to read it out to you or show in a device of their own.
Nowadays, if I see a triangle-shaped cardboard with a QR code on top of each table, I’m 95% sure I will walk out of there hungry. And angry.
Even if they have QR codes, they have some paper menus or tablets.
And it's not even for people without devices or logins -- it's because phone batteries run out and they run out all the time. Restaurants don't generally make a lot of profit, and they need every customer they can get.
Do you bother to ask? Or do you just assume?
Maybe that shows a lack of critical thinking in the general population? I.e.: people must be using FB/IG because it’s the only thing they know, and never questioned themselves if there are other avenues?
I get why that is useful for them (looks cool, no having to reprint the physical hours stickers, less ugly than a paper version I guess) but the assumption that it is easier for me to pull out my phone and scan the code versus just... trying the door... whew.
Reminds me of working in restaurants ages ago. Credit card swiper down? Cool, pull out the "knuckle buster" for your "analog Plan B" -- all's well, though the manager's probably pissed at staying late to manually enter the transactions. We probably could not even do that anymore because many cards have gone to non-imprintable numbers.
Similarly there were no open avenues of appeal.
By a big fluke I actually did some work for FB and in the process they unlocked it.
But yeah, monopolies controlling access to public services with no oversight sucks.
<https://www.fcfcoa.gov.au/gfl/fairwork-small-claims>
The law is what provides justice, the mechanism is the court system. There are many who try to dissuade you from this option because it is effective. Use it.
Write your consumer protection entity. In much of the US that is your state attorney general's office. I believe you can start with the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission), here:
<https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/problem-with-a-product-or-...>
Write your government representatives.
- City council members.
- County supervisors / local councils.
- State representatives / MRA.
- Federal representatives / MPs.
Call their office(s).
Write their office(s). Email and postal mail.
Follow up with them. If you don't get a sufficient response, let the office know.
Australian governmental organisation: <https://peo.gov.au/understand-our-parliament/how-parliament-...>
Contact NGOs advancing personal digital rights in your country. For Australia this seems to be Digital Rights Watch (<https://digitalrightswatch.org.au/>) and EFF Australia (<https://efa.org.au/>). These and similar organisations elsewhere should already be very familiar with account-lock-out and similar problems, and can likely direct you as to how to register your claim most effectively.
Tweeting, blogging, and throwing up your hands is what Meta would most like you to do.
Do more and cause them pain.
Organise.
Why is this complicated? Do the Meta ToS include a choice-of-venue clause for consumer accounts?
How can a stranger have so much hate towards someone who's content they want to consume? Why are meta engineers suggesting suing their own company instead of pointing to someone to walk through a basic appeals process? The obvious, why do so many things in the world not work without a smartphone and a google/facebook account with internet access? Why isn't anyone doing anything about any of this? PMs at facebook? Congressmen/women?
The system is not working.
You won't necessary receive the answers for your questions, but you'll get back your account.
If the simple message did not help, you file a pre-trial claim and send it to them.
Recently, I found that I couldn't log in to my LinkedIn account. They made the issue seem like an error, so I spent a lot of time trying to log in on different device/browser combinations. Eventually, I folded and tried to submit a support ticket, just to be met with a login page.
After some searching around, I found direct links to the support forms, but none of them worked — they all displayed the same error when I tried to submit a ticket. The only other option was to contact them on Twitter. Tried to create an account just to be met with a generic "something went wrong" error, after wasting my time with what was easily the most awful CAPTCHA I've ever seen.
Tried creating a new LinkedIn account — no good, they ask for phone verification and won't let me reuse my phone number.
For some time, I thought my only option was going to be legal action, until a lightbulb lit up in my head. I went back to the support form, and instead of providing the email I used for my LinkedIn account, I used another email. The ticket was submitted successfully.
At that point, it was clear that my account had some shadow ban in place. My only guess is that I tripped some psychotic automated system. How is it in any way acceptable that a company can essentially, and completely arbitrarily, blacklist someone from the job market like this? No notification or warning, nothing — they literally try to gaslight you with fake errors.
I'm hoping that my support ticket will have some effect (not sure it will, given what I've experienced so far), or else I'll once again be left with legal action as my only recourse. So far, nothing.
Given that I don’t seriously use LinkedIn (I just use it to scope out other people), I’ve just permanently stopped using it at all.
Oh no! If only there was some way you could have known!
Apparently "reddit legal" thought that was a credible threat. I find that strangely encouraging.
In addition to platform-wide bans most popular subreddits also use subreddit bans to create false impressions of consensus.
Last scandal I heard was they banned people who upvoted memes about Mario's green brother.
The fact that people openly cheer on re-introducing this, or on those following through with such plans (Luigi), is just showing how fed up wide masses of society are - and Reddit's admins have been hellbent on quenching even verbal forms of dissatisfaction.
The problem is, all that does is keeping pressure bottling up and eventually, if the issues with inequality and absurd amounts of power grabbing aren't dealt with, the explosion will be much harder than if people had a relatively safe way of voicing their dissent.
“Civility” is the first recourse of the privileged.
That's my point. When people see no other way out of resolving the exploding wealth and power inequality crisis than violence, it shows that democracy is on the verge of failure.
It's horrifying, agreed, but it happening is completely understandable IMHO given that democratic systems seem to be completely and thoroughly corrupted by big money.
It's no longer a question if open violence erupts, it's a question of when - and Western governments all seem to ignore the issue and show zero intent to actually do something to ease the life of the wide masses. The system is headed straight for collapse.
There’s a good book called “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” by Christopher Browning which explores this. The Reserve Police Battalions were created by Germany to police captured territory, but they were seen by ordinary Germans as a way to avoid the war and conscription. The members were not Nazis, and almost to a man they joined because it was an honorable way to avoid participating in the evils happening all around them. They were only trained for ordinary honest police work, but in the end many of them were being used to hunt down and murder Jews. They were sent out into forests to comb them for underground shelters. They rounded up Jews and herded them into mass graves.
Almost none of them complained or tried to avoid participating. No one punished them if they didn’t participate. No one coerced them into participating. A few asked for and received transfers, if I recall correctly. The best that can be said about the rest is that many of them are believed not to have actually fired their weapons. Some of them probably went the whole war without actually killing anyone, technically. They were just assigned the job so they did it.
Your second paragraph gives a single example which is apparently supposed to support that conclusion. That's a definitional example of cherry-picking and hasty generalization.
The projection comes in because it's difficult to see how you would reach those conclusions from the available evidence, unless you're projecting.
And if you want more evidence than that, then I suggest reading about Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments. A little quote:
Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become
patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions
incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively
few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
If you're unaware of all the criticism of Milgram's experiments, then you have some studying to do before we can have a meaningful discussion about this.
While you're catching up on the history of social psychology since 1961, you might want to ask yourself why it is that you're so eager to believe that "ordinary people are mostly evil". Do you have a religious background, perhaps? "Original sin" and all that?
Some of the criticisms are valid, and the results to not reflect well on us as people. The 33% of people who can keep to their stated ethics in the face of authority probably have a really hard time believing that 66% of people cannot. To them it seems easy and obvious that you just don’t violate your ethics. But imagine it this way: for hundreds of thousands of years humans lived in tiny tribes wandering in the wilderness. Failure to heed the orders of the tribe’s leaders would have been a virtual death sentence for most of that time. That environment literally breeds for people who obey even when they think it’s a bad idea. That’s apparently not long enough for the trait to have become universal, thankfully.
I don’t know about the TPSE though. I didn’t cite it either.
Launching someone in a rocket to space is clearly beyond the reach of any single individual. It's also not particularly violent in the scheme of things. It's clearly intended to be hyperbole, and hyperbole against a public figure is common. Musk himself, despite his thin skin, has often said much worse, I guess his ban from Twitter should be coming any day now?
However, the lawyers reddit employs are apparently similarly confused on that point.
Welcome to 2025's take on 1984.
This hasn't happened (yet, at least).
"Britain's digital services tax, imposed on U.S. companies like Amazon, Google and Meta, will not be changed under the terms of the trade deal agreed between the two countries on Thursday"
Personally, I don't mind the tax being dropped as long as the UK gets something in return that's worth the equivalent or more. We (the UK) export more services to the US than we get in return, so it would seem preferable to make services trade as friction-less as possible.