Kicked Off Facebook, and Wondering Why | Hacker News Reader

Kicked Off Facebook, and Wondering Why

nytimes.com

37 pointstodayiamme48 comments

Glad I went back and read the end of the article. For anyone else who is about to give up and let themselves believe Facebook was unfairly moralizing in this case:

> For Mr. Letwin, that can’t come soon enough. A month after his account was disabled, he received an email apologizing, saying it had all been a mistake on Facebook’s part.

> A Facebook spokesman said a report was filed against Mr. Letwin for using a fake name, which he had not done, and a reviewer looking at his account then mistakenly thought it violated Facebook’s standards regarding promotion of violence and terrorism. But the process took far longer than it should have, he acknowledged, saying that typically, an appeal should be responded to within a few days.

Thanks for the tl;dr. It seemed like an awfully long article for non-news.

Well, it wasn't really non-news. It's an interesting form of denial of service.

Probably some zionists didn't like his group and probably mass reported his account. They do have a dedicated group for that kinda stuff.

There seems to be well organised groups out to promote the Israeli viewpoint on any social media site which discusses it.

Take Reddit for example, every time the topic comes up it gets absolutely inundated with "people" trying to browbeat any non-pro point of view into submission (through a combination of downvoting and just outright argument from multiple puppets).

While there are definitely real people who feel that strongly about the topic and have similar views, all you have to do is start looking at the account histories of others to feel like there is a lot of sockpuppeting going on.

I'd love for the site admins on social media sites to look into this to see if there is any "unusual activity" going on, particularly Reddit.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/08/14/israel-s...

Both Facebook and Twitter seem very susceptible to "report" campaigns. Anybody who can drum up the numbers can silence somebody else.

I have friends whose ministry is focused on problems in religion A and making converts from religion A to religion B. There is apparently a group of religion A members who flag literally everything they post as hate speech. Photos of themselves? Hate speech. Photos they took of religiously significant locations? Hate speech. Telling us that her mom is in the hospital? Hate speech.

Eventually, after hours on the phone with FB support, it appears to be settled. I would love to know the technical means FB used -- whether they marked my friends' account as "always manually review flags", whether they've got better voting ring detection, or whether they simply found a group of abusing flaggers as a result of the first phone call and that group isn't slick enough to make new accounts.

I was shut out of Facebook for 24 hours and felt like I had a limb chopped off.

I honestly, truly, just don't understand this. Really, I don't. How can anyone allow themselves to become so utterly dependent on a single company like this? This reads like a drug addict describing going cold turkey.

Because all of their friends are also dependant on it.

And not just friends, many people depend on Facebook for their work. I know from an ex that the Opera world operates entirely within FB, and I can imagine the same is true for drag queens getting gigs. My realtor also swears by FB.

It's not like people chose to become so dependent on a social network, often you one must to work within the context that's given.

Especially someone who's 58 y/o (according to his Wikipedia profile). Did he just forget that he was living just fine for nearly half a century before Facebook was even created?

That quote was from another person.

“We don’t realize how ingrained Facebook is in our everyday lives,” a drag queen named Heklina told KNTV in San Jose, Calif. “I was shut out of Facebook for 24 hours and felt like I had a limb chopped off.”

I didn't look that up before posting, but yea, it certainly makes it even more difficult to understand.

Edit: Aha, I see from a sibling post that the wikipedia page is for a different person.

This is not very uncommon actually. Teenagers all around the country feel the same way about their smartphones. I can't remember when this experiment was done but when smartphones were taken away the kids literally had withdrawal symptoms.

As for the dependence on a single company that's more of an issue with technical training and awareness. You might be able to set up your own VPS with all sorts of open source alternatives to what facebook offers but not many others can.

> literally had withdrawal symptoms

Meaning what? That's a broad-enough statement to be meaningless. If withdrawal symptoms include grumpiness, listlessness, and boredom, I get withdrawal symptoms every time I sit in traffic.

Do a google search and find the study. I'm neither a psychologist nor a neuro-chemist.

It's pretty poor form to cite a study and then say "google it and find it yourself" when somebody asks for clarification.

It's also pretty poor form to ask for a citation on something when you can easily find it on your own. We aren't talking about a generic topic here. A five-second search on "smartphone withdrawal" brings up tons of relevant results, including the study mentioned by parent.

edit: I guess expecting people to do their own work is offensive to some people...

This introduces the additional complication of a back-and-forth exchange about whether we're talking about the same study before we can have a meaningful conversation about the contents of that study (ie, "was the methodology good", "were the results statistically significant", etc.) It also introduces the additional complication that a search engine might tailor my results differently from yours, and therefore not show me the study at all because (for example) it thinks I'm searching for an app to help with caffeine withdrawal because I searched for Pepsi last week.

Best practice is to provide an unambiguous reference to whatever study you're discussing. That can take many forms -- a link, the name of the authors and journal, or the full title. Making every single person who wants to be involved in the discussion have to do their own search and make sure they've found the exact right study simply isn't conducive to productive conversation.

>>Best practice is to provide an unambiguous reference to whatever study you're discussing.

In formal debate, yes. This is an informal discussion. The OP started the sentence in question with, "I can't remember when this experiment was done but..." which set the tone in that particular thread to a conversational one. Do you ask your friends for citations when casually chatting about random stuff over beer? Observe the same protocol here. If you get really curious, just look it up yourself.

> "Do you ask your friends for citations when casually chatting"

Yes.

If they reference a study that I'm interested in, I absolutely do ask them for details. And none of them are stupid enough to tell me to "just google it" without giving me adequate information to be sure I've found the right study.

In particular, if they happen to be at a computer at the time, I'll ask them to look it up for me.

>>Yes.

Nothing is as annoying as the guy who throws a wrench into a casual conversation by asking for citations.

>>And none of them are stupid enough to tell me to "just google it"

Wow. So I imagine your happy hour conversations to be like this:

Guy: I remember reading a study where they found that X happens when people do Y.

You: What study is that?

Guy: I don't know, I just remember reading about it a while ago.

You: Actually, I see that you have your smartphone with you. Can you look it up for me real quick?

Guy: ...

I think it's interesting (euphemistic) how you imagine my friends and I interact. Given that I have actual experience interacting with my friends and you have only your imagination, perhaps you should reconsider the casualness with which you've insulted me. My conversations do not infact involve lots of "I don't know", "...", annoyed responses; people describe the details as well as they remember and then either they or we as a group try to look things up.

Next time, try asking questions instead of imagining or assuming.

>>Given that I have actual experience interacting with my friends and you have only your imagination, perhaps you should reconsider the casualness with which you've insulted me.

Are you seriously saying this with a straight face right after suggesting that someone (i.e. me) who tells you to "just Google it" when you ask for the citation for a casually mentioned study is stupid?

You really are a piece of work. I think I'm done here.

I'm saying that any of my friends who told me to "just Google it" would be stupid, and the rest of my friends would let him know. Because all of my friends know that, if you're having a conversation with us and you reference "a study" you're going to have to back that up with a clear enough description that we can actually find the specific study in question and discuss it. (I think that's also the ethos on Hacker News -- it's generally expected, even in casual HN conversation, that people will give enough information that interested parties can follow up without confusion. Don't tell people "google it"; take the 5 seconds to google it yourself and give them the link.)

I expect people to ask me for citations, and I expect people to give me citations when asked, because that's the sort of social circle I've cultivated (and that's the expectation HN has cultivated as well.) You clearly run in a different social circle than me. I would not call you stupid for not having cultivated the same habits and expectations. But I would appreciate if you didn't criticize me based on how you imagine I socialize.

If it's only a 5 second search, then why didn't the OP provide that study and chose instead to say google it, yourself? Both answers take about the same time after all.

Because I didn't like his tone.

You should also add in the fact that the study found 19% of only 150 total 17-23 year olds responded to a written, university study after 24 hours that they were distressed. Only 11% said they were feeling isolated. There are so many things wrong with the conclusion that its a disgrace to any reader. That somehow equates to addiction to smartphones for a large amount of young people?

Article about one such study in the April 2011 UK Daily Mail:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1374632/Smart...

Oh jeeze, both the article and the research are utter crap. 150 students. 11% said they felt isolated and 19% said they felt "distressed". That is hardly a conclusive study and touting it as fact is silly.

Although I imagine we all appreciate an attempt to provide evidence, it's worth noting that the Daily Mail is basically a tabloid, notorious for misreporting studies and outright lying about things.

I think you can get to the paper from http://theworldunplugged.wordpress.com/, though I've not followed through and read it yet.

That's a fair way of describing it. A couple of years back I had a facebook account, a nice iPhone 4 and an Android tablet and did most of my social organisation and communication through them. Everywhere I went I had one device or another attached to my face or hands permanently. I got anxious if the internet was patchy and went particularly batshit when my ADSL line was down for 2 days resorting to cracking the neighbour's speedtouch router password and using that.

Totally fucked up situation so I fixed it one afternoon.

Today, I have a fastmail box that gets about 2-5 emails a day that I read once a week, a single static web page and a £20 Nokia that I don't actually even know where it is as the battery is flat. Work happens elsewhere via RDP and no corporate phone any more.

Life is good.

The transition from one to the other was initiated by a sudden realisation that I wasn't actually doing anything any more other than piping crap into someone else's product and that I wasn't productive or useful and that my family were suffering. I was like a hamster running in a wheel.

Getting rid of this was hard and could be considered like a drug addict going cold turkey as you say, so spot on. I felt ill for a couple of weeks. Then it wore off suddenly.

Now I just have to lever my wife off it...

I honestly, truly, just don't understand this.

Humans need social interaction. If someone's only form of social interaction has become online interaction, losing that will be akin to being put into solitary confinement (which we know is akin to real physical torture).

Most human beings are lazy. Most people don't change their UI's default setting and similarly most people aren't going to change their default mode of interaction. So even your good friends are not that likely to change from Facebook to some other mode of interaction just because you aren't there.

Now, it would be great to not be lazy in choosing your interaction mode and to have all your friends also not be lazy in this regard but the later part is going to be a lot harder.

I totally understand the need for social interaction, and the effects of that interaction being withheld. I don't however understand how anybody could possibly allow their "only form of social interaction" to become Facebook.

It is pretty simple. When all the people you want to interact with are only using Facebook... What are you going to do?

Maybe it's hard to find Facebook essential (as opposed to convenient) if you lived during a time when you had to actually know your friends' phone numbers and enter them manually. As I did.

Anyone you're close to you have a way to contact without Facebook. Anyone else shouldn't make you feel like you're missing anything important. Right?

To me, it is simply it has become part of someone's life. You will feel a little sad and even angry when your favorite hang out place is shut down. You simply make it part of your current moment of life. Do people depend on it as a channel to talk to people, sure. Once you are used to something, you build an attachment.

the same way that many are dependent on gmail

A friend of mine a month or two a go began posting "throw-up Thursday" pictures (a play on #tbt, i.e. throwback Thursday). He posted pictures of people who were drunk and had thrown up on themselves. They were pretty gross, as intended.

Someone reported him, and Facebook removed all of the posts and comments referencing those posts. He began posting pictures again in protest, and they threatened to ban him if he didn't stop, so he did.

I think it is unfortunate that Facebook feels the need to police content like this (especially when the content is relatively in-offensive, like some pictures of barf). There is also a block mechanism, so you can block stuff from people you don't want to see (or, you could, you know, un-friend them!). I can (potentially) see an argument being made for censoring some kinds of content, but I was completely amazed that Facebook cared about something like throw-up Thursday.

This is not news. You can post comments that make some people angry (like a political argument), and after a couple reports on you, a ban hammer will come to your door within a day and you will not be able to even update your status. It happened to me twice a couple years ago. What I said were pretty clam and reasonable though (nothing inappropriate).

I find it weird that Facebook is so clueless about this kind of stuff.

Women breast feeding children? Banned, for ages, until enough kerfuffle tha FB changed their mind.

Beheading videos? Fine, no problem, go on. Until there was enough kerfuffle for FB to make it easier to block those videos.

I'm glad I've deleted my Facebook account. I really don't miss it one tiny little bit.

It's like looking back at a relationship with a really clingy partner and thinking to yourself 'wtf was I doing with her? Why did it take me so long to realise that she was just using me?"

Yep folks. Facebook is that girl or guy you need to dump to realise how screwed up they are.

My Facebook account was suspended out of the blue, "due to recent changes in my profile" where there weren't any. I don't use Facebook that much but I mostly felt liberated. "I thought, hey, they did it for me. I didn't have to get frustrated and shut my account myself. That's it then."

I did miss the chance to keep in touch with certain groups of people but OTOH Facebook already does a lot to make their platform unusable for simply following your friends and groups, such as not necessarily showing what your friends and groups actually post.

They did re-enable my account later. Still have no idea why it was suspended in the first place, even if me and Facebook exchanged a handful of emails about it.

I don't understand why intelligent people that are capable of independent, critical thought don't stay the fuck away from a platform that enforces a narrow set of cultural, political and religious values that aren't theirs.

"My profile didn’t break any rules" "They’re cut off to access to their communities"

It is not your fucking profile. They are not your fucking communities. It has a Facebook logo on top of it, you are publishing for Facebook on behalf of Facebook so that Facebook can profit from it. You are working for Facebook and paying for the privilege with your privacy. It's Facebook's profile about you, and Facebook decides what happens to it.

It all belongs to Facebook because you gave it to them. Just stop fucking doing it.

I'm all in favor of tight government regulation when it comes to consumer protection, privacy and corporations abusing their power, but this kind of idiotic whining about what people do to themselves completely voluntarily just pisses me off.

People deserve to protected against the insidious way in which Facebook c.s. violate people's privacy rights. I understand that people have no idea how and how much info Facebook collects about them, and how much harm that can do.

But if your communication and social life depend on Facebook you're just an idiot who deserves to be made fun of rather than taken seriously and getting portrayed as a victim by the NYT. Being lazy and stupid doesn't make you a victim, no matter how idiotic Facebook's rules are.

TL;DR: Maintain records of out-of-band means of contact.

My friends on FB are "real" friends.

A few years ago, one of FB's mandatory updates swapped out all user profile email addresses with FB-domain email addresses. I had my address entry set to show only to friends, and I considered it (perhaps uncommonly in comparison to the common user) as a backup means of communication, including in the event of losing control -- for whatever reason -- of my FB account.

When the FB update swapped my non-FB address for a FB address, I took the time to manually swap it back and to suggest to my friends that they do the same, including a brief explanation of why.

If you are going to use FB and the like for significant relationships, make sure you have an out-of-band backup means of contact for said.

P.S. This also presupposes, in the case of email addresses in FB profiles, actually noting same in your own records BEFORE the disconnect occurs. I.e. most of my friends also restrict visibility of those addresses to "friends only".

I predict that the new vigorous enforcement of the "real name" policy will be a disaster and it boggles the mind that facebook is doing it after G+ tried and failed.

I estimate 20-25% of my 1000 "friends" are using modified versions of their legal name, or other names entirely.

There are legitimate reasons to change one's public name, too. A victimized spouse hiding from their abuser comes to mind. I am friends with a few indie authors who write under a pen name, and that pen name is what they go by on Facebook. One does it for day job security; she's an elementary school teacher by day, supernatural erotic fiction author by night. She tries to keep her working life and personal life completely separate. Thankfully Facebook hasn't caught on to any of them doing this, or they would lose their connection with readers and friends alike.

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