Content is one thing. But it gets me really concerned about these kind of appeal processes when it comes to more critical things like your identity or proof of personhood.
It is not hard to imagine getting a black mark in some invisible proprietary profile that determines if you can access Uber Eats, LinkedIn, etc. and have no recourse to fix it or get another chance.
It's not just Meta. All big tech companies (including Amazon, if you are a vendor) have gotten infamous for basically only getting a human to intervene with automated moderation or outsourced lowest-effort moderation if one raises a big-enough stink on social media or manages to secure a court judgement, but even that isn't foolproof these days. Twitter has recently gotten under fire for ignoring German court orders.
Google, especially Google Corp, is very much that way too. One of my users is currently getting a fair bit of spam because a spammer figured out that if they send a message with envelope sender @google.com, rcpt @gmail.com, google.com MX will accept it, then bounce it with NoSuchUser and gmail will accept it. I spent an hour yesterday looking for a way to contact Google about it, but couldn't find anything. Made harder because most things assume you are talking about gmail or youtube, not google.com itself.
It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them.
> It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them
This is by design in order to prevent any meaningful path to having to manage user complaints. Companies, broadly, used to have teams of customer support people and you could call and someone would answer to route your issue. That still exists in a lot of family run business (trash collection, home services like cleaning, custom parts etc…) but is frankly extremely rare for the majority of corporate interactions.
That’s not coming back because it’s clear that having a black hole for service saves money and doesn’t prevent repeat customers because there’s no real competition in any market, in a way that would bring customer support back.
> It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them.
It's sadly all too common these days for companies to have no general customer support, only forums full of powerless volunteers. It's even started to become that phone support lines don't have anyone on the other end anymore; Microsoft for instance basically just has an LLM on the other end that waits for you to talk, then tells you to fuck off to the powerless support forum.
I lost my facebook account about five years ago--total outright account ban. No recourse at all. It happened to a group of about 10 people that had been administrators of a local non-profit's facebook page and who had managed groups for the organization in the past. Our non-profit was non-denominational and helped local teens with after school type programs. We never knew why our personal accounts were banned. Best we could figure was that we used a tagline in the past in some facebook comments and posts that later got co-opted and spread by a "white power" group in the USA. We were located in Canada.
At the time, some people recommended buying an Occulus device and calling their support because they were able to recover accounts and they had human support. We tried appealing to the company on social media, but we didn't have any luck.
I had to rebuild my social media profile and our organizations profiles and I lost 14 years of Messenger conversations, posts, and photos. These memories were just gone. It sucked. For the non-profit, it meant lost donations and lost connections for our alumni. Keep your own content off-platform.
I had a Youtube video account with I think two videos. Got a notice it was suspended for content violations (these were self-created videos with no copyright content). Asked for reinstatement. Nada. This was years ago. On a lark recently decided to ask again. Got approved. Have no idea why/how/what/who/etc.
I think it's because just like in Web3, the incentives of Web2 are to make a lot of money for your early stage investors, the VCs, and very few choose not to sell out after they hit the critical mass and get massive centralized power and network effects. I've seen "indieweb" come and go, "decentralizedweb.net" is down but they used to have TimBL speaking at it. I've seen Diaspora come out 13 years ago and sadly one of the founders killed himself. I've seen Mastodon, which Trump's team forked to make Truth Social (one of the few deplatformed guys who actually got his own platform, had to spend millions on it).
Why do you think there is no good alternative to Big Tech, the way that, say, at least the Incredible Burger is an alternative for people who want to opt of meat?
This is pretty much the case for non-abortion, non-political situations, too. For example, MMI, a small watch company out of Singapore, had their Facebook page removed in the middle of one of their Kickstarter campaigns earlier this year.
To anyone on the outside, it's not clear at all if (a) there really was some kind of issue that consumers would want to know about, or (b) their page shouldn't have been removed to begin with.
It's not only (I'm sure) annoying to the company, which, being small, has responded in a relatively circumspect way, but annoying as a consumer because it's not very easy to interpret the signal.
In the same ballpark, but reverse, my news feed always has one or two posts from maybe fake groups that have seemingly AI-written stories that carefully mention the Tedoo app, and FB is all too happy to let that slide no matter how many times I report it as spam...
Same with bugs. Reporting bugs rarely seems effective anymore. Maybe my use-cases are more unique, but sometimes I stumble upon things where there the bug I encounter is 2 years old with 0 responses from the company, but I don't know how many comments from customers.
And it's already a hassle to report, so actual amount of people encountering the issue is probably higher.
One example comes to mind... I can't ask my Google Mini anymore to ping my remote. Many reports. Nothing from Google.
Firstly - Hah! this is the easier situation! This is Americans talking about reaching out to Americans. It’s even more fun when you are in another country, and need to go through your network to get attention to an issue.
Secondly - Everyone I know, who is in a T&S team or does content moderation hates this situation, and is glad that this is being highlighted. it’s considered unfair and absurd. Getting recourse because people know someone who know someone to get it to the right team, is NOT how things should work. Let alone at global levels.
I can give maybe a smaller firm or platform a pass. But at FAANG scales? Cmon.
——
This is also a reason why I think that Reddit dug its own grave, back when it found the testicular fortitude to oust moderators during the API black outs.
If a firm has the willingness to remove mods and craft new philosophies of engagement when the bottom line at risk - does it magically lose that capability during the remainder of the financial year?
Unrelated to reproductive rights, but my private Instagram account got suspended for community guidelines violations out of the blue & I lost all access to my old photos, my friends, contacts, years of DMs. I don't have the slightest idea what triggered it (and of course they won't tell you), nor is there apparently any way I'm aware of to appeal. Interestingly, I still have access to meta[.]ai for whatever reason, so I'm wondering if there is some way to talk to it to get out of InstaJail, or finding a prompt to get it to give you more info on who to contact or ANYTHING at all.
However, after hunting around on reddit for solutions, I was quickly made aware of underground groups of individuals (hackers? I'm not sure what you'd call them) who offer account recovery for up to 1 to 2 grand per instance. These aren't just the people who send you phishing messages claiming to get your account back, but offer full services such as promotion, getting unbanned, having other users banned and etc.
We've seen news reports in the past where individuals or groups get backend access into Meta and then offer these sorts of features. [1]
But who else has access to these sorts of tools & features? I wouldn't be surprised at all if Meta moderators or employees are making a very nice side hustle for themselves doing this, as they'd have not only the access, but presumably know how to hide their tracks.
Just a theory. Anyway, if anyone has any ideas on getting an Instagram account back or filing an appeal or whatever, any info would be appreciated.
There's a post on HN about someone being banned from Facebook because they violated (supposedly; who knows what violated even means) Whatsapp TOS from 3 years prior (possibly even before FB acquisition)
Someone needs to tell Zuckerberg about this thing called "antitrust" and not being a dick and that you can't run your company(ies????) like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
Another case was some fellow selling Python & Pandas educational content on FB and was completely banned from advertising because AI flagged it as promoting animal cruelty and then AI reviewed itself and said it has done nothing wrong.
I feel like this is a cultural value pretty common among modern companies, where the "proper channels" is a broken system and we have to work around it. We've seen it often, where the only way someone will get support requests looked at is by commenting here, on Twitter, etc. Once a furniture company wasn't really taking action on my warranty claim until I commented about it on a promotional Facebook post.
I bet they have a team of people whose job is to keep employees in a kind of trance. Part of that would involve responding swiftly to employee concerns so that the employees maintain the illusion that the company cares and that it was just a mistake. From the perspective of the employees, they must think their employers are extra nice.
They must think it reflects the broader reality of how they treat everyone else.
I had a weird and painful experience like that with Reddit, where my account and 10+ years of content all vanished one morning for no reason... but its "appeals" webpage insists that my account is in good-standing, so therefore I can't submit any kind of request for help.
A real hard wake-up call on the importance of owning your own online identity and content.
I got a panicked call from my parents when Facebook deleted my brother's profile, probably 5 or 6 years after he passed away. After looking into just trying to get the profile restored, I came to the same conclusion as the title essentially. The "memories" feature frequently shuffled posts and pictures of him and had become a comfort for them. They bring it up every now and then, maybe some day I'll find a way to sort it out.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 54.4 ms ] threadIt is not hard to imagine getting a black mark in some invisible proprietary profile that determines if you can access Uber Eats, LinkedIn, etc. and have no recourse to fix it or get another chance.
It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them.
This is by design in order to prevent any meaningful path to having to manage user complaints. Companies, broadly, used to have teams of customer support people and you could call and someone would answer to route your issue. That still exists in a lot of family run business (trash collection, home services like cleaning, custom parts etc…) but is frankly extremely rare for the majority of corporate interactions.
That’s not coming back because it’s clear that having a black hole for service saves money and doesn’t prevent repeat customers because there’s no real competition in any market, in a way that would bring customer support back.
It’s just gone.
It's sadly all too common these days for companies to have no general customer support, only forums full of powerless volunteers. It's even started to become that phone support lines don't have anyone on the other end anymore; Microsoft for instance basically just has an LLM on the other end that waits for you to talk, then tells you to fuck off to the powerless support forum.
At the time, some people recommended buying an Occulus device and calling their support because they were able to recover accounts and they had human support. We tried appealing to the company on social media, but we didn't have any luck.
I had to rebuild my social media profile and our organizations profiles and I lost 14 years of Messenger conversations, posts, and photos. These memories were just gone. It sucked. For the non-profit, it meant lost donations and lost connections for our alumni. Keep your own content off-platform.
Every other day a story comes out about a centralized platform either:
1) Extorting for money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887
2) Canceling accounts: https://www.eff.org/pages/when-knowing-someone-meta-only-way...
3) Has their algorithms choose what you see and hear: https://x.com/i/grok/share/NwPcWVxZiHQytvGs8MONRdpCi
4) Deplatforms you anytime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deplatforming
5) Demonetizes you, after taking over half to begin with: https://podcastle.ai/blog/how-much-money-do-youtubers-make-p...
6) Allows governments easy surveillance and even hacking your account: https://natlawreview.com/article/even-hacking-field-governme...
7) Sends your information to advertisers, etc. etc.
8) Makes everyone increasingly depressed, angry and distrustful of others https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
Now I ask you, why do people put up with this, especially content creators with large audiences?
Because they have no viable open alternative that they can host easily themselves.
And why is that? Here is what it would look like if they did: https://qbix.com/community.pdf
I think it's because just like in Web3, the incentives of Web2 are to make a lot of money for your early stage investors, the VCs, and very few choose not to sell out after they hit the critical mass and get massive centralized power and network effects. I've seen "indieweb" come and go, "decentralizedweb.net" is down but they used to have TimBL speaking at it. I've seen Diaspora come out 13 years ago and sadly one of the founders killed himself. I've seen Mastodon, which Trump's team forked to make Truth Social (one of the few deplatformed guys who actually got his own platform, had to spend millions on it).
Why do you think there is no good alternative to Big Tech, the way that, say, at least the Incredible Burger is an alternative for people who want to opt of meat?
To anyone on the outside, it's not clear at all if (a) there really was some kind of issue that consumers would want to know about, or (b) their page shouldn't have been removed to begin with.
It's not only (I'm sure) annoying to the company, which, being small, has responded in a relatively circumspect way, but annoying as a consumer because it's not very easy to interpret the signal.
In the same ballpark, but reverse, my news feed always has one or two posts from maybe fake groups that have seemingly AI-written stories that carefully mention the Tedoo app, and FB is all too happy to let that slide no matter how many times I report it as spam...
And it's already a hassle to report, so actual amount of people encountering the issue is probably higher.
One example comes to mind... I can't ask my Google Mini anymore to ping my remote. Many reports. Nothing from Google.
Firstly - Hah! this is the easier situation! This is Americans talking about reaching out to Americans. It’s even more fun when you are in another country, and need to go through your network to get attention to an issue.
Secondly - Everyone I know, who is in a T&S team or does content moderation hates this situation, and is glad that this is being highlighted. it’s considered unfair and absurd. Getting recourse because people know someone who know someone to get it to the right team, is NOT how things should work. Let alone at global levels.
I can give maybe a smaller firm or platform a pass. But at FAANG scales? Cmon.
——
This is also a reason why I think that Reddit dug its own grave, back when it found the testicular fortitude to oust moderators during the API black outs.
If a firm has the willingness to remove mods and craft new philosophies of engagement when the bottom line at risk - does it magically lose that capability during the remainder of the financial year?
However, after hunting around on reddit for solutions, I was quickly made aware of underground groups of individuals (hackers? I'm not sure what you'd call them) who offer account recovery for up to 1 to 2 grand per instance. These aren't just the people who send you phishing messages claiming to get your account back, but offer full services such as promotion, getting unbanned, having other users banned and etc.
We've seen news reports in the past where individuals or groups get backend access into Meta and then offer these sorts of features. [1]
But who else has access to these sorts of tools & features? I wouldn't be surprised at all if Meta moderators or employees are making a very nice side hustle for themselves doing this, as they'd have not only the access, but presumably know how to hide their tracks.
Just a theory. Anyway, if anyone has any ideas on getting an Instagram account back or filing an appeal or whatever, any info would be appreciated.
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-instagram-fac...
Someone needs to tell Zuckerberg about this thing called "antitrust" and not being a dick and that you can't run your company(ies????) like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
They must think it reflects the broader reality of how they treat everyone else.
A real hard wake-up call on the importance of owning your own online identity and content.