I'm convinced you'll be better off advertising elsewhere anyway, Facebook is a big advertising platform for sure, but are your coding students there? Maybe. I think they're here and on YouTube. :-)
I'm going to be redoing my site and offerings in the coming months, and I was thinking of doing some advertising along the way. There are definitely other platforms, and YouTube is one I'll be trying, but I figured it was worth a shot. Not any more, I guess!
If I may, your training is much better than your current YouTube views would indicate. I think it you spent some time on it [1] then it should pay off as your explanations are clear and concise, and it's clear from them that you're a good trainer. Your newsletter is also good, and I've had quite a few "oh, that's why that's like that" moments from reading it.
[1] - When I say this, I don't mean thumbnails with you looking shocked in them and the title being "You won't believe how many Python people don't know this!" or similar.... I know it's a fine line to walk, but you're also better than that!!!
Thanks so much -- I know that lots of things about my YouTube channel need to change in order for me to rack up more views. I'm slowly (very slowly!) making those adjustments, but as a one-person business, all of these things take time.
I've already seen a huge increase in YouTube subscribers since I started to make some changes, and I'm hoping that things will get even better over time.
I appreciate the feedback and comments, and am delighted to hear that you're learning from my newsletters.
They checked with three Meta contacts, but because the data retention period had passed, the evidence wasn’t available anymore and the contacts were unable to progress.
Just create a new account and advertise with that. Or even a fake account. I know a lot of people who have dozens of fake accounts even for legitimate products and ads. Facebook is notorious for not providing any kind of support for its ad platform. Not to mention that they don't seem to do anything to stop fraudulent traffic.
One of the Meta employees suggested that I create a new business account. Except that I can't do that, because my personal account has been banned for life, as has any business account created through it.
So I could create a new account that's just for my business. And maybe I will. But ... what a pain, and I'm not sure the ROI is really that good.
The galling thing to me is that these "lifetime bans" do nothing to stop scammers because they can easily create dozens of new companies and identities to continue ripping people off with. For them, it's just a cost of doing business. Either through legal or illegal means, scammers find a way to create lots of different companies and manage to get back on these platforms after their first efforts are "banned for life".
The only people who are actually banned for life are normal well-intentioned people who get their fledgling small business destroyed and don't think they have any recourse.
Wow, this is incredibly stupid (on Meta's part). Way to shoot yourself in the foot.
Is it just me, or does it seem like Facebook/Meta has always been much dumber about how to actually run a business than other big tech companies? I think they just got where they are because they filled a void with Facebook and took advantage of network effects. Nothing they've ever done has really seemed all that "good" to me overall, except little bits and pieces.
Most recently, I got forced onto their "Messenger" app, because they basically disabled the "Messenger Lite" app. This new app is MUCH larger and more bloated, has a bunch of features I don't care about, and now won't even let me log in because "waiting for network". A little searching online seems to show this is a common problem and everyone hates this app, and many more are pissed that they've been forced off the Lite app.
> I think they just got where they are because they filled a void
Don't forget the brazen theft (remember Stories and 'Suggested for You', aka Snapchat and TikTok).
Or the cozy relationship with power, or all the ad money from scammers that would be easily blocked (were there any intention to do so).
I guess all that could be called 'taking advantage of network effects', in the same way you can call torture 'enhanced interrogation' or a coup 'regime change'.
My point may be murky - I'm saying, they're not just dumb; they're immoral bullies too... I don't expect high morality from giant corporations, but I wouldn't Occam's handwave all this away as incompetence either.
Have they shot themselves in the foot though? As long as the money they save from not employing people to manually review cases is less than the profit they're losing by OP (and others in this situation) not advertising on their platform then a few false positives is fine for them.
Sure, they might also get the odd bit of bad publicity somewhere like HN, but I imagine that most people here already have plenty of reasons to dislike them.
>Have they shot themselves in the foot though? As long as the money they save ... then a few false positives is fine for them.
Yeah, I've made this point before, just today in fact about a Netflix discussion (and I like to bring it up with Microsoft too when people complain about Windows...), and agree: it seems like these companies can get away with some horrifically stupid and customer-hostile behavior while remaining very profitable and dominant. Of course, unlike Netflix, Facebook isn't primarily funded by its users, but rather by advertisers (who are other businesses, not consumers), so I'm not sure if that's better or worse here; it might be worse for Meta. I guess time will tell: bad publicity like this isn't going to help them.
>but I imagine that most people here already have plenty of reasons to dislike them.
True, but again, most people here aren't customers of Facebook, they're just users.
Shooting them self in the foot implies instant effect. A better idiom would probably be something like "they are cutting the branch they are sitting on".
I uninstalled the Facebook app, because it literally makes me depressed.
Messenger stopped working. I wasn't able to log in on Messenger (it just kept cycling around the same 3 login pages). I had to reinstall Facebook to get it working.
So, either:
1. Facebook developers are so shit at their job that they can't build and test a simple login page that works.
or
2. Facebook uses dark UI patterns to keep people using its products even when they explicitly don't want to.
Obviously it's 2. But what a dystopian nightmare. Facebook devs, how do you sleep at night?
I've never had the Facebook app installed on my phone (Android). Messenger Lite worked great, until recently. Now that they've shut that down, I'm using regular Messenger, which sucks, but I finally got it working by forcing a stop and clearing the cache. You really shouldn't need the Facebook app on your phone to use Messenger in my experience, but who knows what kind of shenanigans they're pulling.
I seriously wonder what the Messenger app is doing. It's far larger than Messenger Lite was (way more than double), yet it's essentially the same thing: a chat app with video and voice chat. The full-blown app also adds Dark Mode (the only improvement I've found), and some silly sticker crap. So WTF else is going on in that app to need all that storage space?
This is why we should be fighting tooth and nail against both walled gardens and monopolies. These are literally some of the most profitable companies in the world, there is no excuse for not providing a human contact who can at least verify the grounds for suspension, and some kind of appeal system.
I don’t really care how good Meta is on the open source side of things. They’re still a horrible company when it comes to literally everything else.
They are the most profitable companies in the world because they have scaled their revenues and do not give a damn about scaling their costs related to things such as customer service. This is exactly why this happens. In a smaller, local company this would never happen, it would be completely absurd.
Damn. Perhaps I should rethink the name of my new programming language, Children.
Pretty weird how they delete the evidence after 180 days, but apparently the automatic review is still able to pass final judgement after that window closes.
Rust and Go weren’t particularly good names either. At least if you wanted people to be capable of using them as search terms. Yes, yes, you can use “lang” but still.
Swift was also a pretty well established interbank communication format which struck me as a strange choice of name. It legitimately confused me back in those days because I was working with swift messages every day.
In opposition to what the author thinks, I do think that the appeal was viewed by a human (probably from an outsourced agency somewhere far away) who simply didn't have 1) the capacity to understand what the author is selling 2) time enough to read the appeal, research and understand the problem and 3) possibly sufficient control over the English language
Actually, they explicitly said (on some page, or in some e-mail) that both the original evaluation and the appeal were handled automatically. I can't find that evidence, but I remember reading it and saying, "OMG, you've got to be kidding me."
Based on what they've told me, I have every reason to believe that no human ever reviewed my case.
TLDR: A Meta ads reviewer or AI thought he was selling Pythons and Pandas when that's just the name of the programming language he teaches. Then made worse by Meta not having any real appeal process.
...and worse again by Meta deleting information like ban reasons after 180 days, making it impossible for them to verify anything after that date other than the account having a ban flag set in the database.
I had the exact same thing happen to me, only I have never run any ads on Facebook. Got the ominous "you are suspended from running ads on Meta", which was very confusing since I've never run a single ad on any of their platforms, appealed out of curiosity and was met with the "you're banned forever" canned response. Crappy AI making stupid, arbitrary decisions.
This feels the same like google blocking me from using adwords; it said we definitely violated something they didn't specify and were banned for life. We sold productivity desktop software b2b. Not porn or animal abuse or guns or whatever.
They have special rules for advertising desktop software. I hit the same issue but wasn't banned. Eventually it got mostly sorted out.
The most irritating problem: Apple forbid the use of any of their trademarks in Google advertising, for any reason whatsoever. That means you cannot make an ad like "Foobar for Mac" because it will trip their filters. Manual reviews and escalations don't help, the only solution is to get Apple to fax Google a personal permission letter granting authorized use, which is of course impossible. This absurd problem has existed for at least a decade. Presumably it's deliberate and to push people towards the app stores by preventing Mac developers from advertising their app outside of Apple controlled channels (which aren't comparable).
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> Meta won’t be seeing any of my money, whereas companies like Google, who seem to employ at least some humans in their advertising department — will
That is a convoluted way to say you'll do business with companies that accept your business. Google is known for fully automated bans on your full account, not just the advertising part.
My immediate thought when speed reading the blog post was "just create an advertisement company, have yourself as a client and call it a day". Sometimes we gotta fight stupid with stupid, you know?
We have the opposite experience. They pay more, it’s just that the average ad-quality is also lower. We actually had to raise the minimum price even higher for the network to not show tons of borderline scam ads (now they are delivering fewer ads, but they are more relevant and higher quality)
Interesting point. Automated bans with no recourse will mostly deter legitimate businesses. And there is a finite supply of legitimate businesses, but infinite fake ones.
I know that Google has all sorts of automated things in place, and that people have gotten frustrated with them in the past. That said, my friends who have been stymied by Google's automated systems have always eventually managed to find a human who could fix things. Meta doesn't seem to have any such offer for customers. And even three employees, who agreed that the situation was absurd and could vouch for me, didn't manage to reverse the decision.
I once had a Google adwords campaign shut becuase I was advertising software for the Mac. The software only worked on a mac but I wasn't allowed to use Apple, Mac etc. as Google said they were trademarks. To be clear here, these words were used in context, eg. "Widget counting software for the Mac" not "Genuine Apple Software".
ISTR I appealed, and was turned down with no recourse. There was basically nothing I could do to advertise software just for the Mac.
My girlfriend also got banned from advertising on Meta for literally no reason. It’s been also a year since she last advertised her Facebook page (she’s a gerontologist).
They are probably banning most smaller advertisers and sticking with the largest ones.
> Now, I'm not a big believer in "there's nothing to be done",
especially when it comes to companies and software, both of which
are created and managed by people.
You're right of course. Axiomatically there is always "something to
be done".
But corporate technology brings out laziness, contempt for others, a
lack of self-respect and a blindness to ethics.
It seems we don't understand why yet. Despite a great start in
social tech critique in the 1960s from people like Ellul, Postman and
Mumford, it remains a frontier of psychology and computer science
where almost nobody dares to tread.
Maybe a sincere and sustained research programme would turn-up that
most of the systems we build today are psychologically and socially
harmful to us.
Perhaps this mirrors the way it took us half a century to see how
fossil fuels and unbounded growth were invisibly destroying our
ecological foundations, only this time we are destroying the
capital of social bonds, mutuality and care, long term planning
and so much more.
It is ironic then, that these engines of societal decay like Meta
started out life being called "social networks".
Just one more data point to add. I manage a business with 50 physical locations in a Nordic country in Google. These are the business locations that appear in Google Maps. I constantly have similar issues to get our Google Business profiles approved due to "Live animals". It's a simple word filter they just cannot get fixed. It's a constant headache. I get it fixed every time by requesting a manual review. It's work for me and work for them.
I've noticed that Meta offers much better support than Google. They have excellent tech support, at least for higher ad spend tiers. I feel like talking to a human, who seems to care. I think they assign us based on ad spend to more knowledgeable teams. From Google I've never heard a peep from a competent person.
AIs and other opaque processes making decisions are incredibly frustrating. I'm still wondering why my tea-of-the-month business [0] got turned down by Stripe when I incorporated an LLC (technically a Godo Kaisha, as it is incorporated in Japan).
It came as a surprise as it was perfectly fine by them for as long as it was a sole proprietorship. Which is why I strongly suspect the rejection came from an AI. At the time of rejection we were still using the Stripe account of the sole proprietorship, and surely a human would have noticed and blocked that account if it was actually running against Stripe ToS!?!
It doesn't make any sense to me. In any case, I know that financial regulations are stringent and payment providers are often required to leave us in the dark. But is it frustrating...
Now I'm stuck with PayPal for the time being. Unless they, too, decide that selling green tea is against their ToS.
By the way, does anyone know if it's ok to re-attempt to open an account with Stripe? Our offering has been evolving, so we might very well be within their ToS now?
We tried, to no avail, just got the same unhelpful answer each time. Although we didn’t push too much, as we were still relying on the sole proprietorship account, and didn’t want to jeopardize that!
Now that we’re 90% done with the migration to PayPal, I think we can try again…
It sounds like the real story is you need to keep two payment processing setups active and used at all times, because you never know when one is going to mysteriously disappear.
The so called AI is very infuriating indeed. I was once banned by such dumb script because I was trying to call my cell operator via a regular telephone number and there were some technical issues either at my phone or at the base station, and calls were dropping. After about 5 tries I got a robot answer that I'm now banned from ever using support line for "abuse". And to appeal the ban, I would have to use a support line. Ok, I thought, I'll try robochat at the website. No luck - banned there too.
So I have resorted to searching the Facebook page and hoping that a human moderates it. Thankfully I got to a human support and they revoked this ban.
I've stopped posting anything on the Facebook a few years ago and keep the account alive just to have a backup contact option with dumb corpos.
> AIs and other opaque processes making decisions are incredibly frustrating.
Simply better messaging would fix most of this.
One approach is to be upfront and say:
Our automated AI systems have decided that it probably isn't in our best interests to do business with you. We can't elaborate on why, because that would give clues to spammers to help evade our detection of them. However, if you are willing to pay us $15, we will have a human look at your case and make the decision instead. You will be able to send evidence to the human (for example evidence of legitimate sales, a registered company, etc.). The human will be able to ask for further information, but will not be able to tell you the reason for any rejection. Your $15 will not be refunded if your case is rejected. Before you do, double check that your use isn't borderline on our rules and T&C's - human review isn't an opportunity to push the boundaries of what is allowed.
then some business-school asshat will say "wait! I have the most disruptive idea! let's tweak the algo to get 10% more rejections because analytics show 5% of rejectees result in a conversion!" As he proceeds to get a bonus for momentarily boosting revenue while permanently enshittifying the product.
You'd think in 2023 we'd have figured out this whole identity thing by now. Crypto has some unique ideas, but they don't really get all the way there. Things just aren't "mandated", or ubiquitous enough.
My company can't use Stripe to collect payments for our Continuing Medical Education conferences because, as a psychiatry company, we offer in-office-only esketamine therapy to a small subset of patients. No amount of explaining that we do not SELL eskatamine or ANY pharmaceuticals seems to get through to the supposed humans I've talked to at stripe. Nowhere in anything we publish including the website says we sell anything, because we don't. We don't process (and won't/can't) process patient payment though Stripe, because we accept insurance as we are a psychiatry group. All we get back are two types of responses: "We've suspended your account because you sell pharma" and "We're investigating the information you have given us". Mind you all we've been ABLE to give them is email replies because our offers of meetings and documentation to prove what we're saying go ignored.
Stripe is great, but something is going terribly wrong inside the company when it comes to customer vetting.
I can see where Stripe is coming from. At best this lands in some kind of gray area, but really it seems pretty clear why this is getting a no go.
On an extremely fundamental level, people give you money and you give them drugs. The fact you only administer the drugs in your office doesn't change the basic premise.
I don't know your specifics, such as if the patient's money goes straight to a pharmacy to pay for the drugs which are then shipped to you for in-office administration (which would probably impossible to explain anyway). However, even if that's the case people are still giving you money (for appointments, treatment, etc.) and ending up with drugs in their body.
You'd likely have to split the medical CE conferences off from your practice and run it as a seperate entity before Stripe would be willing to take payment.
What's wrong with your existing payment processors? This type of existential thing seems to come up over and over again with stripe, I'm surprised people still want to use them.
People want to use it because its very easy to sign up and very easy to use. Even compared to Paypal, its much easier in my experience. And the vast majority of users don't have any issues at all.
Welcome to the future. Before too long this kind of bs will be an almost daily occurrence for most people who have to interact with businesses/institutions on the net. Highly automated inscrutable processes with hairtrigger banning logic and review paths that never lead to a human. Because the humans that survived the automation are too busy feeding the Algorithm to ever interact with the customers.
Government contractors seem to love it from what I’ve seen. They’ve always been about quantity over quality because most people don’t have the resources to fight the government. “AI” driven by greed and ignorance is a step towards ruining and collapsing a lot of government services in most western countries IMO.
That's the cheap route, like car manufacturers slapping big glossy crappy tablet instead of 40 high quality physical knobs (really, have you ever seen any physical button not working on any car, even 15+years old? I didn't a single time, as long as we don't talk about wrecks).
Then you have premium companies with premium prices, where actual humans serve you. They'll be slower but you have chance for some empathy and non-standard solutions to your problems.
Our legal systems have already become like this. Only those with the knowledge on how to navigate the system or those qualified to interface in the expected protocols have any hope of achieving results.
Super-corporations are now just the next rung down, adopting all the habits of their superior, but without the responsibilities.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 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.
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".
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.).
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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”.
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/
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
If there's enough people who were wrongfully banned for any reason on Facebook because their review process is broken, maybe it's time for a class action suit?
Also, banning somebody and not keeping the relevant evidence, not showing the evidence to the client so that they can archive the case themselves to appeal in court? You don't have any anti-discrimination laws to prevent sellers choose their customers on subjective basis?
Because at this point Facebook cannot prove that the people violated the ToS and thus Facebook is restricting the services it offers to then.
>You don't have any anti-discrimination laws to prevent sellers choose their customers on subjective basis?
US businesses can choose to not do business with whomever they want as long as they aren't a protected class. Besides that point, what damages could you sue over?
This non-sensical auto bans is a well-known phenomenon in the ads industry (personal/small companies). There is even a cottage industry of companies that's specialized in recovering banned ads accounts and/or getting around bans.
Usual methods for getting around this is creating business accounts via relatives, giving yourself admin rights and using that. Some have success with fake profiles.
That doesn't guarantee against banning of the new accounts, you just move on to new ones.
Because ROI is so damn good on these platforms, people put up with all kinds of BS to use them.
>That’s right: I teach courses in Python and Pandas. Never mind that the first is a programming language and the second is a library for data analysis in Python. Meta’s AI system noticed that I was talking about Python and Pandas, assumed that I was talking about the animals (not the technology), and banned me.
If this is true, that is insanely embarrassing for a company that purports to be a sophisticated programmatic advertising platform.
Also it can be difficult to reliably distinguish between an individual passing on a pet, a properly licensed breeder selling animals, and a bad actor doing the same (selling exotic animals, being an unlicensed breeder in jurisdictions where this is not permitted (generally or for particular animals), etc.). For this reason many advertising companies simply have a blanket ban on advertising any animal trading. Being more selective potentially leaves them open to legal issues if the selection process makes a bad decision and lets something illegal through, and that risk is not worth taking in order to allow (and therefore take a cut from) the more legitimate trade.
There are many laws regarding pet ownership and for good reason, if not involving an invasive species there's also animal cruelty issues. Pandas and other exotic animals need specialized care which a typical vet will not be able to provide. And that's if they aren't dangerous. Then there's the puppy mills, which is a huge issue on its own.
All existing pandas are owned by the PRC so the chance of somebody selling a panda for real, vs selling some sort of panda themed toy/book/etc, is virtually nil. No human would make this mistake; their filter is braindead.
Pythons, on the other hand, are often (illegally) sold, and can be extremely difficult to eradicate as an invasive species. Florida's Everglades are in trouble because people buy Burmese pythons and release them when they grow too big to handle.
That's not to defend Facebook's approach to ad management whatsoever. I definitely agree that it is far too blunt a tool for the problem.
Pretending the problem doesn't exist, however, because one example is unlikely is just intellectually dishonest.
That is true that the python trade is somewhat problematic and is accordingly regulated, but there are also a lot of people who are legally selling pythons on facebook and evidently don't get banned for it. Search "facebook python breeder" and they're easy to find. My conclusion is that the filtering system is totally and inexplicably capricious. A braindead computer program making indefensible decisions that it probably can't even justify to facebook employees themselves, let alone to the people it's banning. Maybe mentioning pythons or pandas alone would be fine, but both together gets you classified as an exotic smuggler dealing in literal bears? Who knows. Probably not even facebook knows.
The puppy mills aren't running ads, they're using Groups and doing their advertising on the comments sections of local animal shelters. It's grotesque.
A post will be like "Meet Billy, he's been here at the shelter for 2 years," get a few sympathy comments and be followed up with a "look, we have puppies for sale!"
I'm assuming something to do with the illegal trading of exotic/endangered species; mentioning pythons and pandas, alongside whatever wording was used to sell the course probably triggered the bot to flag it.
Depends in what context you are talking about the animals.
Trade in animals is covered by a number of laws¹ intended to protect them, and fb has a blanket ban on advertising trading animals. This is a perfectly logical thing to declare wrong.
What has happened here, most likely, is that a right thing (selling courses about Python and Pandas, the technical things of that name not the animals) has been misidentified as that wrong thing, by an automated system that doesn't understand that two concepts can have the same names, with no practical way for the affected advertiser to appeal or even query the automated decision.
There would still be need for some sort of appeal/correction process, which doesn't seem to exist in a useful state now and would be required no matter what automated system you put in place.
I think if the front line bot was an LLM, rather than what is probably regex, they would probably have more true positives and less false positives that would potentially allow them to have a real person handling the exceptions - then train the LLM on the exception for the next release.
Just guessing here, but if the senteces sounded like "how to use pandas to help you in work" AI could have decided that you're going to use a cute bear to lay bricks for you. Plus the "exotic animals", as someone else mentioned.
There's a book called "Using Python and Pandas in the wild". What do you think it's about?
"Using Python and Pandas in the wild" likely refers to the application of the Python programming language and the Pandas library in real-world scenarios or practical use cases.
Even text-davinci-003 nails this (via OpenAI Playground).
Prompt:
> The newly-released book "Using Python and Pandas in the wild" discusses
Response:
> the application of Python and Pandas for data analysis, cleaning, and transformation. It focuses on the fundamentals of Pandas, how to use it to explore and manipulate data, and offer guidance for more advanced topics, such as building data visualizations and machine learning models. Readers will also get an overview of the best practices for working with time-series data, unsupervised learning, and natural language processing. The book is designed to be a comprehensive resource for anyone who wants to learn how to use Python and Pandas for data analysis.
> Makes me wonder what's the worst possible phrasing
I got some very strange looks when buying one particular book back in the days when physical books were the norm. It was only after I got home that I realised a book called “Python Cookbook” gives an entirely different impression to non-programmers.
Mmmm, I know rattlesnakes are said to be a pretty good meal. I wonder if pythons and boas taste any good. Those big snakes might make a delicious feast.
It reminds of old Ruby anecdote. There was this guy on a Ruby conference with t-shirt with ":s*x" print, which for rubyists means "s*x symbol", but regular people will read it, well... colon s*x.
(Censored because I'm at work and I'm afraid of my VPN.)
Not guessing, I used to work on that team: it’s based on keywords alone. The list of items is too big and changes too often to handle anything beyond that — more than a trillion edits per month.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you could sell endangered animals if you called them P4ndas.
1. The problem is that there is a staggering amount of “things” that can be either sold on Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp or advertised for (it’s the same service): every film on Netflix, every item for sale on Etsy, eBay, Amazon, every game on a random retro console platform, etc. There are hundreds of billions of things. Some are duplicates (humanity barely makes that many things), but not many are on the same platform anyway. The real problem is that there are even more updates: trillions. When I was there, most large partners updated all their items daily because the API didn’t let them match items dynamically easily enough, and they believed updates granted them some magical recommendation properties. All those updates have to go through a staggering amount of processes, one by one: unauthorized items, spam filters, enlarging photos, transformers to figure out what it is so it can be advertised to the right audience, etc. Why not just item creation? Because it’s all too easy to upload a valid description and then update it to sell unicorn meat. There are miracles done to figure out which items are new and which are neutral changes (like price or inventory updates) or no changes at all. Still, those aren’t nearly as effective as offering the right tools to the bigger partners (like helping them figure out which items were actually updated on their side, before sending them through an expensive, convoluted pipeline on our end). That was my recommendation, which got lost in internal politics. But at the moment, whatever “trivial“ process you recommend, you genuinely have to add 12 zeros to its computational cost.
2. Assuming you resolve internal politics, prioritize sending new products (and genuine product updates) separately from inventory, and only receive billions of materially new descriptions every day, the company has the skill and resources to run proper filters and separate a course on Python with an illegal snake trade — but why? More than any other company, Meta demands a business case for everything, and being nice to 0.000_001% of their partners isn’t a good case. Again, I’m not exaggerating: the entire economy of several large countries goes through WhatsApp. Groceries, Restaurant supplies, Job offers, Prescription drugs, Taxi services, Spare garage parts, Police uniforms, Wedding planning, Army weapon procurement contracts, there is everything going through there. Reuven is a great teacher, but his classes are a speck in that world. “All digital goods not sold by the top 15 platforms” is a tiny sliver of a slice of that pie. So you have to figure out how many second-hand VHS resellers got kicked out for offering a lightly used copy of _The Hounds of Baskerville_ but also how many bakers making custom cakes have heard of someone getting kicked and didn’t even try advertising… With barely any trace on Meta for many of those and several orders of magnitude more actual spammers and people creating accounts by the dozen genuinely trying to sell endangered species. “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” gets weirdly negative when you have all the juice in the world already.
3. On top of that, your business case has to be worth the time for several of the best teams (read: expensive) at Meta: computer vision, spam detection, parsing the largest database Meta has, etc. More importantly, their filter has to offer an absolute guarantee that not a single pangolin can be advertised or sold on any of the services: the company breathes by the strongly held belief that any compromising screenshot will end up on the front page of the NYTimes for a month (because it absolutely will). Some YouTuber selling powdered sugar as “coke” as a prank for views? He has to be banned before he can fake a screenshot. Any less, and the PR team will have headaches.
Bonus: Among the things that Meta has learned they can’t rely on through similar crises is Unicode. There’s a big scandal that (among other failures in management) hinged on a bag-thi...
Thanks for the detailed answer. I guess these are unavoidable without investing a lot more money on it if you are aiming for basically reducing false negatives to zero at that scale. One thing that surprised me is that Yann LeCun frequently mentions transformers have been in prod for all parts of moderation on Meta for a while already but maybe they come into play at more critical problems or at later stages.
Moderation, yes definitely. There’s are a couple billion users, they post a handful of comments per day and rarely post anything long enough to justify applying a transformer, so “everything posted to Facebook/Instagram” is several orders of magnitude smaller. Barely an inconvenience.
Messenger is bigger, but hardly one writes anything long enough to be suspicious. WhatsApp isn’t moderated the same way.
I think it'd be embarrassing if the tech was making this sort of mistake in a high % of cases.
Anecdotally, that's the only account I've read of this kind of error.
Not defending Facebook, they ought to deploy humans in the loop.
But saying the tech is embarrassing misses how machine learning works. It will always make mistakes, and the kind of mistakes that seem silly from a human perspective.
>that's the only account I've read of this kind of error.
it's still anecdotal, but the author did mention that they went to FB/LinkedIn and they got a pretty swift answer. If nothing else, it sounds like it wasn't a unique case (or the author has a very tight knit group of tech isntructors).
What I mean is, there are certainly a lot more than 2 or 3 individuals or businesses that have ever advertised on FB for Python and Pandas (programming) stuff. Courses, recruiting, books, events, commercial libraries, etc.
If this kind of error was systematic, no one would be able to run these ads. We'd have certainly already seen a public outcry about it.
I did leave the possibility of "tight nit group of tech instructors".
With that said, it's not impossible for this to be a systematic issue considering (theoretically, I don't have formal evidence)
1. Facebook may not be the best place to reach out to the tech community
2. There may simply be too many positives (so, actual exotic animal trading) for it to be worth fixing the few false positives. And the author lacked the financial worth to properly fix the issue.
3. At the end of the day, the issue was not resolved. Leaving the potential next victim wanting to talk about Python laying in wake.
I wanted to run ads for my plant nursery. Their bot suspended me before I can even run my first ads. They don't tell you the reason why and you have one chance to dispute. Then it's another automated response, again, not telling you the reason, you're permanently blocked after that. Their system make it feel like they actively punish legit but inexperienced business owner while letting all sort of scam running around in the wild.
I've had similar problems with Fabebook/Meta before and eventually gave up on buying ad services from them.
One solution to this problem would be a law that 1. mandates to give users the information when they are dealing with an algorithm only, and 2. forces companies to make it possible to contact humans within a specific time frame. I very much hope at least the EU will enact such a law soon.
Apart from monumental wastes of time with AI interactions for which no one is compensated, the thing that worries me most is that either AI "customer support" cannot do anything of substance anyway or the AI is given the power to make substantial changes to user settings, billing, etc. The first option means the company is bullshitting their customers, the second option can have very undesirable consequences.
> forces companies to make it possible to contact humans within a specific time frame.
Some EU countries do require this and it works a charm. However it doesnt seem to affect meta. That company, along with google and amazon and any other company that only relies on ai for customer support should fined into bankruptcy.
It's the kind of thing I thought had been handled way back in the 90s when AOL was rightly ridiculed from stopping people from entering the town Scunthorpe as their location because of a certain substring it contained.
513 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 339 ms ] threadI'm convinced you'll be better off advertising elsewhere anyway, Facebook is a big advertising platform for sure, but are your coding students there? Maybe. I think they're here and on YouTube. :-)
[1] - When I say this, I don't mean thumbnails with you looking shocked in them and the title being "You won't believe how many Python people don't know this!" or similar.... I know it's a fine line to walk, but you're also better than that!!!
I've already seen a huge increase in YouTube subscribers since I started to make some changes, and I'm hoping that things will get even better over time.
I appreciate the feedback and comments, and am delighted to hear that you're learning from my newsletters.
So I could create a new account that's just for my business. And maybe I will. But ... what a pain, and I'm not sure the ROI is really that good.
The only people who are actually banned for life are normal well-intentioned people who get their fledgling small business destroyed and don't think they have any recourse.
Is it just me, or does it seem like Facebook/Meta has always been much dumber about how to actually run a business than other big tech companies? I think they just got where they are because they filled a void with Facebook and took advantage of network effects. Nothing they've ever done has really seemed all that "good" to me overall, except little bits and pieces.
Most recently, I got forced onto their "Messenger" app, because they basically disabled the "Messenger Lite" app. This new app is MUCH larger and more bloated, has a bunch of features I don't care about, and now won't even let me log in because "waiting for network". A little searching online seems to show this is a common problem and everyone hates this app, and many more are pissed that they've been forced off the Lite app.
Don't forget the brazen theft (remember Stories and 'Suggested for You', aka Snapchat and TikTok).
Or the cozy relationship with power, or all the ad money from scammers that would be easily blocked (were there any intention to do so).
I guess all that could be called 'taking advantage of network effects', in the same way you can call torture 'enhanced interrogation' or a coup 'regime change'.
My point may be murky - I'm saying, they're not just dumb; they're immoral bullies too... I don't expect high morality from giant corporations, but I wouldn't Occam's handwave all this away as incompetence either.
Sure, they might also get the odd bit of bad publicity somewhere like HN, but I imagine that most people here already have plenty of reasons to dislike them.
Yeah, I've made this point before, just today in fact about a Netflix discussion (and I like to bring it up with Microsoft too when people complain about Windows...), and agree: it seems like these companies can get away with some horrifically stupid and customer-hostile behavior while remaining very profitable and dominant. Of course, unlike Netflix, Facebook isn't primarily funded by its users, but rather by advertisers (who are other businesses, not consumers), so I'm not sure if that's better or worse here; it might be worse for Meta. I guess time will tell: bad publicity like this isn't going to help them.
>but I imagine that most people here already have plenty of reasons to dislike them.
True, but again, most people here aren't customers of Facebook, they're just users.
No, instead, they're the product.
Shooting them self in the foot implies instant effect. A better idiom would probably be something like "they are cutting the branch they are sitting on".
Messenger stopped working. I wasn't able to log in on Messenger (it just kept cycling around the same 3 login pages). I had to reinstall Facebook to get it working.
So, either:
1. Facebook developers are so shit at their job that they can't build and test a simple login page that works.
or
2. Facebook uses dark UI patterns to keep people using its products even when they explicitly don't want to.
Obviously it's 2. But what a dystopian nightmare. Facebook devs, how do you sleep at night?
I seriously wonder what the Messenger app is doing. It's far larger than Messenger Lite was (way more than double), yet it's essentially the same thing: a chat app with video and voice chat. The full-blown app also adds Dark Mode (the only improvement I've found), and some silly sticker crap. So WTF else is going on in that app to need all that storage space?
I don’t really care how good Meta is on the open source side of things. They’re still a horrible company when it comes to literally everything else.
Pretty weird how they delete the evidence after 180 days, but apparently the automatic review is still able to pass final judgement after that window closes.
Based on what they've told me, I have every reason to believe that no human ever reviewed my case.
What a joke.
The most irritating problem: Apple forbid the use of any of their trademarks in Google advertising, for any reason whatsoever. That means you cannot make an ad like "Foobar for Mac" because it will trip their filters. Manual reviews and escalations don't help, the only solution is to get Apple to fax Google a personal permission letter granting authorized use, which is of course impossible. This absurd problem has existed for at least a decade. Presumably it's deliberate and to push people towards the app stores by preventing Mac developers from advertising their app outside of Apple controlled channels (which aren't comparable).
Windows has no such difficulties.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
That is a convoluted way to say you'll do business with companies that accept your business. Google is known for fully automated bans on your full account, not just the advertising part.
I haven't thought about this before, but it could explain some of the degeneration of ads over time I have been noticing.
I know that Google has all sorts of automated things in place, and that people have gotten frustrated with them in the past. That said, my friends who have been stymied by Google's automated systems have always eventually managed to find a human who could fix things. Meta doesn't seem to have any such offer for customers. And even three employees, who agreed that the situation was absurd and could vouch for me, didn't manage to reverse the decision.
ISTR I appealed, and was turned down with no recourse. There was basically nothing I could do to advertise software just for the Mac.
What? Google has humans? Where?
They are probably banning most smaller advertisers and sticking with the largest ones.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/30/childprotection.s...
And now we have machines doing the same.
You're right of course. Axiomatically there is always "something to be done".
But corporate technology brings out laziness, contempt for others, a lack of self-respect and a blindness to ethics.
It seems we don't understand why yet. Despite a great start in social tech critique in the 1960s from people like Ellul, Postman and Mumford, it remains a frontier of psychology and computer science where almost nobody dares to tread.
Maybe a sincere and sustained research programme would turn-up that most of the systems we build today are psychologically and socially harmful to us.
Perhaps this mirrors the way it took us half a century to see how fossil fuels and unbounded growth were invisibly destroying our ecological foundations, only this time we are destroying the capital of social bonds, mutuality and care, long term planning and so much more.
It is ironic then, that these engines of societal decay like Meta started out life being called "social networks".
I've noticed that Meta offers much better support than Google. They have excellent tech support, at least for higher ad spend tiers. I feel like talking to a human, who seems to care. I think they assign us based on ad spend to more knowledgeable teams. From Google I've never heard a peep from a competent person.
> That’s right: I teach courses in Python and Pandas
Hah I suspected that was going to be the punchline, but waited for confirmation
It is believable. What is not so much is that they did a review with real people
It came as a surprise as it was perfectly fine by them for as long as it was a sole proprietorship. Which is why I strongly suspect the rejection came from an AI. At the time of rejection we were still using the Stripe account of the sole proprietorship, and surely a human would have noticed and blocked that account if it was actually running against Stripe ToS!?!
It doesn't make any sense to me. In any case, I know that financial regulations are stringent and payment providers are often required to leave us in the dark. But is it frustrating...
Now I'm stuck with PayPal for the time being. Unless they, too, decide that selling green tea is against their ToS.
By the way, does anyone know if it's ok to re-attempt to open an account with Stripe? Our offering has been evolving, so we might very well be within their ToS now?
[0] https://tomotcha.com
EDIT: wording
Apparently Stripe has great difficulty with non-Japanese people, living in Japan, owning a company overseas.
Now that we’re 90% done with the migration to PayPal, I think we can try again…
I was very happy with Stripe all these years… but having a least two payment processors is probably safer.
I've stopped posting anything on the Facebook a few years ago and keep the account alive just to have a backup contact option with dumb corpos.
An LLC can’t be incorporated.
If you say you had an Inc when you had an LLC is a good cause of rejection.
Although in this case it’s neither an Inc. nor an LLC: it’s a 合同会社. That’s what I wrote on the form, obviously.
Simply better messaging would fix most of this.
One approach is to be upfront and say:
Our automated AI systems have decided that it probably isn't in our best interests to do business with you. We can't elaborate on why, because that would give clues to spammers to help evade our detection of them. However, if you are willing to pay us $15, we will have a human look at your case and make the decision instead. You will be able to send evidence to the human (for example evidence of legitimate sales, a registered company, etc.). The human will be able to ask for further information, but will not be able to tell you the reason for any rejection. Your $15 will not be refunded if your case is rejected. Before you do, double check that your use isn't borderline on our rules and T&C's - human review isn't an opportunity to push the boundaries of what is allowed.
then some business-school asshat will say "wait! I have the most disruptive idea! let's tweak the algo to get 10% more rejections because analytics show 5% of rejectees result in a conversion!" As he proceeds to get a bonus for momentarily boosting revenue while permanently enshittifying the product.
You'd think in 2023 we'd have figured out this whole identity thing by now. Crypto has some unique ideas, but they don't really get all the way there. Things just aren't "mandated", or ubiquitous enough.
Stripe is great, but something is going terribly wrong inside the company when it comes to customer vetting.
On an extremely fundamental level, people give you money and you give them drugs. The fact you only administer the drugs in your office doesn't change the basic premise.
I don't know your specifics, such as if the patient's money goes straight to a pharmacy to pay for the drugs which are then shipped to you for in-office administration (which would probably impossible to explain anyway). However, even if that's the case people are still giving you money (for appointments, treatment, etc.) and ending up with drugs in their body.
You'd likely have to split the medical CE conferences off from your practice and run it as a seperate entity before Stripe would be willing to take payment.
Then you have premium companies with premium prices, where actual humans serve you. They'll be slower but you have chance for some empathy and non-standard solutions to your problems.
Super-corporations are now just the next rung down, adopting all the habits of their superior, but without the responsibilities.
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.
(Re-post of <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27378230>)
Against all natural justice - in the name of national security.
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.
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?
Welcome to the world of automation.
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.
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.
Genuine business wouldn't mind paying their $970 bill by first paying $1 and then paying $969.
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. :(
Things.
The privileges vs obligations of serfdom would be unpleasant by our standards, but it wasn’t slavery.
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".
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.).
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.
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.
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.
(https://indieweb.org/POSSE)
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.
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.
these organizations can barely update those sites sometimes. what hopes are there in maintaining and posting on their own blog?
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.
Data rights enforcement is nascent/emerging but certainly a space to watch.
Of course, that's only in Europe and it's not a very easy law to avail of, sadly.
And then you get banned for life
Mind-boggling!
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.
Being a bit stubborn, he still kept the message and just applied rot13 to it.
Until I read that the law in my country explictely forbids "deceiving" the police...
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.
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/
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.
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.
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’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.
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’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.
Because killing your own account can be easily done by posting objectionable content.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And I should note, compared to some countries, things were relatively soft on our case.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
maybe you should be holding them to a different set of standards
"[..] 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
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.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Maybe I can bing it in Hotbot.
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.
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 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.)
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.
https://www.opera-arias.com/adams/nixon-in-china/libretto/
That's how you tell companies who care about their users and those don't.
(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.
Right now they do this to avoid legal issues but as a citizen, I want them to be legally responsible.
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.
Oh unless I provide my phone number. Then they’ll unban me and I can continue presumably breaking the terms of service.
- 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
That sounds like an accessibility issue, if they're American it could be an ADA violation.
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.
They want sheep. Only sheep.
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.
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?
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.
Also, banning somebody and not keeping the relevant evidence, not showing the evidence to the client so that they can archive the case themselves to appeal in court? You don't have any anti-discrimination laws to prevent sellers choose their customers on subjective basis?
Because at this point Facebook cannot prove that the people violated the ToS and thus Facebook is restricting the services it offers to then.
US businesses can choose to not do business with whomever they want as long as they aren't a protected class. Besides that point, what damages could you sue over?
Usual methods for getting around this is creating business accounts via relatives, giving yourself admin rights and using that. Some have success with fake profiles.
That doesn't guarantee against banning of the new accounts, you just move on to new ones.
Because ROI is so damn good on these platforms, people put up with all kinds of BS to use them.
If this is true, that is insanely embarrassing for a company that purports to be a sophisticated programmatic advertising platform.
Also it can be difficult to reliably distinguish between an individual passing on a pet, a properly licensed breeder selling animals, and a bad actor doing the same (selling exotic animals, being an unlicensed breeder in jurisdictions where this is not permitted (generally or for particular animals), etc.). For this reason many advertising companies simply have a blanket ban on advertising any animal trading. Being more selective potentially leaves them open to legal issues if the selection process makes a bad decision and lets something illegal through, and that risk is not worth taking in order to allow (and therefore take a cut from) the more legitimate trade.
That's not to defend Facebook's approach to ad management whatsoever. I definitely agree that it is far too blunt a tool for the problem.
Pretending the problem doesn't exist, however, because one example is unlikely is just intellectually dishonest.
A post will be like "Meet Billy, he's been here at the shelter for 2 years," get a few sympathy comments and be followed up with a "look, we have puppies for sale!"
That's the only explanation I have.
Trade in animals is covered by a number of laws¹ intended to protect them, and fb has a blanket ban on advertising trading animals. This is a perfectly logical thing to declare wrong.
What has happened here, most likely, is that a right thing (selling courses about Python and Pandas, the technical things of that name not the animals) has been misidentified as that wrong thing, by an automated system that doesn't understand that two concepts can have the same names, with no practical way for the affected advertiser to appeal or even query the automated decision.
Basically this is a variant of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem.
--
[1] Morals too, of course, but companies like FB work based on laws/regulations² rather than based on what is considered [im]moral.
[2] or based on working around laws/regulations!
"Master Python and Pandas, make them work for you, attack new challanges, earn good money"
"If you find yourself fighting with Python and Pandas, I'll help you improve your technique"?
"Using Python and Pandas in the wild"?
"10 unexpected uses for Python and Pandas in the food and apparel industries"?
"Breaking all the rules for Python imports"?
"How to replace your whole ecosystem with just Python and Pandas"?
"Put Python to work on the family farm"?
There's a book called "Using Python and Pandas in the wild". What do you think it's about?
"Using Python and Pandas in the wild" likely refers to the application of the Python programming language and the Pandas library in real-world scenarios or practical use cases.
Prompt:
> The newly-released book "Using Python and Pandas in the wild" discusses
Response:
> the application of Python and Pandas for data analysis, cleaning, and transformation. It focuses on the fundamentals of Pandas, how to use it to explore and manipulate data, and offer guidance for more advanced topics, such as building data visualizations and machine learning models. Readers will also get an overview of the best practices for working with time-series data, unsupervised learning, and natural language processing. The book is designed to be a comprehensive resource for anyone who wants to learn how to use Python and Pandas for data analysis.
I got some very strange looks when buying one particular book back in the days when physical books were the norm. It was only after I got home that I realised a book called “Python Cookbook” gives an entirely different impression to non-programmers.
(Censored because I'm at work and I'm afraid of my VPN.)
I wouldn’t be surprised if you could sell endangered animals if you called them P4ndas.
> This review found inauthentic behavior or violations of our Advertising Policies or Community Guidelines
There could be thousands of other things.
Sounds like speculation to me. Anything to back that up?
1. The problem is that there is a staggering amount of “things” that can be either sold on Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp or advertised for (it’s the same service): every film on Netflix, every item for sale on Etsy, eBay, Amazon, every game on a random retro console platform, etc. There are hundreds of billions of things. Some are duplicates (humanity barely makes that many things), but not many are on the same platform anyway. The real problem is that there are even more updates: trillions. When I was there, most large partners updated all their items daily because the API didn’t let them match items dynamically easily enough, and they believed updates granted them some magical recommendation properties. All those updates have to go through a staggering amount of processes, one by one: unauthorized items, spam filters, enlarging photos, transformers to figure out what it is so it can be advertised to the right audience, etc. Why not just item creation? Because it’s all too easy to upload a valid description and then update it to sell unicorn meat. There are miracles done to figure out which items are new and which are neutral changes (like price or inventory updates) or no changes at all. Still, those aren’t nearly as effective as offering the right tools to the bigger partners (like helping them figure out which items were actually updated on their side, before sending them through an expensive, convoluted pipeline on our end). That was my recommendation, which got lost in internal politics. But at the moment, whatever “trivial“ process you recommend, you genuinely have to add 12 zeros to its computational cost.
2. Assuming you resolve internal politics, prioritize sending new products (and genuine product updates) separately from inventory, and only receive billions of materially new descriptions every day, the company has the skill and resources to run proper filters and separate a course on Python with an illegal snake trade — but why? More than any other company, Meta demands a business case for everything, and being nice to 0.000_001% of their partners isn’t a good case. Again, I’m not exaggerating: the entire economy of several large countries goes through WhatsApp. Groceries, Restaurant supplies, Job offers, Prescription drugs, Taxi services, Spare garage parts, Police uniforms, Wedding planning, Army weapon procurement contracts, there is everything going through there. Reuven is a great teacher, but his classes are a speck in that world. “All digital goods not sold by the top 15 platforms” is a tiny sliver of a slice of that pie. So you have to figure out how many second-hand VHS resellers got kicked out for offering a lightly used copy of _The Hounds of Baskerville_ but also how many bakers making custom cakes have heard of someone getting kicked and didn’t even try advertising… With barely any trace on Meta for many of those and several orders of magnitude more actual spammers and people creating accounts by the dozen genuinely trying to sell endangered species. “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” gets weirdly negative when you have all the juice in the world already.
3. On top of that, your business case has to be worth the time for several of the best teams (read: expensive) at Meta: computer vision, spam detection, parsing the largest database Meta has, etc. More importantly, their filter has to offer an absolute guarantee that not a single pangolin can be advertised or sold on any of the services: the company breathes by the strongly held belief that any compromising screenshot will end up on the front page of the NYTimes for a month (because it absolutely will). Some YouTuber selling powdered sugar as “coke” as a prank for views? He has to be banned before he can fake a screenshot. Any less, and the PR team will have headaches.
Bonus: Among the things that Meta has learned they can’t rely on through similar crises is Unicode. There’s a big scandal that (among other failures in management) hinged on a bag-thi...
Messenger is bigger, but hardly one writes anything long enough to be suspicious. WhatsApp isn’t moderated the same way.
Anecdotally, that's the only account I've read of this kind of error.
Not defending Facebook, they ought to deploy humans in the loop.
But saying the tech is embarrassing misses how machine learning works. It will always make mistakes, and the kind of mistakes that seem silly from a human perspective.
That's because, well, these systems aren't human.
I worked on the team that dealt with that, and you pretty much can’t mention exotic animals by name if you sell books, movies, fan art, etc.
it's still anecdotal, but the author did mention that they went to FB/LinkedIn and they got a pretty swift answer. If nothing else, it sounds like it wasn't a unique case (or the author has a very tight knit group of tech isntructors).
If this kind of error was systematic, no one would be able to run these ads. We'd have certainly already seen a public outcry about it.
That doesn't seem to be the case, here (yet)?..
With that said, it's not impossible for this to be a systematic issue considering (theoretically, I don't have formal evidence)
1. Facebook may not be the best place to reach out to the tech community
2. There may simply be too many positives (so, actual exotic animal trading) for it to be worth fixing the few false positives. And the author lacked the financial worth to properly fix the issue.
3. At the end of the day, the issue was not resolved. Leaving the potential next victim wanting to talk about Python laying in wake.
I subscribe to #2 personally.
One solution to this problem would be a law that 1. mandates to give users the information when they are dealing with an algorithm only, and 2. forces companies to make it possible to contact humans within a specific time frame. I very much hope at least the EU will enact such a law soon.
Apart from monumental wastes of time with AI interactions for which no one is compensated, the thing that worries me most is that either AI "customer support" cannot do anything of substance anyway or the AI is given the power to make substantial changes to user settings, billing, etc. The first option means the company is bullshitting their customers, the second option can have very undesirable consequences.
Some EU countries do require this and it works a charm. However it doesnt seem to affect meta. That company, along with google and amazon and any other company that only relies on ai for customer support should fined into bankruptcy.
More specifically, it'd need to make it possible to contact humans with the authority to overturn the algorithmic decision.