I'm no fan of Facebook, but I think this is pretty extreme. Other than laws barring discrimination against protected classes, nobody has a right to demand that any company provide them services.
You have a point here.
I'm running with the assumtion that most of the ban appeals that are going to end up in small claims court are from legitimate users stuck with an automated false positive. Pretty sure if a human spent 30 seconds looking at the ban, they would overrule it. The issue is getting a human to actually look at it. I doubt users brazenly breaking rules would go through the process of going to small claims court.
Looking at the thread, I see a lot of people with unusual names (for instance asians and native americans) getting banned. I wonder if this couldn't be interpreted as discriminating these people. Of course, we can only assume FB's good faith here, hence why it would not be a problem for them to produce evidence of bad behavior from the people they banned.
In this case, Facebook is the new website/storefront/phone number for a lot of small businesses as well as the default communications medium for a large chunk of the population and makes it impossible to interact with these without having an account (unlike let's say a telco or email provider which will happily receive contacts from other providers).
It's really weird that HN people think that businesses never have obligations of this kind. It's not even uncommon.
For example, the power company. The telephone company. A sole ISP with no local alternatives. A company that owns an important toll road near your house. Monopolistic social media companies. Etc.
https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/oculus-quest-2-headsets...
Frankly, it provides negative value and my life has been vastly improved since I logged off and blocked their cookies a couple of years ago.
Just because it isn't necessary for you does not mean that it's not necessary for someone else.
People don't need to "examine their life choices" just because you disagree with their needs.