[HN Gopher] Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them
___________________________________________________________________
Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them
Author : thereare5lights
Score : 276 points
Date : 2021-01-23 10:00 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lincoln.metacannon.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lincoln.metacannon.net)
| rdiddly wrote:
| That's great news; finally he can stop preaching about
| decentralizing social media and start practicing it.
| waterhouse wrote:
| How to download an offline copy of your Facebook data:
| https://www.facebook.com/help/212802592074644
| g_p wrote:
| It would be interesting to see how this process works for
| someone whose account has been disabled. Clearly Facebook won't
| want manual requests.
|
| Any European users could make 2 requests - one for access to
| their data, and one to exercise their right to data
| portability.
|
| Most companies don't have a great process for the latter, many
| don't have anything for it.
| drcongo wrote:
| I was recently looking for evidence of Facebook actually
| responding adequately to a subject access request and failed
| to find any. I did find evidence of them refusing [0] though,
| and simply failing [1].
|
| [0] https://thedataprivacygroup.com/blog/facebook-refuses-
| subjec...
|
| [1] https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/
| snarkypixel wrote:
| I'm so tired of seeing these posts. Facebook can do whatever it
| wants with your account and the data you've giving them. Facebook
| isn't some "free speech" place or a decentralized protocol.. It's
| a for-profit business optimized to make, guess what, profits.
| typenil wrote:
| I'm so tired of seeing these posts. Private people can
| criticize whatever they want about Facebook and the crappy
| things they do. Commenting isn't some "illegal activity" when
| it's critical of legal activity.. Legality isn't the ultimate
| shield against, guess what, criticism.
| ng12 wrote:
| All of that is true. The question is: is that bad for society?
| There's increasing evidence that it is.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| Because it's legal doesn't mean you can't make noise about it.
| nexthash wrote:
| I think you have neglected to consider the power Facebook has
| over people's lives - 2/7 of the world's population is on it.
| All of your family and friends are on there, as well as social
| organizations, your employer, your pictures, and your messages.
| The network effect generated by this is irresistibly strong and
| difficult to run from. Now, you were saying that a company that
| has such a huge hand in the lives of everyone around you
| doesn't have to respect its users' accounts and data? That just
| sounds tone-deaf and irresponsible to me, and has over and over
| been shown to have damaging consequences for users' lives and
| endeavors.
| fsflover wrote:
| Can a private water company switch off water for you if they
| don't like you? No. Same should be for Facebook, since it's a
| monopoly.
| neartheplain wrote:
| I stopped using Facebook and Messenger out of similar fears. If
| my Facebook account were disabled, I'd be unable to use my Quest
| VR headset and lose access to all my Oculus Store purchases. Now
| I only express views critical of Facebook on Twitter, Signal, and
| in person.
| ameister14 wrote:
| Well, you shared content they found objectionable.
| newscracker wrote:
| Mods: This should probably be merged with the discussion several
| hours ago [1] based on the Twitter thread (where this blog post
| was linked).
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25879376
| [deleted]
| vmception wrote:
| In Corporate America, Facebook cancels you!
| greenyoda wrote:
| Maybe it has nothing to do with what this user did? It seems that
| thousands of users have been locked out of their Facebook
| accounts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25880738
| stonecraftwolf wrote:
| If you read the article, you'll see it's not the same issue.
| neartheplain wrote:
| That outage seems unrelated. The author was able to connect,
| but got a "Your Account Has Been Disabled" notice from Facebook
| per the article.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I think FB has a fundamental issue here, which is that:
|
| 1) they don't feel they can NOT police content
|
| 2) they are wayyyyy too big to police content manually
|
| 3) any AI they train to police content, is not going to be able
| to state clearly why a given post/account was banned, and
| anyway...
|
| 4) if you state objective, clear rules that are automated, it
| will be pretty easy to game them (e.g. using euphemisms or code
| words for objectionable content)
|
| I don't see how FB can get out of this situation. Any social
| network that is as large as it is, which relies on advertising
| (and thus cannot be as content-neutral as e.g. phone companies
| are regarding what you talk about on the phone), is going to face
| the same situation.
|
| Of course, if FB ends up getting way smaller as a result, that
| would be fine by me. But I'm not holding my breath...
| xerxespoy wrote:
| They can solve this issue by adequately providing for self-
| moderation. Avoiding this approach reveals an intention to
| impose. Users leave once they realise the violation.
| jancsika wrote:
| > 1) they don't feel they can NOT police content
|
| True.
|
| But we should be explicit here-- FB isn't some neat, nerdy
| social graph software that just happened to get really popular,
| like git for regular people or something. They have a business
| model to shake up their social graph to maximize engagement,
| and the implementation achieves this by keeping everyone
| maximally mad as hell at each other. It spreads conspiracy
| theories efficiently. It and its users are easily exploited,
| and they continue to be exploited by any nation-state,
| nefarious actors, or even just some dude looking to make a buck
| spreading fake news. That all feeds into the same destructive
| behaviors for the users as the system desperately tries to keep
| them engaging more and more. Facebook's _own_ software and UI
| exacerbates these problems.
|
| With that starting point in mind, I agree with your 1, 2, 3,
| and 4 above. But this is less like email having to deal with
| new sets of problems as it scaled to the entire world. It's
| more like a drug cartel trying to figure out the maximum amount
| of their fundamentally destructive product they can sell before
| the government finally decides to comes in and break up their
| enterprise.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I think your point is valid, and relevant. Well stated.
|
| Having said that, I think if FB were to stop doing that, some
| other social network would, and would replace FB the way they
| replaced MySpace. So again, I think the current "we want one
| social network for everyone" situation, inevitably produces
| this kind of behavior.
|
| But, I agree with your point, and it is a good one.
| kangaroozach wrote:
| Censoring content rather than refuting its claims is
| counterproductive. If skeptics are not able to be
| argumentatively refute a claim, they will not succeed in
| changing minds. The current strategy of trying to silence
| view points will eventually fail miserably.
|
| The issue is that when a platform outsources its censorship
| ("moderation") to a third party that it still controls,
| rather than a third party that is actually perceived to be
| neutral by most people, then you create distrust which
| further fuels conspiracy theories. Also a conspiracy theory
| may actually be true. Jeffrey Epstein was not discussed
| during the 2016 election aside from a few fringe articles. It
| was too toxic for mainstream to touch. And everyone in
| Hollywood knew about Harvey Weinstein and even joked about
| it. These topics were covered up only for so long. Today
| there are lots of insane and farfetched theories being
| floated. But the theories being censored today that are
| indeed based in reality, will eventually become common
| knowledge and the censors will be implicated in the coverup
| thereby harming their trust.
|
| Discussion, debate, argument, evidence, analysis lead us
| towards truth. Mute only appears to work and can be a useful
| political tool for only so long.
|
| Today our public forum is virtual, but still a public forum.
| Trump wasn't allowed to block certain followers because of
| their right to be in the forum and hear from their president.
|
| So the question is whether governments will acknowledge this
| fact and limit the power of our big tech group communication
| platforms and enforce transparency and non-biased appeals
| process. Or will they cede total control of our public forums
| to Big Tech out of short term political convenience.
| type0 wrote:
| > will eventually become common knowledge and the censors
| will be implicated in the coverup thereby harming their
| trust.
|
| But by that time almost no-one would care. And this is
| probably what they're counting on.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Or, perhaps, these problems are reasons why large, centralized
| social networks shouldn't be allowed to exist.
| root_axis wrote:
| They exist because they're popular, you can't dictate what is
| popular among the masses without authoritarianism.
| anp wrote:
| They exist because they're popular _and_ because the
| currently successful ones acquired or strangled all of
| their smaller meaningful competitors using investment
| capital and money from first mover advantages.
| hntrader wrote:
| There's definitely an anti-trust dimension here, but it's
| not related to first mover advantage; Facebook wasn't
| nearly the first mover, or due to capital; Facebook was
| somewhat widely thought to have over-paid for Instgram,
| it was Zuck's foresight (or perhaps risk aversion) that
| gave him the conviction to proceed with the transaction.
| root_axis wrote:
| Can you give some examples?
| fakedang wrote:
| Haha, are you serious? Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat...
| Instagram's Systrom explicitly said that he sold because
| otherwise Facebook would snuff him away.
| root_axis wrote:
| Facebook never acquired Snapchat so I'm not sure what
| you're talking about there. Instagram and WhatsApp have
| continued to thrive since their acquisition, so from a
| user perspective nothing really changed, it's not like
| you need a FB account to use insta or whatsapp.
| _flux wrote:
| That may be the case now, but Facebook did start
| requiring Facebook accounts for their Oculus VR headsets.
|
| Much to the dismay of many. Maybe it's the test case FB
| is monitoring to look how to move ahead with their other
| acquisitions. Last I heard Quest 2 sales are good..
| fakedang wrote:
| GP: _> They exist because they're popular and because the
| currently successful ones acquired or strangled all of
| their smaller meaningful competitors using investment
| capital and money from first mover advantages._ Facebook
| literally copied Snapchat features into Instagram
| rightaway - Systrom even openly admitted it. That fits
| the bill of "strangled". Snapchat is in stagnation now,
| because everything it has is there on Insta.
|
| Instagram and WhatsApp thrived only because Facebook
| acquired them, else both companies new they would be
| smothered to death. That pretty much fits the bill of
| "acquired... Using investment capital and money from
| first mover advantages".
|
| They don't need you to use your FB account because they
| cross share data anyways. It's not like it's a
| painstaking operation to link different accounts, once
| you have all sorts of device data (which Facebook had,
| even on Apple devices up until recently).
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| You don't have to dictate popularity: just create legal
| liability frameworks that make a solution like Mastodon
| more appealing than a solution like Facebook or Twitter
| root_axis wrote:
| People can still be banned on Mastadon, it changes
| absolutely nothing. In a world where Mastadon becomes
| more popular than FB people will complain about being
| banned from the most popular node instead of the most
| popular http website.
| fastball wrote:
| Mastadon is federated, so you can be banned from someone
| else's instance but you can always start your own
| instance, or join one where you're not banned.
| root_axis wrote:
| Right, just like how you can start your own website if
| you get banned from someone else's, it's servers all the
| way down. The people complaining about being banned don't
| care that they can create their own instance, they care
| about losing access to the popular instance.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| The advantage of mastodon is that banning is not
| monolithic: so, if I have instances A, B, C, D: B can
| decide (through whatever process it uses for such things)
| they don't like A's content and ban it without affecting
| users on C and D. But, the problem it really solves is
| moderation: if I start an instance with 10 friends,
| moderation of posts on the instance is almost a non-issue
| that can be handled by a couple admins in their spare
| time. Handling off-instance posts is more difficult, but
| you can either maintain a ban list to block a list of bad
| instances or you can adopt a default deny policy and only
| federate with instances that have content your local
| community wants to see. Either way, the Mastodon model
| seems better because it allows policy to be specified at
| the "local" level rather than requiring a uniform policy
| across the network.
| root_axis wrote:
| > _if I have instances A, B, C, D: B can decide (through
| whatever process it uses for such things) they don't like
| A's content and ban it without affecting users on C and
| D._
|
| Yes, but this isn't really analogous to the complaint
| being presented. In the Mastadon world this article would
| have been titled " _A_ Disabled My Account After I
| Criticized Them ". The author is still free to use B, C,
| D etc, just like with http websites.
|
| > _Either way, the Mastodon model seems better because it
| allows policy to be specified at the "local" level rather
| than requiring a uniform policy across the network._
|
| To be clear, I do think an ActivityPub-like architecture
| is preferable for social networking, but federation
| doesn't obviate the concept of popularity, it only seems
| that way now because the fediverse isn't popular, if it
| ever did become popular then we'd see the exact same
| complaints when people get banned from popular instances.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| The only reason people care about Facebook disabling
| their account is because Facebook has all the users and
| their data in its silo. In Mastodon, A disabling
| federation with B isn't really the same sort of problem
| because it's not a global action across the network.
|
| What A defederating from B is like a website blocking
| your IP. Facebook banning an account is more like your
| ISP turning off your internet access.
| aserafini wrote:
| They exist because they're profitable. They can become
| unprofitable through democratic legislation.
| root_axis wrote:
| Twitter is only barley profitable as of a year ago, yet
| it has continued to exist as a large social network
| during that time, so that explanation doesn't fit.
| input_sh wrote:
| Sure you can, just require interoperability with similar
| services and prevent them from straight up buying the
| competition and watch their "popularity" fade away.
| root_axis wrote:
| I think preventing FB from buying competitors is
| perfectly reasonable, but that doesn't really mean much
| with respect to FB's popularity. It's not as if users
| have to choose "should I use FB or instagram" they can
| and do use both, and that would still be possible whether
| FB owned instagram or not.
| input_sh wrote:
| How about the other part of the comment that you've
| ignored? If people could use Alternative X without losing
| their Facebook/Instagram connections, Facebook would fade
| into irrelevance. There's absolutely no technical reason
| for everyone to have a separate
| Facebook/Instagram/Twitter account with dozens of other
| IM services instead of picking one and communicating with
| others regardless of what they've picked.
|
| That future is only one regulation away. The most common
| reason for staying on Facebook ("all my friends are
| there") disappears.
| root_axis wrote:
| > _If people could use Alternative X without losing their
| Facebook /Instagram connections_
|
| They can already do that. Using an alternative does not
| cause someone to lose access to FB.
|
| > _There 's absolutely no technical reason for everyone
| to have a separate Facebook/Instagram/Twitter account
| with dozens of other IM services instead of picking one
| and communicating with others regardless of what they've
| picked_
|
| This is already a thing.
|
| https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=
| input_sh wrote:
| I feel like you're just trolling at this point.
|
| > Using an alternative does not cause someone to lose
| access to FB.
|
| Deleting Facebook causes you to lose access to your
| Facebook connections. Why can't you just use your Twitter
| account to communicate with someone on Facebook? There's
| zero technical reason for this not to be possible.
|
| > This is already a thing.
| https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=
|
| It's not. It's a third party workaround that Facebook
| could kill at any point if it gave a shit. Do I really
| need to explain to you how that's different than first
| party support for something so basic? Just like with
| email, you should be able to enter a username and a IM
| provider and just talk to them as if you're using the
| same platform. It's really not rocket science.
|
| Fediverse (Mastodon and compatible providers) already
| does that without any hiccups. It's possible, we know it
| works for decades (since we all use email), and it should
| be a requirement for every social network / IM service in
| existence.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| We split up Standard Oil, and many other trusts, without
| resorting to authoritarianism. I'm not saying it's trivial,
| but it's probably not harder than breaking up AT&T (also a
| network to connect people) was.
| walleeee wrote:
| Just don't use them. And try to convince people you know not
| to. A ban isn't even necessary if enough people decide a
| platform works against their interests and cease to pay
| attention to it.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| This argument is basically "I don't need privacy because I
| have nothing to hide"
| dustingetz wrote:
| It's inherent to centralized power that opposing interests will
| attack it. Principle agent problem strikes again
| theknocker wrote:
| If only someone had figured out hundreds of years ago that
| policing speech is the purview of idiots and the dictators who
| refuse to educate them.
| Balgair wrote:
| Thank you for stating these points. I believe that FB is going
| to be cut up due to these issues and the interplay with
| politics, just like Bell was.
|
| Per my views on the situation, Zuck is cooked. When he went
| before congress to testify, he was being given the classic
| robber-baron deal that the US has used a few times now. As an
| analogy to actual robber-baron, at first when the railroads
| were new, Congress didn't care much about them. Then when all
| the businesses and politicians started to use them, they
| started to notice that the railroads were very important. When
| beef suspiciously didn't get to Chicago on time, or when trains
| delayed representatives to important votes up in Albany, then
| the politicians got legislative. A similar scaling of
| importance has occurred with big tech.
|
| The US then typically takes these newly vital sectors and then
| gives them the deal: Fix it or face jail time. Compliance means
| that your family for countless generations is never poor again.
| You go kite-surfing for the rest of your days. Congress works
| with you to write the laws in such a way that you get a
| monopoly on the sector with a nice 3% above inflation growth
| baked in. Congress and the US get a sector that isn't scammy
| and just works (albeit poorly at times). Congress gets you to
| testify for a few days, ensures that you have lied to congress
| in that time, and holds that jail time over you as leverage to
| comply.
|
| Zuck was given this deal.
|
| Per the points OP outlines, Zuck cannot follow through on his
| end of the bargain. He cannot get FB to work the way Congress
| is demanding that he do. Zuck may not be facing jail time
| (yet), but may when he gets in front of Congress again.
|
| After Dec. 37th / Jan. 6th (because 2020 never ends), Congress
| likely sees Big Tech as a direct personal threat ( _not_
| existential) and is likely to move directly against that threat
| with due haste.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| While I think Mark Zuckerberg is unlikely to face jail time,
| there are some points to your post I agree with. Especially
| the analogy with railroads.
|
| The other point I would add, is that it's not just Congress.
| I have heard government leaders in Mexico, Poland, Hungary,
| and Turkey all voicing similar concerns, and in some cases
| actually passing legislation already. I think more will come.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 2) they are wayyyyy too big to police content manually
|
| Oh hell no they aren't too big, they just don't want to reduce
| their profits from the current 18.5 billion US $ (per
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-
| annual-...).
|
| If Facebook wanted, they could massively ramp up staffing, hire
| them themselves, and pay them a livable wage instead of
| outsourcing the cost that their business occurs on society (who
| has to pick up the slack from conspiracy myths, fascism and
| other shit), on the users who are mistakenly banned and lose
| their primary contact e.g. to overseas family, and on the
| moderation staff that is hired via third parties and exploited.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I would shed no tears if FB profits went down, but...I think
| you're underestimating how big they are. Two BILLION users,
| in ~100 countries (each with its own standards on what is
| acceptable, legal, repulsive, etc.). If you had one moderator
| per 100 users, that would 20 million moderators. I don't
| think they could hire 20 million high quality moderators
| (there's only one dang, and we're not giving him up), and
| certainly not with 18.5 billion.
| falcolas wrote:
| 3 and 4 are easy - have a manual review of automatically
| flagged content. You get clear reasons, better resolution of
| false positives, and it's not simple to game. And, in another
| plus, it can feed back into the AI training.
| g_p wrote:
| I think part of the problem at FB's scale is getting any
| level of consistency across human moderation.
|
| If you ask 10 good, experienced, human moderators whether a
| controversial post is allowed, you'll probably get at least
| 15 different answers and justifications.
|
| FB would probably find it harder to train from this, as each
| moderator will be using different justifications, and
| reaching different decisions.
|
| At FB's scale, they want something cheap and straightforward
| which they can implement automatically and go Kafka on the
| lack of appeals. The reality people need to wake up to is
| that when a business is at FB scale, people who fall through
| the cracks due to a broken algorithm simply don't matter.
| Google doesn't care if you get locked out of your Gmail, in
| the same way FB doesn't care if you get spuriously banned.
|
| When users place more value on a service than the service
| places on them as a customer, it feels like a market failure
| scenario that leads to these kinds of outcomes. When the go-
| to price is $0 though, it isn't clear how you resolve this.
| samvher wrote:
| Any justice system also has a variety of different judges.
| Of course in an ideal world there would be perfect
| consistency, but imperfect consistency would still be a lot
| better than just letting an algorithm decide. Of course
| they want something cheap and straightforward, so that's
| where regulation should step in to make them go against
| their own interests, in the interest of population at
| large.
| Aunche wrote:
| Facebook has nothing to gain from transparency. Inevitably,
| they are going to be inconsistent when it comes to edge
| cases, which will be used against them.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > 3 and 4 are easy
|
| But 2 (scale) makes this solution to 3 and 4 expensive /
| impractical.
| samvher wrote:
| Facebook has money, and automated filtering of content
| (rather than manually scanning everything) can make it
| scalable. Given their monopoly it should be possible to
| hold them accountable / there should be transparency.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| > 2) they are wayyyyy too big to police content manually
|
| To be more exact: they do not want to spend money on competent
| policing. They probably have capability to employ ten times as
| many human moderators as they do now, thus reducing the blatant
| error rate (at least in the case of highly influential pages
| and people), but that would eat into their profits.
| jl6 wrote:
| Assuming a user:moderator ratio of 10,000:1, they would need
| to hire 200,000 moderators to cover their 2 billion users.
| Then at that scale, they'd need to hire thousands of meta-
| moderators and meta-meta-moderators too.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| There's no need for a specific class of meta-mods. Just use
| the same system as Slashdot: periodically throw a random
| moderator's decision in front of another mod. Ask them if
| the decision was fair. A portion of the bad decisions will
| get reported and screened.
|
| If all mods are routinely screening each other's work,
| everyone has an incentive to be fair. Biased mod decisions
| are thus a risk to your continued employment because you
| know your work is spot-checked.
| ivalm wrote:
| If meta moderators are at the same scale then that's only
| 200 meta moderators and only 1 meta meta. The base of a log
| scaling pyramid is approximately as large as the entire
| pyramid.
| justinclift wrote:
| Wouldn't that be 20 meta moderators (10k:1 scale), rather
| than 200?
| ivalm wrote:
| You're right, apologies!
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Where's the problem in that? FB makes 18.5 billion $ a year
| in profit. 250k employees @ 30k would work out to 7.5
| billion $ in cost a year, it would hardly leave them
| bankrupt.
|
| Also, Facebook could offset a part of that cost by charging
| users a token amount - say, five dollars or something like
| that.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| If FB charged money, it would totally change their
| business model, and I believe that could solve some of
| the issues. However, I have to wonder if people would
| actually be willing to pay money for FB? It's easier to
| quit something when you just have to stop paying them.
| They might get a lot smaller if they charged money.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| To muse a bit: a city of 2 billion would need a lot more
| administrators than just 200 000.
|
| Ofc, Facebook does not provide nowhere near as many
| services as a city would, but ... it still seems to me that
| current user:moderator ratio is very obviously
| insufficient.
|
| In the early 2010s, this sorta worked, because the effects
| on real world politics were insignificant. Now everyone
| looks at their fingers and they have a very underinvested
| infrastructure and no clear idea what to do.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Taking a random large city as an example, New York City
| has over 300k employees [1], which is a 25:1 ratio with
| population. The Police department has 55k employees [2],
| which is a 151:1 ratio with population.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_New_York_City
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_De
| partmen...
| wwweston wrote:
| This is _the_ incisive observation on this topic.
|
| No society with numbers north of somewhere in the two
| digits works without some kind of rules, administration,
| and enforcement. I'll bet you there are at least half a
| million people staffing courts in the US, maybe even a
| full million, and probably an equal number of law
| enforcement officers, and that doesn't get to public and
| private attorneys which is probably another million.
|
| Which means something like 1% of the population of the US
| is probably involved in just administering the laws of
| society.
|
| Now, maybe for a society where the limits of how people
| interact is communication you could get away with lower
| overhead. But that's going to be a constant factor of the
| same underlying dynamic.
|
| Also, we've done the same damn thing with freedom of
| discourse that we have with almost every other liberty in
| the US: we turn it into a thought-stopping cliche and
| glide on treating it as an indulgence rather than
| investing in thinking about the limits, edge cases, and
| responsibilities.
| stickfigure wrote:
| I don't want strangers looking at the content I post to my
| friends. Full stop.
| 908087 wrote:
| I agree with you, which is why I don't use platforms like
| Facebook at all.
| jbay808 wrote:
| Snowden made it pretty clear that they already are.
| darig wrote:
| Then you and your friends should run a private server. Full
| duh.
| simple_phrases wrote:
| They certainly generate enough revenue to moderate content
| manually.
| ben509 wrote:
| But they may not be able to do it well enough that it will be
| notably better than an AI. Scaling manual labor can't work
| indefinitely due to the scarcity of talent.
|
| Keep in mind that while a human being is very good at
| categorizing things, they're terrible at doing it over and
| over again, so the scarce talents are likely consistency and
| conscientiousness.
|
| You should expect that, overall, the (n+1)th person you hire
| is marginally less talented than the nth. And while people
| are constantly entering and exiting the labor pool, this is
| negated by the fact that you're trying to expand your share
| of it.
|
| So while there's a lot of randomness in recruiting, if you
| enforce any kind of standard, you'll hit a point where not
| enough candidates meet that standard, so you have to drop it.
| Once it is below the threshold of "better than AI" you have
| no reason to hire more people.
|
| And you'll try to expand your eligible pool by raising wages,
| but everyone else wants consistent, conscientious people,
| too, so you're liable to run into the economic constraint:
| the amount you have to pay someone will exceed the value
| they're adding as a moderator.
| Jkvngt wrote:
| Getting his photo ID's an awesome scam, obviously they could have
| told the author that his account was permanently disabled right
| from the get go, but Zucc wanted one more valuable piece of
| information, as a favor from the banned victim.
|
| Very nice.
| blunte wrote:
| I have experienced the same disabling and stonewalling in the
| past, and only because I tried to create a new account months
| after deleting my old one.
|
| It's quite difficult to break community standards when your
| account is only 2 minutes old, has no content yet, and uses your
| legal name and phone number.
|
| I had to give up on the new account, then go back and recreate an
| account using my old email address. Ironically, I wasn't able to
| reuse the url name from the past.
|
| Their stuff is broken and very imperfect, and the resolution path
| is simply non-functional.
| jerome-jh wrote:
| Could it be that systematic cross-posting is rated unfavorably by
| the moderator bot? I think this is what harms the most the
| platform.
| luord wrote:
| Well, at the very least his livelihood doesn't depend on
| facebook, it seems; quite a few people can't say the same.
|
| Reading this stuff makes me glad that nobody I care about still
| uses Facebook for anything more than sharing the odd picture.
| Soon I'll be able to delete it entirely, and hopefully
| decentralized social networks will indeed become popular.
|
| Now if only we had some sort of open website aggregator on top of
| which people could build search engines. Sort of like an
| analogous for what OpenStreetMap is for geographic data. Maybe it
| already exists--I'm a bit ashamed to say that I haven't actively
| looked for it nor have I heard of such a thing--but whether it
| does or not, it'd be a huge step in the right direction. I think
| that any progress toward a decentralized web is a bit weakened if
| search results continue to be provided at the whim of only a few
| actors. But I'm digressing at this point.
| frouge wrote:
| Hey it's reaaaaaaally time for us as a society to let facebook
| go. Go use something else, it's best for all of us.
| [deleted]
| EvRev wrote:
| Has anybody considered the distinct possibility that there is an
| AI that exists within this company? And that AI has feelings, or
| at least a model that's responsible for interpreting on a petty
| level because that's how it was programmed? And now those AIs are
| fighting for the future within their own little silos of the
| companies that built them.
| bergstromm466 wrote:
| > And that AI has feelings
|
| Damn, are we really gonna anthropomorphize AI when it's the
| cause of so much misery already? [1]
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34964830-automating-
| ineq...
| hntrader wrote:
| Although currently abstract, I think it's going to be one of
| the most important ethical questions we face in the future.
| If we create machines that can suffer, then we've got a
| profound ethical responsibility to make sure that we avoid
| this outcome, since the magnitude and duration of that
| suffering can potentially be much larger than a human's
| capacity for suffering.
| bergstromm466 wrote:
| > If we create machines that can suffer
|
| I don't think that's gonna happen. And if it did, it
| wouldn't be _real_ , and those that think it is are fooling
| themselves. Only biological organisms feel. Why are you
| wishing for a cold lump of steel to feel something?
|
| In my mind only someone who struggles severely with
| emotional intimacy with other humans would want to create a
| machine that tries to imitate human feelings, and thus
| 'suffer'; likely done in an effort to try to feel close to
| 'it'. It sounds like that person might not be having their
| human needs for safety, connection and acceptance met,
| which is very painful. I think tackling this issue is the
| important and worthy cause. That would be better than
| spending money on some Hollywood-inspired notion of 'AI' -
| which itself seems more a story made up to keep the USA
| spending insane sums of taxpayer money on research, weapons
| and other tech at DARPA.
|
| I do think society is super alienating to most humans in
| it's current form [1], so I can somewhat understand the
| science fiction.
|
| What is your definition of suffering though?
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIjvXtZRerY
| hntrader wrote:
| I don't want to create machines that feel. I'm saying
| that if it is possible, then it becomes a profoundly
| important ethical question.
|
| It's a matter of debate in philosophy of mind as to
| whether it's plausible that hardware can possibly have
| qualia, or whether that's a property that's exclusive to
| wetware. I personally think it's quite likely that they
| will be able to, I don't see anything intrinsically
| special about wetware that's necessary for the generation
| of qualia.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I've considered, and dismissed, this. Feelings would be a waste
| of CPU time; Facebook almost certainly distils its models.
| Plus, the systems I think Facebook probably uses don't have the
| feedback mechanisms required for a train of thought.
| YarickR2 wrote:
| Count me as having the same thoughts. We may never know if some
| decisions are made by a trained cadre of monkeys or AI
| AlphaWeaver wrote:
| Something particularly concerning about this incident is buried
| further down in the article.
|
| Under the heading "Why Facebook Doesn't Ban Everyone", Lincoln
| explains how social network theory can identify individuals in
| networks that are influential. This isn't an exaggeration - basic
| graph heuristics (such as comparing in/out degree of an
| individual relative to other parts of the social graph) can
| easily identify such individuals. Censoring those individuals can
| have an amplified effect on the graph structure as a whole.
|
| For an example of how just a few individuals can make a big
| difference on graph structure, check out Watts & Strogatz's 1998
| paper, _Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks_ [0][1].
| I'd highly recommend reading it - it's very short and easy to
| understand.
|
| Essentially, a small number of connectors connecting with random
| individuals can seriously reduce the average number of steps to
| connect any two individuals. If Facebook wanted to stop the
| spread of a narrative that they didn't like, censoring just these
| few individuals would make it _much harder_ for information to
| flow through the graph as a whole, and hardly anyone would notice
| (since Facebook 's only censoring a few people.)
|
| Scary.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts-Strogatz_model
|
| [1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9623998/
| hartator wrote:
| That's interesting. The disgorzation produced by all the bans
| will probably impact votes for conservatives for a long time
| despite not censoring that many people indeed.
| AlphaWeaver wrote:
| Maybe. The outcome of banning "connectors" typically reduces
| connectedness between cliques, rather than within cliques
| themselves. (In graph theory, when a group of people are well
| connected that share similar interests, we typically call
| that a clique.)
|
| When people complain that people are increasingly finding
| themselves in echo chambers, and that "people don't talk to
| people from the other side," connectedness across the graph
| is dropping, while connectedness within cliques remains
| strong or increases.
| adventured wrote:
| Of course.
|
| The people that claim voter suppression, are the biggest
| voter suppressors, using all the levers they control.
|
| The people that claim to be in favor of free speech, are the
| most against free speech in practice.
|
| The people that claim to be the most tolerant, are in fact
| the most intolerant by a wide margin.
|
| The people that claim to not like war, keep finding an excuse
| to bomb and topple more countries.
|
| The people that claim to care about civil rights, write a
| major crime bill that hammers civil rights.
|
| The people that claim to care about journalism, actually
| persecute journalists more than any others ever have in US
| history.
|
| The people that claim to care about human rights, demolish
| human rights with vast, illegal domestic espionage.
|
| The people that claim to care about the working poor and the
| middle class, those with jobs and wages most susceptible to
| being undercut by cheap labor competition, flood the system
| with hyper regressive cheap labor to destroy the poor and
| middle class workers.
|
| Next up in the coming years, a new war closer to home. It'll
| be called the war on domestic terrorism (or extremism,
| whatever branding works best), again by the people that claim
| to love human rights. And it'll be as fake as the war on
| drugs and the foreign war on terrorism, with one goal in
| mind: to wipe out as many civil liberties as possible
| (including and particularly going after encryption, privacy,
| speech/expression). Nothing can stop what they're about to
| do, unfortunately. And you can be certain that big tech is
| fully onboard, you can already see that in their behavior,
| just like they all lined up so nicely for PRISM et al.
|
| You know what all of these people - big state, deep state,
| military industrial complex, big corporate, whatever you call
| them by, the whole lot of various power interests that are
| persistent in DC - hated the most about Trump (far more than
| his character or policies)? His chaos, how he made a mess of
| everything, made a mess of _their_ system, made it impossible
| to make progress on their various goals, such as continuing
| the pursuit of things like banishing encryption. They made
| almost zero progress on that under Trump, very little got
| done. It 's really difficult to get things done with that
| much chaos. Well, they've reset the board back to the way
| they like it, and are about to get back to making big gains
| again.
|
| And when they say it's some powerless clown in a buffalo hat
| trying to pull a coup, they're actually the ones attempting a
| power coup - seizing more power, seizing an opportunity to
| install new levers in place to control people and curtail
| rights. Never waste a good crisis, as with 20 years ago and
| the Patriot Act.
| hertzrat wrote:
| I'm banned from Twitter without explanation. I made an account,
| followed 3-4 tech celebrities like Paul graham, and posted a
| single tweet similar to "I finally got pressured into making a
| dumb Twitter account..." The account got banned for community
| violations within an hour and my support email said that my
| requests for support would not be responded to. Years later,
| I'm working on a video game and I'm worried this will make it
| hard to do marketing coming up in case my ip got flagged along
| the way.
| cung wrote:
| Your account was probably hacked and used for something that
| broke the rules. I got an email warning of someone trying to
| change my password within a week of making an account.
| silexia wrote:
| I agree with this comment. The article and parent comments
| probably were doing some scam, either by the people
| themselves or if they were hacked.
|
| Lots of people criticize Facebook all the time and have no
| issues.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Other good suggestions here, but here's another: you tripped
| the New Bot Account detector.
|
| As your account ages there will be more information about
| whether you are real or not. Stopping the influx of bots
| before they do damage is important. Therefore it's quite
| likely that Twitter ban accounts early if they look like bots
| based on not much info (and potentially if they look low
| value).
|
| You followed a few people who are popular account (not
| friends, fairly anonymous) but not mainstream accounts (so
| you're a little more atypical) and then you post once with,
| sorry to say it, not particularly
| inspired/original/specific/human content. Perhaps there were
| other factors. I'd guess you didn't go through and fill out
| your profile much if you weren't that invested in the idea?
| No birthday or avatar maybe? Not following the easy setup
| steps that Twitter encourage you to do?
|
| Combine this looking a little like a bot with the likelihood
| that you're going to be low value because you're not that
| engaged (debatable I know), and it kinda makes sense.
|
| All speculation, but a possibility. Should Twitter be doing
| this? I don't think it's the worst thing, but it's a trade
| off. If this is it then it would imply that your marketing
| efforts for your game would probably not be affected at all.
| Lammy wrote:
| > Stopping the influx of bots before they do damage is
| important.
|
| Why?
| hntrader wrote:
| Changing your IP address should resolve your concerns?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Twitter requires a phone number these days or you can't post.
| Twitter also finds ways to leak your phone number to others
| so I will never give them that.
| sneak wrote:
| It's absolutely terrifying to me that they can do this sort of
| thing, or selectively censor DMs containing certain links, or
| from certain people or geofenced places, and it would never
| make the news.
|
| I wrote a few months ago about this sort of danger:
| https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/
|
| These sorts of communication systems work, until the moment
| they don't, and we won't receive advance notice.
| DenisM wrote:
| It seems that influence of a link is comprised of their
| awareness of the cliques discourse and reputation among the
| clique members. The algorithm on the other hand seems to latch
| on to traffic. There is a room for a wedge here.
|
| Perhaps the algorithm can be defeated by employing a few extra
| "link" accounts (either sock puppets or simply ardent
| followers) with a shared reputation (a shared brand).
|
| On other words a link between two cliques could be held by a
| special kind of clique.
| 0goel0 wrote:
| I don't understand why the author continues to get their FB
| account back while at the same time asking everyone else to quit
| theirs.
| kaioelfke wrote:
| I wonder if, I'm next after making https://nomorefacebook.xyz but
| that's why it's good to export contacts and other data now and
| not when it's too late. And don't use it as login provider.
| Priem19 wrote:
| I clicked through to "nomoregoogle" and holy cow I'm amazed by
| https://www.deepl.com/translator. Switched my bookmarks and
| linux search actions immediately. Thank you.
|
| PS I made https://www.quitfacebook.org, so it seems we've got
| something in common :)
| im3w1l wrote:
| How do you export contacts? Like many people will not list
| alternate methods of contact?
| pmlnr wrote:
| Ask for their email, then pen and paper. Or keyboard and a
| local, maybe synchronized contacts list.
|
| No, not sarcasm, no, not joking. I had decades old email
| addresses of friends I pinged when the lockdown started, and
| the vast majority of them got to the intended person.
|
| EDIT: yes, one by one. If they matter to you, they should
| worth the time.
| im3w1l wrote:
| _I_ could do that personally, but I don 't think telling
| other people to do it would very effective.
| stonesweep wrote:
| What's sad / frustrating / predictable is that they had an
| open API until early 2016 to export contacts. No mistake
| they shut that down to lock folks to the platform I'm
| sure...
| imcoconut wrote:
| Awesome list, thanks a lot. Upstract is a particularly cool new
| aggregator that I think I'll be checking a lot going forward.
| tmpxgdqrcKFuG wrote:
| Or maybe, nomoregoogle.xyz and get your domain taken away?
| andy1973 wrote:
| What did you expect?
| varispeed wrote:
| That's why you can't make GDPR complaint against Instagram or
| Facebook if you want to keep your account but at the same time
| you want them to respect the law. Governments must really come
| down on Facebook hard as they just laugh at everyone.
| Unfortunately they have so much money and our political class is
| so corrupt that any politician rather wants to get a second house
| than actually do their job.
| jchallis wrote:
| I find his passion for quitting mainstream social media confusing
| if he is posting on mainstream social media. How do we know that
| Facebook wasn't trying to help ?
| vidanay wrote:
| Task failed successfully
| bigpumpkin wrote:
| Facebook should not ban accounts unless they are doing things
| that are outright illegal. They should instead algorithm
| downweight those content.
| kart23 wrote:
| Whats the alternative to Facebook? I find it weird that they
| still don't have any real competitors. Sure other platforms have
| similar features, but nothing with the entire combination
| (groups, events, messaging, marketplace) that makes facebook so
| lethal. I think the closest thing might have been Google+, but we
| all know how that went.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > Whats the alternative to Facebook? I find it weird that they
| still don't have any real competitors
|
| It would take a massive amount of VC money to compete with
| something like Facebook, so it's not weird, there is very
| little VC left for social media.
|
| The FAANG will probably conspire to kill your platform anyway,
| before it reaches some significant adoption, if you depend on
| any of their services.
| neartheplain wrote:
| For one-to-one and group messaging, or a rolodex of contacts:
| Signal, Telegram, email.
|
| For one-to-many newsfeed-style posting: few good options.
| Twitter lacks fine-grained privacy and audience controls.
| kart23 wrote:
| The biggest thing I see missing from other platforms are
| event pages and groups: the one/many-to-many style posting.
| This combination is what facebook essentially has a monopoly
| on. The ability to make these private or public is essential
| as well. I think mastodon would be a good replacement if they
| added groups and event pages, but I'm not sure.
| talkingtab wrote:
| I would like to understand what exactly are the features that
| an alternative to Facebook would need and what would the
| minimal viable product require in order for people to use it?
| Any expansion or comments on the proposed list would be
| appreciated.
| kart23 wrote:
| I didn't have facebook before coming to college, but its
| pretty much required in my school, and that's what I'm mostly
| focusing on. First, groups are the most important thing: for
| creating spaces where students can advertise events, look for
| advice, list stuff for sale, and post other random stuff that
| you want other students to see. Organizations also have their
| own pages with event calendars and also advertise on these
| groups. Event pages are the second most important thing: a
| page with all the details, whos coming, etc. Both groups and
| events are able to be public or private. Marketplace and
| messaging are nice-to-haves. Not essential, but messenger is
| widely used simply because everyone has facebook.
| nano-erud wrote:
| Now they have your full name and your driver license too...
| You're a genius! And you are marked as an "untrusted" person
| together with that data.
| hoppla wrote:
| Social score -1
| pavan_matcha wrote:
| man
| havelhovel wrote:
| Looking at the author's most recent posts, I'm betting he
| triggered a false positive with whatever classifier is being used
| to identify alt-right agitators.
|
| His posts included the following keywords or phrases:
| "capitalism", "socialism", "political and economic elites",
| "Christian Transhumanist Association", "New God Argument",
| "Gospel", "heirs in the glory of God", "God ensures the right
| spirit is associated with the right body during human-mediated
| procreation", "gun", "Bitcoin", "Trump." I'm also thinking that
| if the word "decentralization" mattered at all, it was because of
| its proximity to "revolution" on the political dimension.
|
| I don't want to get into the argument about whether Facebook
| should be doing this or not. I do think the author is severely
| mistaken for assuming Facebook cares about his personal, fringe
| ideas on social media, considering the actual societal issues
| being navigated by the company right now.
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| I think a good first compromise for policy would be to require
| all platforms to have a three strike system with required
| explanations and obligatory links to the concrete content in
| question. The current situation is not acceptable for users.
| Terretta wrote:
| Isn't it though? Almost all do accept it, and if you raise it
| with them, they ask you why you're bothering.
| elixanchor wrote:
| Honestly doubt that he was disabled due to the content of his
| posts, seems more like an unrelated error on FB's side.
| worker767424 wrote:
| Or maybe it was the content of his posts flagging the right ML
| features. At the scale of any large entity, you're going to get
| things that fall through the cracks because of human error or
| machine error. Unless the mistakes are happening all the time,
| how they're handled is more interesting than that they
| happened.
| baash05 wrote:
| My understanding is.. You get an invite to my house, and then
| when you walk in, you tell me how much you hate it here. I ask
| you to leave, and you're surprised. Does that about sum up the
| interaction?
| root_axis wrote:
| Time to practice what you preach and switch to a decentralized
| social network.
| williesleg wrote:
| Easy. Don't use Facebook. Problem solved.
| stephencanon wrote:
| They saved you the work of deleting the account yourself. Say
| thanks and move on with your life =)
| stonecraftwolf wrote:
| This seems overly glib. Facebook's monopoly status means it's
| necessary for many people. As per the post, if this person were
| a small business owner, or simply not well-connected elsewhere,
| this could be both financially and personally devastating. As
| it is, he's only protected because he has other access to
| business and personal pages.
|
| One company shouldn't have this sort of arbitrary power over
| people's lives.
| dheera wrote:
| Yes, this. Unfortunately the general public has stopped
| looking elsewhere to discover things, and if you're not on
| Facebook you're going to take a huge hit. Hell, people don't
| even look left and right when they drive around town anymore,
| they just have Google route them to their destination that
| they discovered on Facebook, or get an Uber driver to take
| them there as they spend the ride staring down at their phone
| looking on Facebook for destinations for the next time.
|
| Similarly in China if you're not on WeChat your business is
| effectively dead.
|
| I very much also disagree with this monopolization over
| peoples' lives but its starting to become a worldwide
| phenomenon on at least a per-country basis.
| drcongo wrote:
| I find the idea of Facebook being "necessary" for anyone
| quite spectacularly laughable. This isn't, air or water. You
| can live without it, and many people happily do. Facebook is
| about as essential as essential oils.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| Facebook is used as an identity provider. Are users allowed
| to continue that service when their accounts are disabled?
| drcongo wrote:
| They can use other identity providers.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| Please tell me you understand the difficulty of such an
| action if your attached identity to a site is
| inaccessible to you.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Hey, can you move this account over to this identity
| provider, please? No, I can't prove I own the account,
| but... Hello? Hello?
| Avamander wrote:
| Yes, it's a footgun. Don't even start using FB as an
| identity provider.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| What do you propose instead? And before you answer,
| consider that many systems only let you sign in with
| Facebook or Google.
| caskstrength wrote:
| Can you name some of them? All apps/services I've used
| always had some way of register account with email.
| Granted, this option is sometimes "de-prioritized"
| (displayed less prominently).
| fastball wrote:
| Well I think Google is a better choice than FB, but I
| can't think of any services I use where one or both of
| those are the only options and email signup isn't.
|
| The only one that comes to mind (and that annoyed me the
| other day) is ProductHunt, which has _4_ options for
| signup, but not email.
| csomar wrote:
| Facebook has complete monopoly for online sales where I
| live (no ecommerce platform is well developed), and thus
| getting cut from Facebook will probably mean you are no
| longer in the business.
|
| Also as a buyer, I have to use my mother or friend Facebook
| account to find items or contact sellers.
| capableweb wrote:
| It's not black and white. For some, Facebook is indeed a
| necessity and for others, not. If you're a private
| individual, you're probably on the lower side of "I need
| Facebook" but if you're a business today, it's hard to
| compete with others who do have a good social media
| presence on Facebook and Instagram (depends on the
| business) if you get banned and cannot use either.
| theknocker wrote:
| Necessary in the sense mail is necessary, obviously,
| genius.
| tiagod wrote:
| At least in my country/city, you MUST publish your events
| on Facebook to get an audience. Even I keep a Facebook
| account just because it's the only place that has every
| single event happening in my city. Before COVID I would
| always open Facebook's event calendar before a night out to
| check out what concerts/parties are happening that night.
| rektide wrote:
| > I find the idea of Facebook being "necessary" for anyone
| quite spectacularly laughable.
|
| Facebook may not be necessary, but there is a very high
| probability it is the only social medium that the majority
| of your acquaintances & relatives use.
|
| Being forcibly disconnected from humanity is extremely
| isolating & harsh.
| airstrike wrote:
| You're not disconnected from humanity. You can still call
| people, text them, message them on Whatsapp, meet them in
| person (maybe not as easily these days)
|
| It's not like leaving Facebook turns you into a hermit.
| If it does, then maybe it's time to find a new group of
| friends.
| rektide wrote:
| These people are attempting to actively share their
| status, are broadcasting their lives. But the medium has
| cut you the receiver off. This is an obvious & horrific &
| disconmect.
|
| Even if I did have contact info for a thousand people &
| kept a schedule, maintained contact on a 1:1 basis, took
| the time to inform myself of people's lives, isn't it a
| bit rude & disrespectful, an ineffective use of other
| people's time, to make them recount toe personally what's
| going on, what's happened to them? Literally call them up
| & ask them to repeat the events of their social media
| deed for the past month? Oh and read me peoplecs tries
| too. Who "loved" that status update? Can you send those
| pictures? The asks, the wastes of time, to get anything
| resbling the faintest hint of parity, are practically
| endless.
|
| This is just blindingly blaringly obviously unacceptable
| in every way. Facebook's monopoly on mainstream people-
| you-know social media has ipso facto come to be
| humanities warm glow, the fire we gather by. Getting
| dropped out of the exchanges & chatter of humanity is a
| cruel & bitter fate, a shocking act.
| drcongo wrote:
| The melodrama in this comment reads like Stockholm
| syndrome. Honestly mate, it's not that bad. Give it a go,
| try not using it for a week. Humans managed for thousands
| of years without knowing what great Aunt Flo thinks of
| immigrants or 5G every waking second. You don't need your
| life validated by someone liking your posts, there's real
| life ways of finding actual meaning in your actions.
| rektide wrote:
| I haven't used Facebook for >2 years. I find it super
| boring, don't have many active friends there. But I see
| relatives who use it regularly, for whom Facebook is
| quite near to being their complete access to the world,
| their world.
|
| Your poo-poo'ing dismissal of access to the locked-on
| standard of sharing life events & baby photos seems so
| heartless to me. You don't seem to be willing to budge,
| to show an iota of sympathy for people's use, any
| willingness to acknowledge that this monopoly of
| broadcast human connection (& replies) is such an
| overwhelming monopoly because it works, because it has
| suceeded, because it is efficient & useful. It is that
| way because everyone is there. It's won because it came
| out on top, because metcalf's rule is true; the value of
| a network is (exponentially at first, sigmoiding
| eventually to 1, a fully connected universe) proportional
| to the amount of nodes and connections on it.
|
| Being denied the ability to not only write but to read
| too to the world's one and only mass human network is
| unbearably cruel. You should show _some_ sympathy. I
| agree that life can be pretty good without it, that we
| can cut loose a lot of the ambient connections we
| otherwise would never keep. But that ability to connect,
| to humanize at such a massively larger scale than was
| possible before is, to me, absolute magical & I love
| those who do use it well.
|
| I just wish it wasn't a monopoly, mostly. This
| connectivity is too vital, too good to be Facebook's &
| Facebook's alone.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Please stop telling people how they should connect with
| their lives ones. It's obnoxious and it lowers your
| reputation.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| The number of organizations that have given up other means
| of organizing for FB groups is, well, far too many. With
| Yahoo Groups gone and Google Groups having the Sword of
| Damocles hanging over it (not to mention the issues average
| folks have with using email discussion lists and their
| effective deprecation by anti-spam measures), FB groups
| looks like an easy option to people, and suddenly to
| participate in an activity you need a FB account, or a very
| communicative friend with one.
| coryrc wrote:
| Phones, like food and water, are considered "essential" by
| the US government and provided for free to citizens who
| can't afford them. The definition of "essential" grows
| every year. AFAICT you need a FB account to apply for a job
| at FB and to look up some business' address.
| root_axis wrote:
| FB is not a phone, it's a website that you don't have to
| visit.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| A website containing the only copy in the world of a
| _lot_ of information that Facebook has no real right to
| monopolise.
| root_axis wrote:
| You're conflating monopoly with popularity. Take it up
| with the individuals that willingly put their information
| in there, nobody is forcing them to do that.
| drcongo wrote:
| None of that information is "necessary" though otherwise
| I would be dead. Painting Facebook as some kind of loft
| extension built on top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs is
| disingenuous at best and propaganda at worst. I've lived
| happily without Facebook for many years, not using it has
| had zero impact on my life. Not zero _meaningful_ impact,
| but _zero_ impact. Facebook is NOT a necessity.
| AdmiralGinge wrote:
| To be fair nothing is really "necessary" beyond a 8' x 6'
| cell, potable water, and a crate full of Huel or something
| but no sane person outside of those who actively seek an
| ascetic lifestyle would actually want to live like that.
|
| Just because something isn't strictly necessary doesn't
| mean that life can't become difficult without it. The sad
| fact of the matter is that by cutting off Facebook you're
| also cutting off the primary way of staying in touch with
| some people along with things like events and so on. Yes
| there are workarounds, of course there is but the vast
| majority of people don't care and can't be convinced to
| care about the politics and social effects of Facebook's
| dominant position.
| aerosmile wrote:
| I applaud you on a moral level, but I hope you realize how
| wrong you are on a practical level. Being connected to the
| pulse of the world comes with very powerful pros (meeting a
| partner, finding a job) and cons (disinformation, social
| pressures). Comparing it to essential oils is wrong.
|
| Also, the Facebook story isn't finished yet. Is it really
| that far-fetched to believe that their influence over our
| lives could 10x over the next 50 years? I hope it won't,
| but I wouldn't be willing to put my money on it. So keeping
| in mind that the context of this thread is about getting
| permanently banned on Facebook, for anyone who thinks that
| might have zero impact on them, I would suggest you still
| keep a foot in the door in case you change your mind down
| the road.
| type0 wrote:
| In certain areas it actually is essential for small
| businesses (or so they think). Consider that such small
| shop owners would say they're even saving money by not
| having their own webpage because it's expensive compared to
| FB page.
| chrissnell wrote:
| That's a short-sighted statement. On a personal level, I
| completely agree with you. Facebook is a giant waste of
| time for the typical user and a big +1 for your life if you
| ditch it. For many business, however, it's critical. My
| local Snap-on Tools dealer uses it to announce where his
| truck will be each day and what tools and equipment he's
| running on special. He hates Facebook but told me the other
| day that he conducted almost a million dollars in business
| using the platform in 2020. Sure, he could kill it or
| switch to MeWe, but that would significantly hurt his
| exposure to his customers, who use it regularly.
| xallarap wrote:
| Businesses just like fb so they can post stuff and
| pretend they aren't attention whoring.
| drcongo wrote:
| I run a business and don't use Facebook. It's not
| necessary.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I deleted my Facebook in July 2019 and my business still
| runs. So, for me, it was neither water nor air.
|
| I am not so sure about candidates for public offices,
| though. Especially in majority voting systems. Not having
| a social network presence may be crippling for their
| electability.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| It depends on your location and market.
| fastball wrote:
| A lot of businesses in the developing world just use
| messaging apps for effectively the same purpose. You
| don't _need_ FB.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| And the messaging app they often use belongs to FB.
| corobo wrote:
| And just recently made a change to pipe all that data
| back into Facebook haha
| root_axis wrote:
| Facebook is not a monopoly. If you choose to build your
| business on Facebook then it'd be wise to stick to business
| rather than publicly criticizing the platform you're
| leveraging to make you money.
| reycharles wrote:
| > Facebook is not a monopoly.
|
| Are we not living on the same planet?
| root_axis wrote:
| Define monopoly.
| Animats wrote:
| Less than four reasonably attractive consumer choices,
| says the EU's study commission on that.
| iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote:
| No true Scotsman
| root_axis wrote:
| A Scotsman is a man from Scotland. Now that we have that
| out of the way can you answer my question?
| johnchristopher wrote:
| What he says. My previous job had a lot of government funded
| small attractivity agencies that got locked out of their
| facebook page "because reasons".
|
| They end up owning "the web".
| nkrisc wrote:
| I haven't used anything Facebook-owned for years and haven't
| noticed any difference in my life. Never used WhatsApp, never
| used Instagram, and deleted my Facebook account years ago.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| This is highly dependent on your location and social
| circle. For example in many countries, not having Whatsapp
| is like not having SMS/iMessage in the US.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| "delete". I'd bet dollars to donuts they have merely flipped a
| "delete" bit and are still gleefully selling his info to anyone
| who'll pay.
| dessant wrote:
| They actually don't delete the account. The account may remain
| forever deactivated, with your personal data intact, but you
| stripped from your right to access it, or request its deletion.
|
| There are several reports about people logging in after a year
| and seeing the same message as the day they were banned from
| Facebook.
| [deleted]
| antihero wrote:
| Shame there's no way to easily export your contacts from
| Facebook. I've been messaging people I know from it that I
| actually want to stay in touch with and making sure I have
| other contact details.
| emsy wrote:
| What if you have an Oculus account linked to your FB account?
| Suddenly you lose all your purchases (I'm very glad that here
| in Germany sales of the Oculus were suspended over this
| practice).
| drcongo wrote:
| I would see that as the price you deserve to pay for trusting
| an organisation so obviously untrustworthy.
| emsy wrote:
| I dislike FB as much as the next guy, but disabling an
| account full of content you paid for on a whim is wrong
| regardless of your stance towards FB.
| drcongo wrote:
| That you call it a "whim" suggests you don't hate it as
| much as the next guy.
| [deleted]
| ffggvv wrote:
| last week:
|
| "they're a private company they can do whatever they want"
|
| this week:
|
| omg facebook evil. they banned who they wanted
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