[HN Gopher] Tell HN: My wife was banned from WhatsApp without re...
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Tell HN: My wife was banned from WhatsApp without reason or
recourse
Like many people, my wife and I use WhatsApp to keep in touch with
various family and friends who prefer that platform. I actually use
it more than she does--she basically just chats with close family
and a few friends from highschool. A few days ago, she opened the
app to find the message, > This account is not allowed to use
WhatsApp > Chats are still on this device. This didn't make any
sense, as she only uses it to chat with family and friends and
certainly hadn't broken any terms. Found the option to appeal and
submitted that. A day later, the app now says > This account
cannot use WhatsApp > We've completed our review and found this
account's activity goes against WhatsApp's terms of service
There's no way she's actually broken any terms, so it appears this
is some kind of mistake, but given the speed of the "review", I
doubt any human has actually looked at it. She's tried contacting
them via their contact page, but given the review is already
"complete", I'm not too hopeful. Our only guess as to what could
have caused this is that a week or so before the ban she received a
spam message sent to a giant group and marked it as spam. Perhaps
somehow all numbers in that group ended up associated with the
spamming? Regardless, pretty frustrating situation since she has a
couple of long-running chats with family and friend groups that she
can no longer participate in. Always fun to be at the whims of the
algorithm. Posting in case there's anything to the connection
between marking a message as spam and getting blocked (maybe it's
safer to just mute spam messages instead), as well as on the off
chance someone from Facebook ends up reading this and can help.
Author : tempestn
Score : 157 points
Date : 2022-06-11 19:17 UTC (3 hours ago)
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Could be someone spoofed her number and so bad things
| NullPrefix wrote:
| How do you know that she didn't violate terms of service? It's a
| mile long document, I doubt you have read it. I didn't read it
| either, but still, just because she's using it to keep in touch
| with friends & family doesn't mean she didn't violate ToS.
| SnowHill9902 wrote:
| Damn. Would you mind stating your country? I had only heard about
| this when invited to a spam group by malice with CP.
| tempestn wrote:
| We're in Canada.
| ayewo wrote:
| Is it possible that in one of those groups, kids photos were
| shared? Perhaps the algorithm somehow classified the photos
| being shared as CP?
| tempestn wrote:
| She's probably shared photos of our kids with her parents
| and that kind of thing, but nothing that would reasonably
| be classified as CP (obviously) - although who knows what
| could cause a false positive. She did receive that spam
| group message though, and has gotten others in the past;
| anything could've been in there.
| rajup wrote:
| > Our only guess as to what could have caused this is that a week
| or so before the ban she received a spam message sent to a giant
| group and marked it as spam.
|
| Hmm that's mildly concerning if that's the reason. My
| acquaintance got a similar spam message yesterday and they marked
| it as spam as well. No account closures yet though...
| daanlo wrote:
| I emailed the support@ email in a different scenario (my phone
| was stolen) and got help fairly quickly (within 24h). If that
| doesn't help shoot me a DM and I might be able to ask a friend
| that works at whatsapp about it.
| tempestn wrote:
| She just got a reply from the support email:
|
| > ##- WhatsApp Support -## Hi, Our system flagged your account
| activity as a violation of our Terms of Service and banned your
| phone number. Your account will remain banned as a result of
| the violation. We recommend carefully reviewing the "Acceptable
| Use of Our Services" section of our Terms of Service to learn
| more about the appropriate uses of WhatsApp and the activities
| that violate our Terms of Service. You can learn more about how
| to use WhatsApp responsibly in this Help Center article. Please
| keep in mind, WhatsApp reserves the right to enforce its
| policies in accordance with its Terms of Service.
|
| If your friend can help, that'd be great. My email is in
| profile. Thanks.
| tempestn wrote:
| And a new reply:
|
| > Hi, We have reason to believe your account activity has
| violated our Terms of Service and decided to keep your
| account banned. We received a large number of complaints
| about your account and to protect our users' privacy, we
| won't disclose the nature of the complaints. Unfortunately,
| responses to this email thread won't be read.
|
| Unless her parents are complaining about her account, this is
| nuts. There's no conceivable way there could be a large
| number of complaints about an account that doesn't actually
| write to anyone besides family and close friends.
|
| Increases my suspicion that it's related to that spam group
| message. Likely there were a bunch of complaints about that
| thread, and somehow her account got rolled into the ones that
| were banned, despite doing nothing besides blocking the chat
| as spam.
| kklisura wrote:
| > We received a large number of complaints about your
| account
|
| > Our only guess as to what could have caused this is that
| a week or so before the ban she received a spam message
| sent to a giant group and marked it as spam.
|
| Each person in that group marked each other as spam? I
| wonder if other people in that group ended up banned as
| well.
| orlp wrote:
| A possible explanation is that her number got SIM swapped
| and then used by spammers.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Or maybe somehow someone managed to enable WhatsApp web
| on her phone, or she used it on a public computer and
| forgot to turn it off? Otherwise, completely out of
| ideas.
| tempestn wrote:
| I don't think it could be one of those. She only uses it
| on her phone and home pc.
| tempestn wrote:
| I would think if that were the case she'd get some return
| calls and texts from people receiving the spams? There's
| been nothing aside from this whatsapp ban.
| darkhelmet wrote:
| Perhaps her account credentials were compromised? Somebody
| could have used the web API to run a spam/abuse campaign.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > We received a large number of complaints about your
| account
|
| So if I get a bunch of bots I could file mass complaints
| about someone's what''s app account and det them banned?
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| I don't know about whatsapp but on tiktok you can easily
| do this successfully, without bots - they automatically
| permaban anyone who is reported just a handful of times.
|
| All you have to do is make a few accounts or convince a
| few friends and you can remove any video or account on
| the app that you want.
|
| Considering this thread, it looks like Whatsapp is the
| same way.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| This is a known problem and (probably) there are systems
| which should monitor automated abuse of abuse.
|
| However, all those social networks (including Instagram)
| are susceptible to another attack - just rent a horde of
| low-grade bots... and add the victim's account to their
| friends. This sudden increase in friends count are
| treated as an attempt to boost the rating of the bot
| accounts => ban not only for the bots (about whom you
| don't care) but for the victim too.
|
| Perhaps OP is in the similar situation, though probably
| his spouse wasn't a target but a collateral.
| ElectronShak wrote:
| > We received a large number of complaints about your
| account
|
| I hope this system is smart enough to only consider
| complaints from accounts that this user has messaged
| recently, otherwise, a group of people could decide to
| maliciously report an account.
|
| But how would they determine this if it is true that they
| do not store messages on their servers?
| GWBullshit wrote:
| Sorry this happened to your wife.
|
| I actually can't for the life of me figure out why there's no
| business model to address this, as it is a common enough type of
| occurrence on numerous social media platforms; some examples I've
| personally encountered:
|
| - Friend put in Facebook jail for being tagged in what Facebook
| found to be an offensive post; people tagged in the post were
| also put in FB jail, yet ironically the original spamming poster
| never was
|
| - Friend put in Facebook jail for reporting a clear violation of
| Facebook's terms of service to Facebook, meanwhile nothing
| happened to the violator's account
|
| - Myself having been put in FB jail because of a picture of a
| statue that showed side-boobage; meanwhile "artistic photography"
| FB pages featuring full, shaven frontal nudity (among other
| things) were allowed to persist
|
| - Myself having been flagged by FB's "new Ai" during the outbreak
| of Covid for an "offensive post" ... because I put up a music
| video that feature zero nudity/sexuality/violence/racism/sexism,
| yet it supposedly "went against community standards"
|
| - During the period the previous account was flagged by FB Ai, it
| was flagged again and I got a message that "Our records indicate
| you were previously flagged in the recent past, and being flagged
| in the recent past is now a flaggable offense in itself, so we're
| giving you another month in FB jail"
|
| - While in FB jail, got another message that "I violated the
| conditions of FB jail (not even sure how this is technically
| possible) by posting more content "against community standards"
| (while ALL features of my account were disabled for a month), and
| so no we're taking this account offline"
|
| Lost EVERYTHING including a contacts list built up over the
| course of years
|
| Recent Reddit incident where Reddit spam filters mistakenly
| identified my own posts on my own subreddit that were crosslinked
| NOWHERE as "spam", resulting in the subreddit being banned (and
| losing shit-tons of info on the subreddit); Reddit agreed that
| this was done "in error" but has so far failed to help retrieve
| any of the lost data on the subreddit ...
|
| Considering how many similar stories I've come across in my
| research and how important our social media lives/data/contact
| lists are ...
|
| I would GLADLY either:
|
| 1.) Pay a reasonable fee for services with an actual liability
| clause/customer service contact number OR
|
| 2.) Pay for some intermediary service that would take up
| complaints and find a way to get through to social media
| companies and be like, "WTF?!?" on behalf of their customers
| rglullis wrote:
| Can't you just pay for a service provider directly that does
| not build a business around offering "free" services in
| exchange of data harvesting and exploitation?
| coredog64 wrote:
| I can see a scrappy group of ex (or even current) Meta
| employees creating a service using their inside knowledge.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| now that every iphone has two sim card slots, and its so
| ubiquitous instead of having to get some random HTC Obsolete, I
| just add a new line to my cell phone plan
|
| I'm aware of all the phone number workarounds possible, most of
| which are VOIP, some of which are using internet hosted real cell
| phone numbers that forward you access codes, but at this point I
| can just afford another line. VOIP numbers are getting randomly
| banned everywhere, and the internet hosted numbers have already
| been used for a lot of services.
|
| definitely consider just getting a new phone number. they told me
| to "recognize my privilege" and so, calling all folks with a
| little financial privilege! get another phone line.
| rglullis wrote:
| 60 comments in the discussion already and no one is slightly
| curious about _what kind of investigation they can do, if the
| messages are end-to-end encrypted?_
|
| OP: any chance your wife's phone was sim-swapped or cloned? I
| believe that this is the only thing that could trigger an alarm.
|
| Also, just drop WhatsApp if you can. Install Element on your
| phone and ask your wife to do the same, if you want you can sign
| up for a 14-day trial on Communick [0], or just use the free
| service from matrix.org [1]
|
| [0]: https://communick.com
|
| [1]: https://app.element.io
| spijdar wrote:
| > what kind of investigation they can do, if the messages are
| end-to-end encrypted?
|
| When a user flags a conversation/user, it sends a number of
| historical messages with the report. End-to-end encryption
| doesn't prevent the end user from forwarding the messages to a
| third party.
| treme wrote:
| why stop there? get them to install linux on their pc, help
| them tunnel through Tor and setup pgp for them.
| rglullis wrote:
| Baby steps... Baby steps...
|
| Seriously, though. My mother, well in her 60's and far from
| being a tech-savvy person, managed to install Element and
| login to her account simply by following the instructions on
| the email I sent her when I signed her up. The whole thing
| with saving recovery key is a bit confusing, but not a
| showstopper.
|
| I don't get why people need to act like they can't even try a
| different service.There was life before WhatsApp, there can
| be life without it. Worst case scenario, you tried something
| new.
| TekMol wrote:
| I often wish that there was a law that says the larger a company
| is, the higher the standards it has to be held to.
|
| So a billion dollar company that locks out a user and does not
| correctly and quickly handle an appeal would get a giant fee that
| really hurts.
| elric wrote:
| This should especially be true for communication services. If
| you reach a large enough threshold of users, you should be
| required to offer interoperability with competitors, and have
| 24/7 support humans available to help out with things like
| this.
| emacsen wrote:
| Communication, and financial services.
|
| I made a new LLC recently and signed up for PayPal to pay an
| invoice.
|
| I gave them my info, my tax ID, my bank account, etc.
|
| And within five minutes, they told me that my account was
| permanently blocked and that I wouldn't be able to use PayPal
| with my business. No reason was given other than I must have
| violated their TOU.
|
| I had to go onto Twitter and talk publicly about it, then
| talked to three different Twitter representatives over a
| three weeks period, and they finally unlocked my account.
|
| I commend them for unlocking it, but it's certainly given me
| pause over using them for even sending funds. :(
| Evidlo wrote:
| You mean PayPal representatives?
| happyopossum wrote:
| For an essentially free service? Those sound like a pretty
| high bar.
| gerdesj wrote:
| If it was "free" then the company would have gone out of
| business long ago. So it is not free and she is a revenue
| generator for them. In return she might want some sort of
| basic support.
|
| Given the market value of the company, then it should be
| able to comply with basic standards of say decency, honesty
| and perhaps ... transparency.
| jjeaff wrote:
| And I'd bet a hefty sum that even after they ban you,
| they continue collecting and selling any data they can
| still collect from the app installed on your device.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Of course: you gave it willingly if unwittingly.
| ssss11 wrote:
| If it were truly free it would have died many years ago.
| Sakos wrote:
| A "free" service run by one of the richest and most
| profitable companies in the world. There should _be_ a high
| bar.
| layer8 wrote:
| They are a business, not a charity, so it seems
| appropriate. Nobody forces them to provide the service for
| free.
|
| The other argument is that the major messaging platforms
| have collectively become an essential basic utility, and
| accordingly carry some responsibility.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Its 'free', and you are the product (Congratulations!). You
| pay with your metadata (address book). Metadata is
| invaluable. Facebook knows everyone's connections. I'm even
| included in someone's address book, even though I don't use
| WhatsApp or any other Facebook service. I'm not benefiting
| from Facebook's free services, yet I am the product. It is
| disgusting, I hate this company, but I can't blame them.
| They get away with their nefarious crap for fun & profit.
| Scarblac wrote:
| So ask for some money if you need to.
|
| Taking on so many users means you get responsibilities to
| society that smaller companies don't get.
| dTal wrote:
| And of course, WhatsApp used to cost a dollar. A dollar a
| year, even! So "people wouldn't pay" just isn't true. I
| for one would gladly pay that just to have it not run by
| Facebook.
| frostwarrior wrote:
| It's not free. We pay with our data.
| runjake wrote:
| That's free in the way grass is "free" for beef cattle.
| hedora wrote:
| I think all fines should be expressed in days of revenue.
|
| Permaban for no reason, and fail to respond to appeals? A fine
| of 1 day of revenue, per user, seems reasonable to me.
|
| (Revenue would include revenue of all controlled foreign
| subsidiaries, tax haven shell companies, etc, of course)
| adastra22 wrote:
| This is usually the case, although through the form of safe-
| harbor exclusions which allow smaller companies to get away
| with more.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| If this is the "usual" case, why do we never hear about big
| companies ever getting any kind of regulatory fine that
| actually hurts?
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| A fine for what? Meta has no obligations to provide service
| to anyone other than their advertisers who've purchased
| such service.
| themitigating wrote:
| Why does the size of the company matter?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Resources available (fiat and people) for meeting regulatory
| requirements and the relative burden imposed by regulation.
| There are regulatory risk and compliance teams (finance
| specially, but also in other spaces) larger than most
| startups, with mid to high 8 figure budgets.
|
| Meta can afford meeting regulatory requirements imposed by
| nation states.
| [deleted]
| layer8 wrote:
| Because the larger the company, the more they should be able
| to afford it.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| Aside from burden on the company, the cost to the user from
| being arbitrarily locked out of a facebook property is much
| greater than some random start up.
| nycdatasci wrote:
| If the value of a social graph with N users is ~N^2. The
| damage done by restricting access is similarly non-linear.
| arnvald wrote:
| Because of the impact their actions have on people's lives.
|
| If my local barber tells me "don't come back here ever
| again", I'll find another barber within 15min walk from my
| place.
|
| If Facebook bans me, I might lose a way to communicate with
| hundreds of people, I might lose access to managing my
| business and talk to my clients. And often there might be
| very few viable alternatives.
|
| As Facebook and other large companies become dominant in
| certain areas, their responsibility should grow, too. And
| banning users based on some algorithmic detection, without
| the ability to contact human customer support to understand
| and fix the situation, should not be acceptable.
| themitigating wrote:
| I just don't want more government regulation, we have
| enough
| d1str0 wrote:
| Were you equally against the FAA regulating the use of
| drones around airports?
| [deleted]
| smoldesu wrote:
| I've tried greenfielding this innovative technique here on HN,
| it turns out people _will_ defend the world 's largest company
| for a "magic mouse" that needs to be charged upside-down.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| We call those government utilities, and apparently, that's a
| bad thing.
| nojito wrote:
| Talk about a massive slippery slope.
| FrenchDevRemote wrote:
| isn't there a term in their ToS that says they can ban whoever
| they want? don't see why a software company should be fined for
| banning users, you should be able to ban any non paying user
| whenever you want
| pxeboot wrote:
| I agree, but they should need to tell you why they banned
| you, and offer a chance to appeal.
| tempestn wrote:
| Which they do, theoretically, but the reason is "see our
| terms" and the appeal is "yep, reviewed, still banned".
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > the reason is "see our terms
|
| So when you go to jail, do they tell you 'see the law'?
| No, they tell spesifically which law you broke.
|
| If you are willing to accept this BS, how do you know
| they are telling the truth, what if you didn't break
| their TOS and the real reason they banned you is because
| they dislike your political views?
|
| What if tomorrow they ban everyone who supports donald
| trump, or whatever.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Banning people on a global, worldwide communication network
| that has a reach of billions of users is not "I don't see why
| they can't just do it without any reason" material.
| amyjess wrote:
| It is their private property, and they have an inherent and
| fundamental right to decide who they want to allow on it.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| No, they do not. Facebook has worked hard to destroy
| competition by buying up every significant messaging
| service, which should never have been permitted.
|
| They are a monopoly that people are dependent on - it's
| not as if you can just choose not to use whatsapp. You
| cannot just move to another messaging app unless you get
| everyone on the planet to move with you.
|
| I, for example, am required to use whatsapp every day for
| my job. If I was banned from whatsapp, I would be unable
| to do my job and be immediately fired.
|
| Messaging is an essential utility now, and just like the
| other utilities in your house, it is not fair to cut
| people off from them.
|
| Whatsapp doesn't have rights, they have responsibilities,
| and they should not be allowed to ban people for no
| reason.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Facebook did not buy Discord which is currently the best
| messaging service on the market. They didn't buy slack
| either.
| zaik wrote:
| That's kind of what you get if everyone chooses to use
| walled gardens like WhatsApp or Signal.
|
| My XMPP address will keep working as long as I have control
| over my DNS records.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| You're always in someone's walled garden. Didn't someone
| get their domain seized by Cloudflare the other day?
|
| There is no technology in the world that isn't vulnerable
| to this sort of thing. The only way out is legislating
| against companies cutting you off without reason or
| recourse.
| susam wrote:
| > You're always in someone's walled garden.
|
| Indeed! One has control on their DNS records only as long
| as they are allowed to have control on their DNS records.
| That control can be taken away as it once happened in my
| case when a domain name I was using was sinkholed due to
| a false positive. Full story here:
| https://susam.net/blog/sinkholed.html
|
| Until the sinkhole incident happened, I was a firm
| believer of running my own email server with a domain
| name I have registered, so that it would not be possible
| for a large corporation to accidentally lock me out of my
| email. But now that I have seen how one's control over a
| domain name can be taken away suddenly and without
| warning, I am not so sure!
| seaman1921 wrote:
| So your solution is to fine the cr*p out of it until it becomes
| a smaller company Hard disagree - in a billion users a few
| thousands are bound to be misclassified - no ML model (or
| HUMAN) is 100% accurate
|
| I would rather the company focusses innovation on the next big
| step rather than incrementally taking care of these few long-
| tail and corner cases.
|
| Moreover, its the users who make a company big or small, if
| there are better options users would anyway migrate away - the
| comment sounds a bit entitled if I am being honest - you want a
| great product + great customer service, for free. (I don't buy
| the 'but i am giving them my personal data in return' argument)
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| Users cannot simply migrate to a competing service, the
| concept does not apply to messaging or social media, as you
| have to successfully convince everyone else on planet earth
| to move with you.
| enriquto wrote:
| > I often wish that there was a law that says (...)
|
| Do you live in a democratic country? It's up to you and your
| neighbors then!
| cal5k wrote:
| This _exact_ thing happened when I created a Facebook account so
| I could see our company 's Facebook ads. It was a brand new
| account, no activity at all, and now I can't see or manage our
| ads even though they're running.
|
| It's awful. This is why I would never, _ever_ buy a product that
| requires a Facebook account to use it ( _cough_ Oculus _cough_ ).
| yieldcrv wrote:
| yeah, if you go out of your way to break the social graph,
| facebook will ban you quickly under the excuse of "spammers
| also do this". one way around this is to send a few friend
| requests (and get them accepted) during your first signin
| session.
| donohoe wrote:
| Yeah, created a FB account for same reason (manage ads and org
| page). It is not usable anymore.
| drited wrote:
| If in the EU try a GDPR request for her personal data.
|
| I did that once when hit with a similar situation with no reason
| given for refusal of service from a faceless corporation.
|
| The request resulted in a human looking at the situation (because
| they had to in order to give me my data). They reinstated the
| service after realising a mistake had been made.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Facebook ignores the GDPR and gets away with it:
| https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/
| cvccvroomvroom wrote:
| Commercial "social" media and chat apps are allowed to do
| whatever they want without any reason or process. If people had
| any sense, they would use subscriber-funded, employee co-op,
| nonprofit services. "Free" commercial apps aren't free or
| dependable.
| tempestn wrote:
| The problem in this case is network effects. I prefer not to
| use whatsapp, but if I want to chat with people who are on
| whatsapp, that's what I need to use.
| zaik wrote:
| That's why the XMPP standard was invented: Interoperability
| even if you use a different IM provider.
|
| Unfortunately almost no one seems to care about standards
| compliance when choosing their messaging app.
| bashinator wrote:
| This is what happens when basic forms of communication are
| products instead of utilities.
| psyfi wrote:
| This, I think I might be on of few people who uses XMPP with
| his wife
| usrn wrote:
| And that's what happens when only products can trigger push
| notifications on most people's phones.
| samstave wrote:
| trollied wrote:
| What actually needs to happen is a proper federated system
| (akin to the existing telecoms system) that is regulated in the
| same way worldwide. XMPP is great. It should have ended up
| being the new SMS in my opinion, but telcos wouldn't have been
| able to make money off it, so it never happened. Enter Apple
| with imessage. The game changed somewhat. But it still left the
| Android gulf.
|
| If Apple and Google sorted things out message-wise (can't see
| this happening) we might get there, but then you're still left
| with the billions of people that have simpler phones that use
| whatsapp because that's all they can actually use (whatsapp
| became prolific because of its tiny J2ME roots on tiny cheap
| phones in 3rd world countries).
|
| I guess I was trying to point out that you need to look at the
| bigger picture. How would you police a free service with
| hundreds of millions of users without a shitload of automation?
| How would you pick the "innocent" people out very very quickly
| by using a human to review, given there are probably hundreds
| of thousands of such requests a day? It's not an easy problem.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Damn man, maybe just take a break from social media? I agree
| with the sentiment but Twitter and Reddit aren't worth this
| much anger.
| samstave wrote:
| Reddit and twitter are watersheds in this space. These
| subjects need to be discussed and not by dinosaurs who have
| been in congress before the internet even existed.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Sure, if you think platforms where elite influence and
| popular opinions are "free speech", be my guest.
|
| Really though, you'd probably change more actual minds
| (rather than just finding others who agree with your
| opinions already) on a literal soapbox.
|
| I do agree that these platforms should have (mostly) been
| regulated out of existence long before the term "cancelled"
| was popular.
| aboringusername wrote:
| If you're in the EU you have a right not to be subjected to
| automated decision making. You can visit this URL [1] and get in
| touch with their DPO - they must conduct a human review and can
| look at all of the data and either reinstate your account or
| explain why it was banned. I have used this process successfully
| to overturn automated decision making as if they refuse you can
| complain to your data authority if you have one.
|
| [1]: https://www.whatsapp.com/contact/forms/3022366361353546/
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| [flagged][dead] so I vouched for it. Hope you get some help. I
| try and keep a spare account going for times like this but it's
| not always possible or convenient.
| bowsamic wrote:
| The [flagged] [dead] epidemic on HN seems to be going crazy.
| The number of well formed opinions I've seen recently flagged
| just because they're out of the HN ideal is crazy
| United857 wrote:
| Ironic that comments are false-positive banned in a
| discussion about false-positive banning.
| slaw wrote:
| There are also comments that disapper, yet still visible at
| user's comments history.
| daedalus_f wrote:
| Interesting, I've not read about that on the various lists
| of HN undocumented features like [1], not that that means
| it does not happen. Do you have an example?
|
| [1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-
| undocumented#second...
| slaw wrote:
| See my reply to comment about Estonia.
| daedalus_f wrote:
| I can see that users comments both when I go from their
| comments list and also when I go directly to the posts
| comment section. Is there something I am missing? It
| doesn't seem to be downvoted or dead and has multiple
| replies.
| Cpoll wrote:
| Is that different than 'dead' comments (only visible if
| 'showdead: yes' in settings)?
| slaw wrote:
| These comments are not visible with showdead:yes. They
| are detached from article.
| dahart wrote:
| The difference between flagged-dead items and detached
| items is that flagging is done by the community for any
| reason, while detaching is done by moderators to fix
| specific problems. Flagging might be gamed but usually
| isn't from what I've seen, and HN actively tries to
| detect gaming. OTOH, moderation is always done manually
| and thoughtfully. (And, most importantly, there is a
| human who will listen to appeals about either.)
| swayvil wrote:
| Thay call that "shadow removal" in redditland.
|
| From the perpective of the guy who posted it, everything's
| kosher, just nobody's replying for some reason. From the
| perspective of everyone else in the forum there's no post.
|
| Ostensibly a way of managing spam while depriving the
| spammer of informative feedback. In practice a method of
| censorship with extra "screw you" on top.
| slaw wrote:
| HN censors heavily politics, economy and covid. See my
| comment about Estonia. I was shadow banned on Electrec,
| Tesla fan forum. My comments were visible when I was
| logged in, but gone when not logged.
| swayvil wrote:
| HN censors unpopular opinions too.
|
| Some of us express our disagreement with a reply by
| downvoting and flagging.
|
| HN responds to that by rendering your reply progressively
| invisible. Throttling your speech. Shadow removal. And
| shadow ban. (While avoiding responsibility for the
| censorship, if you see what I mean)
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| 'shadow banning' is just another method of avoiding
| responsebility and scrutiny, and stifling dissent. Goes
| with the times.
|
| Just like not exaplaining reasons for banning what's app
| account, makin vague TOS, keeping salaries secret, it's
| the antithesys of a fair and just society.
| jsnell wrote:
| This is not a support forum for tech companies. There is
| nothing interesting about or surprising about this event, and
| no discussion to be had on this subject that hasn't been
| already had on HN a hundred times this year. All this does is
| push some worthy content off the front-page.
|
| If anything is an epidemic, it's posts like this one. Sure,
| each of them has a small chance of being useful to a single
| individual. At the same time, it's reducing the usefulness of
| this site for tens or hundreds of thousands. And the more
| they're encouraged with upvoting and vouching, the more of
| them will be posted.
| monkey_monkey wrote:
| Actually posts like this are very useful - the more of them
| they are, the higher the chance that something will
| actually change.
|
| I'm tired of billion dollar companies that have achieved
| their scale by literally hooking us on their free services
| and have zero interest in us as real people, and then don't
| give a flying fuck if their shitty automated processes
| decide to unperson someone.
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| Is this realistically now a problem for regulators (FTC,
| FCC, etc.) or does our industry stand a chance of
| correcting itself?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I think the big mistake is in people thinking events have
| a single cause and in reality events can have dozens of
| contributory factors, most of them often invisivle
| monkey_monkey wrote:
| I think it will have to be forced on them by external
| regulators.
| bsder wrote:
| > If anything is an epidemic, it's posts like this one.
| Sure, each of them has a small chance of being useful to a
| single individual.
|
| Then, perchance, we should be using the collective will to
| name and shame companies so that the _source_ of these
| posts stops.
|
| The fact that modern companies have taken Kafka's "The
| Trial" as a playbook instead of a warning is beyond
| infuriating.
| dahart wrote:
| Fwiw, I personally like reading these threads to keep an
| eye on the negative experiences people are having with
| various cloud services. I also think this is incredibly
| relevant to HN, where the default discussion is how to
| build scalable services. The inability for these tech
| companies to provide fair human review is one of the
| critically unsolved problems in tech, and it seems to be
| getting worse.
|
| > If anything is an epidemic, it's posts like this one.
|
| That right there is a good reason to encourage it rather
| than discourage it, because it indicates a market need.
| This is exactly the forum to discuss how to address market
| needs, especially when it comes to cloud services and
| software, right? I hope, but also expect, that if posts
| like these get more popular, we will see some actual
| competition and the problem will begin to rectify itself,
| which will naturally cause these kinds of threads to
| diminish. If we suppress these conversations, it may take
| longer than if we allow it to reach public consciousness.
| tempestn wrote:
| Appreciate it. It's not the end of the world as she wasn't
| using it for anything critical; she could get a new phone
| number, but not sure it's worth the hassle of juggling two
| numbers or devices just for whatsapp, nor is it worth changing
| her phone number for everything else. So if it's not reversed
| she'll probably just live with missing out on those chats.
| pdksam wrote:
| Or maybe she can get a new number just for registering on
| whatsapp and keep the sim around if she needs to re-register.
| I don't belive I have ever had to re-register unless I
| changed devices. Although, I think that might be
| circumventing the ban and should be pretty trivial to detect
| and might get banned again.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| If you get a phone with 2 sim cards you can use one only for
| WhatsApp and the other for everything else.
|
| I was even able to use WhatsApp while abroad and my sim card
| not working for a month, it might be only needed for setting
| up WhatsApp once at the start and then swap the card.
| abofh wrote:
| You only need to be able to receive an SMS for setup - I
| ported my cell number to twilio long ago for spam
| prevention purposes, but can still use whatsapp / signal.
| sva_ wrote:
| Maybe someone needs to build flaggeddeadyc.com that has a list
| of recent posts that had a number of votes but got nuked,
| because I noticed this increasingly being a problem as well. I
| feel like on some posts the flagging is abused to block stuff
| that might otherwise be interesting to some people.
| [deleted]
| trhway wrote:
| May be the algorithm calculated that blocking just that one
| innocent account would save the Earth from a future catastrophe.
| inopinatus wrote:
| "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is a warning, not a how-to
| guide.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| > banned from __________ without reason or recourse
|
| That's the risk we all run when using services owned by others.
| The unfortunate takeaway is that you cannot trust other people.
| _vertigo wrote:
| This strikes me as unnecessarily defeatist
| Ansil849 wrote:
| > This strikes me as unnecessarily defeatist
|
| How so? I think it's just a realist view. What alternative
| would you suggest?
| jtode wrote:
| swayvil wrote:
| The fundamental problem here is that there's a guy squatting in
| the middle of the communications pipeline deciding who gets to
| talk and who doesn't.
|
| Of course that's going to go bad, for several unavoidable
| reasons.
|
| Any filtering needs to be managed at the level of me, the guy
| reading the stuff.
|
| I think this is clear. But maybe I'm wrong.
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