Meta is banning people from advertising after running ads for Python and Pandas
lerner.co.il
lerner.co.il
It came as a surprise as it was perfectly fine by them for as long as it was a sole proprietorship. Which is why I strongly suspect the rejection came from an AI. At the time of rejection we were still using the Stripe account of the sole proprietorship, and surely a human would have noticed and blocked that account if it was actually running against Stripe ToS!?!
It doesn't make any sense to me. In any case, I know that financial regulations are stringent and payment providers are often required to leave us in the dark. But is it frustrating...
Now I'm stuck with PayPal for the time being. Unless they, too, decide that selling green tea is against their ToS.
By the way, does anyone know if it's ok to re-attempt to open an account with Stripe? Our offering has been evolving, so we might very well be within their ToS now?
EDIT: wording
Apparently Stripe has great difficulty with non-Japanese people, living in Japan, owning a company overseas.
Now that we’re 90% done with the migration to PayPal, I think we can try again…
I was very happy with Stripe all these years… but having a least two payment processors is probably safer.
I've stopped posting anything on the Facebook a few years ago and keep the account alive just to have a backup contact option with dumb corpos.
An LLC can’t be incorporated.
If you say you had an Inc when you had an LLC is a good cause of rejection.
Although in this case it’s neither an Inc. nor an LLC: it’s a 合同会社. That’s what I wrote on the form, obviously.
Simply better messaging would fix most of this.
One approach is to be upfront and say:
Our automated AI systems have decided that it probably isn't in our best interests to do business with you. We can't elaborate on why, because that would give clues to spammers to help evade our detection of them. However, if you are willing to pay us $15, we will have a human look at your case and make the decision instead. You will be able to send evidence to the human (for example evidence of legitimate sales, a registered company, etc.). The human will be able to ask for further information, but will not be able to tell you the reason for any rejection. Your $15 will not be refunded if your case is rejected. Before you do, double check that your use isn't borderline on our rules and T&C's - human review isn't an opportunity to push the boundaries of what is allowed.
then some business-school asshat will say "wait! I have the most disruptive idea! let's tweak the algo to get 10% more rejections because analytics show 5% of rejectees result in a conversion!" As he proceeds to get a bonus for momentarily boosting revenue while permanently enshittifying the product.
You'd think in 2023 we'd have figured out this whole identity thing by now. Crypto has some unique ideas, but they don't really get all the way there. Things just aren't "mandated", or ubiquitous enough.
Stripe is great, but something is going terribly wrong inside the company when it comes to customer vetting.
On an extremely fundamental level, people give you money and you give them drugs. The fact you only administer the drugs in your office doesn't change the basic premise.
I don't know your specifics, such as if the patient's money goes straight to a pharmacy to pay for the drugs which are then shipped to you for in-office administration (which would probably impossible to explain anyway). However, even if that's the case people are still giving you money (for appointments, treatment, etc.) and ending up with drugs in their body.
You'd likely have to split the medical CE conferences off from your practice and run it as a seperate entity before Stripe would be willing to take payment.
I definitely think there need to be laws made about this. Because it's really clear that the market has no power to correct this behaviour - yet it can be utterly devastating to individuals when they have life long bans put in place on what are (whether you like it or not) pretty much essential online services.
In an actual competetive environment, you would go to the next door buisness that didn't arbritrarily ban you/has actual people in their customer service...
* The Scunthorpe problem, AOL didn't let users set their hometown to Scunthorpe because of the "cunt" substring. This is a classic.
* Amazon banning sales of Guns N' Roses merch (because guns).
* People named Miranda having issues with bank transfers (because of the substring "Iran").
* Some games displaying the nickname "Nasser" as "N*er", suggesting that it is the n word.
Alexa not being able to say "pussycat" properly, which is an issue to this day.
* Parental control software that filtered on "anal" in URLs, which also affected "analysis".
* Another parental control software that removed any file with "sex" in the name. This also included "sysext". I know of a school whose entire computer room got bricked because of that bug, the IT person decided it would be a good idea to update all the computers to Windows 10 at once, without checking for software incompatibilities first.
* The British politician Dominic Cummings not being able to set up a Twitter account.
So while I couldn't find info on actually innocent topics, it had been trivial to play around with search terms to find porn that the filter couldn't catch.
So, the USA huh?
For "children" (read: under 18), schools are some of the most despotic, censorious, and anti-democratic institution we have, and we send young humans from 6-18 through this meatgrinder.
During health class, our teacher was unable to see anything about "breast cancer", even though various cancers were in the discussion topic. Didn't matter. "Breast" is a evil horrible sexualized word that we must never allow anybody ever see... Even though you're legal to consent to sex at 16 in most states, and 17 in the rest.
Even the community college had the same blocks on it as the local high school. By definition, people who attend are 18+ , and yet treated like 3rd graders.
It may not be as censored on your own connection (cell, cable, fiber, etc), but this country absolutely does heavily censor, and they censor humans when most vulnerable and under state compulsion to attend.
Before smartphones, I’ve seen someone masterbating while watching porn in the middle of a massive row of computers in the college library. People probably did worse and it’s the reason they block it.
We already have a pretty sane law on this. We do not need shitty blocking tools that way overreach their bounds.
And yes, anything that blocks "sexual content" or otherwise also blocks VPNs and Tor and I2P as well. Those "bypass tools" are default enabled on ALL blocking systems.
If you insist on searching for "kinky kids" (using quotes) you will find stuff that is closer to what the filter warns you about, still SFW though.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/may/21/kinki-univ...
Turn out it is the correct spell that triggers the warning
Clbuttic!
"medireview. Erroneous, computer-generated form of medieval."
Enlightened facepalm
Also I utterly hate all those online services that require at least 6 letters in nickname...
One of Google's autosuggested response emojis was a kiss. This has happened repeatedly over the 6 months-long conversation.
This would all be solved if the predictive text engine knew the context beyond what was recently typed. I don't think this is typically true (yet?) -- it would be interesting if all predictions were at least binned by partner vs slang1 friend vs slang2 friend vs business acquaintance et al. with structured data coming to it from the app. Bit of a privacy question I suppose.
E.g. instead of /mp3/ you write /%6dp3/.
Filed under Idle Questions About Past Events Next To Impossible To Answer Today (IQ APENTITAT?)
This actually looks like it removes "ass" and not related to n-word? Nevertheless, rather assumptious!
Edit: Oh I misread the post. The new name is even worse... That is rather hilarious and sad at the same time :/
Guy Carbagiale Fuck wasn't allowed to have his name on his jersey.
There's a lot of shitakemushrooms going on.
And the rest went the same as with you: Appeal process is done by a bot who only knows one answer: "We are right, you violated our ToS, your account is blocked, this decision is final".
Oh how I miss the times when an organization for which you potentially are making a lot of money was still willing to hire a human for customer support...
And of course in these days, where your whole business may depend on being able to advertise or sell on the small number of platforms, a bot may decide to kill my business and company at any time. It's scary.
It doesn't matter if it's "clean" and has never been in any spam/abuse blacklists. Apparently it is (wrongly) assumed that a data center IP is someone scripting/scraping, or worse. Ignoring the fact that actual humans do work and visit data centers and use their Wi-Fi.
I used to have a Facebook account ~13 years ago before their real name policy came into force, but I closed it because I found it awkward to refuse or accept so many contact requests by people from my distant past.
Now unfortunately I can't access the Facebook group that is the only source of information for important things going on in the building I live in. My wife does have access though, so it's not a big deal.
It seems the only way for me to get around Facebook's real name policy is to use a fake name. But I guess that wouldn't allow me to advertise on Facebook or use any of their developer related stuff.
- Phillip K. Dick, etc., So like a body part or cuss word, or even an ethnic slur, for instance in Papua New Guinea a hundred or so people have the surname “Wop” which might trigger an algorithm. “Fokker” is a Dutch example of this, refers to someone who was an expert in getting animals to breed—possibly some other culture has a variant like Fucker that's the same.
- The name could be identical to a celebrity, for instance a Malcolm X born to Arthur and Jenny X having nothing to do with the more famous person of that name. Then you would still say “it’s because of my surname.” Alternatively the celebrity could be notorious e.g. if your name were “Jack Hittler.”
- The James Randi Educational Foundation once dismissed an application for a prize that they administer, because the person did not appear to be using their real name. This had to be reopened when notarized copies of a court order changing the name were submitted, confirming that he had indeed changed his first name to Prophet and his surname to Yahweh. So if that guy has kids with more normal first names...
Let me go see what jobs they're hiring for...
That is a convoluted way to say you'll do business with companies that accept your business. Google is known for fully automated bans on your full account, not just the advertising part.
I haven't thought about this before, but it could explain some of the degeneration of ads over time I have been noticing.
I know that Google has all sorts of automated things in place, and that people have gotten frustrated with them in the past. That said, my friends who have been stymied by Google's automated systems have always eventually managed to find a human who could fix things. Meta doesn't seem to have any such offer for customers. And even three employees, who agreed that the situation was absurd and could vouch for me, didn't manage to reverse the decision.
ISTR I appealed, and was turned down with no recourse. There was basically nothing I could do to advertise software just for the Mac.
One solution to this problem would be a law that 1. mandates to give users the information when they are dealing with an algorithm only, and 2. forces companies to make it possible to contact humans within a specific time frame. I very much hope at least the EU will enact such a law soon.
Apart from monumental wastes of time with AI interactions for which no one is compensated, the thing that worries me most is that either AI "customer support" cannot do anything of substance anyway or the AI is given the power to make substantial changes to user settings, billing, etc. The first option means the company is bullshitting their customers, the second option can have very undesirable consequences.
Some EU countries do require this and it works a charm. However it doesnt seem to affect meta. That company, along with google and amazon and any other company that only relies on ai for customer support should fined into bankruptcy.
More specifically, it'd need to make it possible to contact humans with the authority to overturn the algorithmic decision.
There is nothing wrong with using technology to empower humans (in this case Meta employees) to be more efficient in processing information. But removing the human from the loop in matters that affect other humans (whether in small or major ways) is a disastrous direction.
Coincidentally on the frontpage of the Financial Times today: "Meta’s Yann LeCun argues against premature AI regulation".
Let AI moderation commit genocide once, shame on Facebook. Let AI moderation continue to go unregulated, and...
Then you have premium companies with premium prices, where actual humans serve you. They'll be slower but you have chance for some empathy and non-standard solutions to your problems.
Super-corporations are now just the next rung down, adopting all the habits of their superior, but without the responsibilities.
Can you imagine a big tech employee having to say to a judicial person, "The system automatically blocked the user, then automatically denied their appeal, and we have no way to know why, because there is no evidence or other supporting data because we deleted it all."
Surely any form of arbitration or legal scrutiny would turn that into an instant default judgement against the tech giant?
And while I would generally support the right of any business to choose who to do business with, there comes a point when a business becomes somewhat monopolistic, and a gatekeeper of access to the market, at which point these kinds of decisions need to have a reasonable route of appeal.
It remains to be seen if the behaviour of these companies will change in response to legislation, for example the EU Digital Markets Act has some obligations relating to "Allowing business users to access end users" that may be relevant.
It's just straight up bad product management and development. Some small group of people decided to make this the behavior and implement it.
Don't attribute to machines that which was clearly malice, ignorance, or apathy (or all of the above) by the builders.
This shouldn't be legal.
I've noticed that Meta offers much better support than Google. They have excellent tech support, at least for higher ad spend tiers. I feel like talking to a human, who seems to care. I think they assign us based on ad spend to more knowledgeable teams. From Google I've never heard a peep from a competent person.
Based on what they've told me, I have every reason to believe that no human ever reviewed my case.
So I could create a new account that's just for my business. And maybe I will. But ... what a pain, and I'm not sure the ROI is really that good.
The only people who are actually banned for life are normal well-intentioned people who get their fledgling small business destroyed and don't think they have any recourse.
It would be even more ironic if it was Python code that made the decision.
The most irritating problem: Apple forbid the use of any of their trademarks in Google advertising, for any reason whatsoever. That means you cannot make an ad like "Foobar for Mac" because it will trip their filters. Manual reviews and escalations don't help, the only solution is to get Apple to fax Google a personal permission letter granting authorized use, which is of course impossible. This absurd problem has existed for at least a decade. Presumably it's deliberate and to push people towards the app stores by preventing Mac developers from advertising their app outside of Apple controlled channels (which aren't comparable).
Windows has no such difficulties.
Is it just me, or does it seem like Facebook/Meta has always been much dumber about how to actually run a business than other big tech companies? I think they just got where they are because they filled a void with Facebook and took advantage of network effects. Nothing they've ever done has really seemed all that "good" to me overall, except little bits and pieces.
Most recently, I got forced onto their "Messenger" app, because they basically disabled the "Messenger Lite" app. This new app is MUCH larger and more bloated, has a bunch of features I don't care about, and now won't even let me log in because "waiting for network". A little searching online seems to show this is a common problem and everyone hates this app, and many more are pissed that they've been forced off the Lite app.
Don't forget the brazen theft (remember Stories and 'Suggested for You', aka Snapchat and TikTok).
Or the cozy relationship with power, or all the ad money from scammers that would be easily blocked (were there any intention to do so).
I guess all that could be called 'taking advantage of network effects', in the same way you can call torture 'enhanced interrogation' or a coup 'regime change'.
My point may be murky - I'm saying, they're not just dumb; they're immoral bullies too... I don't expect high morality from giant corporations, but I wouldn't Occam's handwave all this away as incompetence either.
Sure, they might also get the odd bit of bad publicity somewhere like HN, but I imagine that most people here already have plenty of reasons to dislike them.
Yeah, I've made this point before, just today in fact about a Netflix discussion (and I like to bring it up with Microsoft too when people complain about Windows...), and agree: it seems like these companies can get away with some horrifically stupid and customer-hostile behavior while remaining very profitable and dominant. Of course, unlike Netflix, Facebook isn't primarily funded by its users, but rather by advertisers (who are other businesses, not consumers), so I'm not sure if that's better or worse here; it might be worse for Meta. I guess time will tell: bad publicity like this isn't going to help them.
>but I imagine that most people here already have plenty of reasons to dislike them.
True, but again, most people here aren't customers of Facebook, they're just users.
No, instead, they're the product.
Shooting them self in the foot implies instant effect. A better idiom would probably be something like "they are cutting the branch they are sitting on".
Messenger stopped working. I wasn't able to log in on Messenger (it just kept cycling around the same 3 login pages). I had to reinstall Facebook to get it working.
So, either:
1. Facebook developers are so shit at their job that they can't build and test a simple login page that works.
or
2. Facebook uses dark UI patterns to keep people using its products even when they explicitly don't want to.
Obviously it's 2. But what a dystopian nightmare. Facebook devs, how do you sleep at night?
I seriously wonder what the Messenger app is doing. It's far larger than Messenger Lite was (way more than double), yet it's essentially the same thing: a chat app with video and voice chat. The full-blown app also adds Dark Mode (the only improvement I've found), and some silly sticker crap. So WTF else is going on in that app to need all that storage space?
Meta and Google are exiting "detailed ad targeting"? How so?
You can see this in the ad products they are both pushing: Advantage+ on the Meta side and PerformanceMax at Google. Marketers ability to target with these ad products is severely curtailed. They are opaque black boxes at best.
I ended up finding a random Facebook corporate email address online and I just kept spamming it in hopes that a human would actually read it and do something about it. To my surprise, it actually worked.
Ended up making a facebook business page and running an ad to get access to FB business support. They were the ones who finally helped me get unbanned. My FB business did get permanently banned, but I only cared about the instagram account anyway :)
A COMPUTER
CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE
THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER
MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION
Also, banning somebody and not keeping the relevant evidence, not showing the evidence to the client so that they can archive the case themselves to appeal in court? You don't have any anti-discrimination laws to prevent sellers choose their customers on subjective basis?
Because at this point Facebook cannot prove that the people violated the ToS and thus Facebook is restricting the services it offers to then.
US businesses can choose to not do business with whomever they want as long as they aren't a protected class. Besides that point, what damages could you sue over?
Usual methods for getting around this is creating business accounts via relatives, giving yourself admin rights and using that. Some have success with fake profiles.
That doesn't guarantee against banning of the new accounts, you just move on to new ones.
Because ROI is so damn good on these platforms, people put up with all kinds of BS to use them.
I'm convinced you'll be better off advertising elsewhere anyway, Facebook is a big advertising platform for sure, but are your coding students there? Maybe. I think they're here and on YouTube. :-)
[1] - When I say this, I don't mean thumbnails with you looking shocked in them and the title being "You won't believe how many Python people don't know this!" or similar.... I know it's a fine line to walk, but you're also better than that!!!
I've already seen a huge increase in YouTube subscribers since I started to make some changes, and I'm hoping that things will get even better over time.
I appreciate the feedback and comments, and am delighted to hear that you're learning from my newsletters.
I don't think we can blame this on all AI customer management/support, either. Google Ads assigned us an account manager for the first 90 days, we've upped our spend because they gave us good guidance and we saw conversions.
The irony that Meta remains a cesspit for fake news.
Facebook/Meta don’t accept messages from people banned for life. The NSW small business ombudsman won’t touch the case because they only will resolve cases with companies that have Australian contact details.
My history on Facebook is pretty boring. Family photos and news about my advocacy for blind and low vision people and the occasional work post. Pretty mundane stuff.
This article is useful because I thought I was the only one.
I’m not sure about my next steps. I am probably required to notify the uni but I also don’t want to create trouble for them.
Write to your minister of parliament.
The net is closing in a bit too obviously and this 'there's nothing you can do, government will obey tech' narrative isn't going to survive. That's a narrative, it isn't reality. Don't let it become reality. It's only tech. If you pulled all the plugs and went back to usenet and 486s the world would still turn.
My Facebook account was the admin on a page for a business that we had for 10 years.
At some point in the last year, FB apparently flagged my advertising account and seeked request. I didn't respond in time, and that account is now permenantly banned from advertising with no way to request a review lol..
Whatever! I figured the universe was telling me that the good old days of advertising to real people on FB were gone.
I did however want to start gathering insights on potential audiences with the Meta pixel; so I just simply created a new Facebook account, and then a new page with 0 advetising history.
That seemed to work, and haven't had any issues.. Old account is still flagged; and I just have to flip between my accounts when I actually use FB.
> That’s right: I teach courses in Python and Pandas
Hah I suspected that was going to be the punchline, but waited for confirmation
It is believable. What is not so much is that they did a review with real people
One of the most hilarious cases came up with southern-italian style braised fennels, whose internal machine-translation naming by meta was not exactly LGBTQ friendly.
As I said in a previous post, most of these cases were usually resolved trough the legal department of the agency, It was considered basically a requirement of being in the ad business.
Total lack of accountability.
Guess I'm never buying anything from Ebay.
They are probably banning most smaller advertisers and sticking with the largest ones.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/30/childprotection.s...
And now we have machines doing the same.
Read my post here that goes into detail about it:
First they wouldn't let us add credit cards or normal accounts, just Paypal.. okay
Then (after many support calls and cases always by different agents of course) they activated our credit card. One payment got through then no more. Meanwhile on Meta side the "unpaid balance" is rising because they won't charge the card (support didn't help, mixed us up twice and invited us to a video call that was booked by someone else already)
Total madness. They just won't let us pay them
After a week or so Facebook suddenly banned all my ads about cotton masks my grandmum has sewn. I tried to publish one ad again and since then have been banned forever.
No way to contact, no way to ask why. No warning and no rule changes at this point.
These software giants never take a responsibility of wrongful automated result for decades but we keep using it.
Meta doesn't have an incentive to fix this case. It costs them manual labor of many manhours that outweigh the ad revenue from this person.
It probably keep this way.
A lot of the times when you actually dig into this stuff, the person banned did break a perfectly reasonable rule.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
Another annoying things is the use of affiliate links to online marketplace (Lazada is a notable example; sometimes it can lead to a more sinister destination, such as malware-dropping site) masquerading as a link to news site, which was often spammed in a comment below the news post. They even typed in my language even though the account appears to be based in Indonesia or the Philippines. I have heard numerous people reporting this, but so far the situation isn't improving at all (and can even get worse)
I'm not defending Meta and I agree that AI shouldn't used to review appeals, but the title is clearly a clickbait. Based on the article, they banned you because AI thought you're trading live animals not because you're teaching Python.
So I'm curious to see the original title and ad image.
Same lack of proper review prevents people from restoring hacked accounts, even in cases where it is completely obvious that the accounts were hacked. E.g. The name and/or e-mail was changed by a user in a different country than the account owner.
If Facebook has access to such sophisticated AI, then it is quite amazing that they cannot deduce (even without AI) that an account was hacked. A set of if statements in their code should be enough to check for typical suspicious circumstances. E.g. The user is suddenly in a different country, and happen to change their name (highly unusual and very suspicious circumstances)!!
I am not defending Facebook here but come on. There is at least some nuance you should acknowledge
These big companies don't care much about small users and can be quite nasty in their language. They have no interest to make the process fair because they have all the power.
You have to take a picture of yourself yes a selfie (yuck) and send it to Instagram. The funny thing is I have no selfies on Instagram so what are they using or comparing my selfie to? I was unblocked and that was that no idea what happened.
A graph database that is more you to them than you are you to them. You know meta things.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-murder-and-the-m...
The incentives are just stacked towards not having policies.
First once you have a policy, that policy can be criticised. Nothing withstands criticism these days. Politics also lost its explicit policy statements for the same reason.
If one politician has a policy plan, his opponent's "policy" will be a critique of his plan and that gives the opponent an edge.
Second, once e have a policy, you need to implement it. FB is better resourced than all the others, but none of these "policies" are even designed to be implemented broadly.
Vagueness just serves, and if you aren't vague you will regret it.
If you are clear, there will be a ton of criticism of your clear policy. Then there will be criticism of your imperfect implementation.
If you're vague and concommital, you can half implement a half baked plan plan and change or drop it when you want.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/facebooks-name-policy-...
This is a product failure, an engineering failure, a research failure, etc. etc. I don't mean to pick on just this one exampl as there are instances in all of big tech [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
if you're an agency or if you're large enough to have an account manager, things go smoothly
if you have facebook / insta cred and try to build a following on top, you're probably also okay
but if you get on there to build a business from scratch, and don't have the budget or creative team, it doesn't work for you. I tried last year, learned some tricks, but ultimately came away with 'this isn't what my business needs right now'
With many smaller companies in a competitive environment, some would be forced to provide a good customer experience to differentiate their service. Theoretically, at least.
(Note the advertisers are the customers, not the users.)
I think that's straightforward enough.
In other words, the problem is that suddenly a machine is not only making laws but also executing them. But we as a society did not agree to hand our laws to the machine. Luckily, the area where these laws apply, is very narrow atm - it is only the fb space. But the tendency seems alarming.
A human wouldn't have had anything to review no wonder they got rid of him.
Everyone who has ever had feelings with me should be able to leave feedback on me, and I should be able to leave feedback on everyone I ever dealt with.
It should be illegal to share a calculated score for money. Instead, a scripting interface similar to Excel formulas should allow us all to write out own metrics for who is a good guy and who is a bad guy.
They do still send me ToS updates by email though like it somehow matters and that I'm somehow bound to it.
I noticed this when an email that was routed through smtp123.essex.hp.com or something similar never arrived to my mailbox.
I'll never touch advertising again. It seems to be designed for start ups with VC money to burn and not small business.
The review loop should at least have gone to a person. It’s hard to assume both review loops missed something like that.
I have never put ads on FB - I would assume that there is at least a tagging, or topic orientation for ads (Education, Coding, CS, IT, for example).
The fact that the full ban came so quickly after the appeal is also very strange.
You need someone there to submit an oops for you.
If you check the sender they just created the account, and the link looks like Facebook.
I get this within a couple of hours after my first advertisement on a new page. This is probably phishing, and I guess it was not Facebook contacting you in the first place.
But the good news is you'll never advertise again on Meta and you can inspire others to do the same. These giants have too much power and since the justice system that should break them up is corrupt or not willing to do the job, it is up the users to do it.
When I started there, the mere act of visiting the 2FA page caused an irreversible hellban... not once, not twice, but 3x. Each page on Facebook is really a Hack controller with many layers of abstraction and various byzantine messes behind them.
What a joke.
No one has cracked proper reasoning AI based like human commonsense. Human commonsense is legit really hard.
Does Python run into this as well?
Do Facebook ads for technical content work. If you have successfully done this, I would love to chat.
(We're friends who both happen to be Python and Pandas trainers.)
Meta, whatever this "technology" may be, you did not use it correctly.
Meta staff have been hijacking Facebook, Insta accounts (and few dozen have been fired for doing so). It would be not surprising if some working for Meta, or their spouse or friend, is doing what you are doing and they are cutting your legs.
Check for friends who compete and work with Meta.
That is, look at the benefit/risk. If someone does this and is caught, they could lose their job.
The instigator must assume reuven wasn't going to notice this change within 180 days, and assume reuven doesn't have another contact at Meta who can figure things out.
This only works because reuven does little advertising on Meta, but that means there isn't much benefit to the instigator.
Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
On the other hand I think you don't get how common what I describe. People do this and get fired if found out, but rarely do. Meta fired only people who took bribes before doing nasty. If you mess with nobody users for personal gain, its seemingly non-issue for them.
Seems they are busy creating filters & banning accounts, just not the right ones.
What do people do who don't have friends at Meta?
A lot of these services seem so Integrated into living stopping people from using them seems like taking a rights away from people.
Especially with digital laws being added in CA wouldn't be surprised if we as citizens get to control the digital oligarchs within the next 20 years.
How much quicker would this be resolved if the first AI said, "your account has been blocked because we detected an advert related to live animals" to which you could appeal with your one sentence reason, "these are not animals, they are programming languages with the same names as animals" which would take a very cursory check and continue to bring in advertising revenue.
I think like another poster it is probably true that if you were spending a lot, you would have been given more time to argue your case. For someone who brings in $10 a month, it's not worth their time.
(Re-post of <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27378230>)
Against all natural justice - in the name of national security.
Usually any entity dealing with the web don't want to reveal how their spam detector works because doing so could in turn reveal information on how to circumvent it[0].
The issue is that Meta thinks they're large enough that they can apply this to every single one of their business customers and all other parts of their policy as well - normally a company will be inclined to keep the businesses it's partnered with happy because losing their business can have a knock-on effect that could result in a bigger knock-on effect.
The sad thing is that Meta is probably correct in this assessment - losing one business wouldn't hurt them, regardless of spending. Even if you put a few thousand a month on the line, it's not worth for them to consider you. Heck even if you tell your friends about it - Meta doesn't give a shit.
The true Kafka-esque nightmare here though is that even just knowing someone at the company is apparently not even enough to get it properly checked out and fixed (even corporations like Google who have similar black box policies to most users have the means to do that). It seems Facebook runs on "computer says no" logic when it comes to cases they don't have data on anymore. That is truly disgusting.
[0]: This in part because most spam detection is ultimately still just checking heuristics; revealing the heuristic simply reveals what stat to adjust for. There's very few "sophisticated" detection methods - even the big email providers still just rely on heuristics combined with an internal trust score that they gain by checking how users respond to email.
Which is why it seems really strange that this was a lifetime ban, and so quickly at that.
Maybe it didnt even get to human review?
Welcome to the world of automation.
A genuine business will be willing to put down some information and a cash payment for a review; spammers won’t have the time or resources.
You run the risk of a perverse incentive to trigger it for revenue but make the fee refundable or something.
Besides, I think for modern society, paying $1 rather than presenting your government ID is an easier ask.
There's a few easy checks to prevent perverse incentives:
1. promise (yeah, an impossible task already) a human will review your appeal
2. if the strike was a false positive, refund that appeal cost.
Genuine business wouldn't mind paying their $970 bill by first paying $1 and then paying $969.
I saw a sign last year for forestry service work happening locally to me. Apparently they're only going to provide safety announcements on Facebook.
Shit like that grinds my gears.
Meta's users aren't citizens, they're serfs. :(
Things.
The privileges vs obligations of serfdom would be unpleasant by our standards, but it wasn’t slavery.
There probably are (and should be) laws or regulations forbidding that, especially because "safety".
OTOH, from the PoV of the lower-level Forestry Service people who decided to do that - I'd guess they're stuck in a miserably understaffed and low-budget bit of a pretty dysfunctional government, and doing traditional safety announcements would cost them 100X the time and headaches of "just put it on Facebook".
Sadly, this is something that needs reliable, local news coverage. Doesn't much matter if that's a "for profit" newspaper magically transported from the Good Old Days of local journalism...or ongoing, ~thankless work in the trenches by a person or few with the skills to set up and run some flavor of local news web site (which could be very niche - say, forestry service stuff, parks & rec news, road closures & construction, etc.).
While I understand, what's the alternative you propose? I have seen HN threads ridiculing some govt website for being outdated or not fixing the latest vulnerability or not using the latest version etc. Or if they do allocate a bigger chunk of their budget for tech and there will be unreasonable HN threads about how one user feels he/she could build it over a weekend and question the budgets. Worst yet, I have seen numerous HN threads talking about big ad tech (which most big tech are), claiming their services are totally non essential and a waste of time, and how their life improved since they stopped using these services. This comment goes as far as to call all the users as serfs totally ignoring that many real people and their real use cases :(
I feel its used because it's free and it simply works for most people. I feel the status quo is there because of the lack of a better one. You simply cannot make everyone happy on HN, let alone all people.
Simple: Strike the word "only". It's not that hard to post to several sites and also your own. I'd like some RSS on the main site too. It's not that hard for an individual and it's even easier for an organization with thousands of employees.
I'd prefer the government to host its own data.
I'd also like any site hosting public information to be compelled to serve that information to everyone.
Facebook may not know they're being used like this, and it would be fine for them to object, but if they do want to carry government alerts they should be open to non-users without tracking or shadow profiling.
So? Public institutions are free to run "outdated" web sites and ignore random people ridiculing them on HN. "We're on a budget, stop whining" is a perfectly valid response, if a such behavior even warrants a response.
And people are free to ignore them and rely on trillion dollar corporations.
I understand your point, but the main point here isn't internet elitism. It's how you justify hosting servers for stuff no one is already visiting. "Not relying on Meta" is an equally HN take.
these organizations can barely update those sites sometimes. what hopes are there in maintaining and posting on their own blog?
The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.
But there's the usual "explicit consent" caveat, which Meta will argue they have because the user (as in: habitual consumer of harmful substances) has agreed to it in their TOS.
But then there is also a transparency requirement on automated decision making (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-15-gdpr/):
[data subject has access to] the existence of automated decision-making [and] meaningful information about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of such processing for the data subject.
This explicitly says that the user has the right to know what logic is employed by automated decision making systems.
Data rights enforcement is nascent/emerging but certainly a space to watch.
Of course, that's only in Europe and it's not a very easy law to avail of, sadly.
And then you get banned for life
Mind-boggling!
Yes, "the document", without telling which document. When calling the support, they first said that it must be indicated, no kidding. And then they said that it was not possible (despite getting screenshots).
It is sometimes a matter of having the wrong attribute set somewhere in a database and welcome to hell.
Being a bit stubborn, he still kept the message and just applied rot13 to it.
Until I read that the law in my country explictely forbids "deceiving" the police...
Still, actual terror group would do it the same way intelligence agencies call their division 'room 10' as a code for something else. As a species, we certainly are a little weird.
You might see dumb things because banks will do anything they can think of to ensure they comply, and enough in the eyes of the regulator is that they don't allow banned transactions.
Yes, you're meant to do KYC checks, but also be on the look out for things that your non-sanctioned customers might be doing (post KYC checks) that involves interacting with Sanctioned entities.
Hence lots of pattern matching on names of sanctioned countries/organisations/people.
What would have happened if your acquaintance was from Middle-East or Middle-East looking? Probably the story would not have ended so happily or at least not so fast.
Anyway, it's utterly bizarre to me that banks can get a license to run their business with what seems only a marketing and it-team with virtually no recourse for the customer, it was a WTF moment for me and I hope to never get in such a dystopian situation for something I really rely on, be it banking or (utility) services. (and I got a slightly better understanding how it must feel like for the victims of the Dutch childcare benefits scandal (https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-scandal-serves-as-a-wa...))
I’ve been trying to get an Instagram account deleted for the better part of a year, and even with quintuple (!) ID verification and threatening to bring an GDPR case to bear, all I get is what amounts to “computer says no”, in such a talking-in-circles kind of way I am not sure I am talking to a human.
In case that leads nowhere, you should raise a complaint with you local data protection agency, for example https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/
I’ve been trying to escalate it to a manager, because I feel once the Irish data authority gets involved it will be handed off to legal.
Because killing your own account can be easily done by posting objectionable content.
honestly spam is the easiest and safest way to get banned. easy to automate as well. doubly efficient if you scrape the site to power your bot.
that's ideal if they are ignoring GDPR protocol, right? it'll make for glacial progress, but you did say you've been at this for a year as is.
It is that somebody might contact me in 10 years, and at that point I'll have no idea about the context or how to "defend myself" because I won't know what they're talking about.
Maybe it's far fetched, I don't know, but it's a possibility. An interesting thought exercise if nothing else.
Sometimes people cannot bear to see the phenomena in real life even if it is very clear for many people. Life is complex, so there are always many opportunities for weave a narrative to explain away phenomena that you cannot bear to see.
And I should note, compared to some countries, things were relatively soft on our case.
One of the problems is if you make a specific policy available and for whatever reason you can be shown not to follow that policy (like say you’re being an intelligent human being and exercising discretion) and someone is harmed they can potentially have a cause of action. So lawyers will often bias towards making the process as opaque as possible as a defence against litigation. Someone can’t claim to have been harmed by relying on a policy that says you will take a particular action if you never commit to doing that.
It’s one of the ways a culture of civil litigation makes things worse for people by creating perverse incentives.
Secondly you can see from the whole SEO industry that people will actively try to game and evade any system you put in place and by making things crystal clear you are giving much clearer guidelines to people who are trying to do that.
None of which is intended to let Facebook off the hook. There are better ways of doing this that don’t involve banning people for life without explaining (clearly) but I at least do understand how we got to this ridiculous state of affairs.
The conclusion people should draw from this is that companies as big as Facebook should not be allowed to exist. They can get away with this because they have too much leverage in the vendor-client power balance.
how would you solve that? A big problem is that the primary product isn't in and of itself that profitable. So it's hard to encourage competition there. And if you can't ask for money from the consumer you resort to ads.
Even a relatively tiny company can have a huge impact on your life. Say you're interested in a niche hobby, so niche there's only one company who organises meet-ups and events around that hobby. The best friend of the chairman runs the main online forum for that hobby.
If you have a falling-out with either of those people, or their friends - you're going to lose all the social aspects of your hobby, and they're probably going to slander you to everyone they know. And people will repeat the lies, assuming that the chairman of the major event of the niche hobby wouldn't lie... and on and on.
The people who seek these roles absolutely love this, though homeowners' associations are probably the more familiar example of the same power structures.
If it's that niche that no one else forms groups around it, that sounds like an issue in and of itself.
>If you have a falling-out with either of those people, or their friends - you're going to lose all the social aspects of your hobby, and they're probably going to slander you to everyone they know.
sounds like your average small town experience. People can be cruel, they don't need a company to enable that.
further, there was a principle of roman law that forbids this... then again the USA is not following those principles (civil law) but common law which means you can disregard what I say
you seem like you haven't actually read the referenced book, but only heard about it
At that point the company serves a vital public function, and its rules and actions bleed into public governance.
Which is a great argument for limiting the scope and size of companies that interface directly with the public.
maybe you should be holding them to a different set of standards
"[..] the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader."
Today I searched[1] for 'Kafka' on Google before I made the comment above and I got 'Apache Kafka' first and I'm still surprised. I never learn;-)
[1] I was tempted to write 'altavistad', but it's such a clunky word, no wonder Altavista lost.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Maybe I can bing it in Hotbot.
Even if you turn off all tracking and use a private window, there are ways. In my case, the combination of a Polish IP address, Safari on Mac OS and English as the browser language is enough to profile me as "tech-savvy, probably interested in science and edutainment, not in funny cute cat videos, Polish politics and sports." The Youtube home feed is a testament to this. If I change my location to the UK (with a VPN), that feed suddenly becomes a lot more generic.
Your average DDG user is somewhat privacy conscious, so they probably know much more about tech tan your average Google user, and are a lot more likely to be a programmer than anybody studying literature.
If you base your algorithm purely on what results get clicks (but not on who clicks them), you essentially target your average user.
I don't remember whether DDG does anything to the scores it gets from Bing. They might, but then - taking into account how particular its users are... - the poor Franz K. would be on the third page, far behind even a Kafka library for Franz Lisp. (No, that's not a thing. A shame, I know.)
I do everything in my power that it doesn't, but your point still stands.
My somewhat creepy story about this is that at some point I got lots of COPD related search results and ads and I didn't even know what this is at the time. After a few weeks my neighbors wife died from it.
I can only assume that my neighbors and other people in the house searched for it a lot in these weeks and Google thought I must be interested in this topic too.
That's how you tell companies who care about their users and those don't.
(Not saying Steam never did shady stuff)
They seem very opaque on rules broken whenever you submit VN's. Which is odd given the... variety of VN steam offers. You can have stuff rated by the ESRB rejected, you can have sequels to games that are still being sold on Steam rejected. some SFW VN's are also rejected, so it's not as simple as sexual content not being allowed.
Then you go on the page and are recommended "Sex with Furry Hitler 3" and can't help but wonder if you simply got the wrong reviewer.
Right now they do this to avoid legal issues but as a citizen, I want them to be legally responsible.
No room for arguments = no time needed for a human to interact.
For a while now, it's become pretty common knowledge that the big tech companies do not want anything involving people, because people don't scale. This is also why they invest so much in "AI" tooling, so there's even less people needed.
Oh unless I provide my phone number. Then they’ll unban me and I can continue presumably breaking the terms of service.
- Copy of unspecified ID or driver's license
- High resolution copy of national ID, front and back
- Copy of birth certificate
- 3D video of face
That sounds like an accessibility issue, if they're American it could be an ADA violation.
So I created a new account, but I assume found out that despite posting pretty benign comments they were uncontroversial, that account got shadow banned. I'm not sure what mechanism i triggered.
So now I created another new account which seems to be functional for the moment. I think the lesson I should be taking away from this is that almost all of Reddit is absolute garbage, and I should only be going there for niche hobbies and professional support forums. Let the rest of that God forsaken site burn.
Anyway, I thought this was relevant because of the fact they didn't inform me of my sin before banning me.
They want sheep. Only sheep.
1. With zero notification or reason, you are shadow-banned, and every post/comment you ever made vanishes from public view.
2. You use the "Appeals" page, and get a canned apology that it was a mistake withtheira spam-filter, and a message claiming your account has been restored.
3. Except they lied. You're still blocked, and now the Appeals page stops working because it falsely claims your account is already in good-standing!
4. All your messages through unofficial channels (modmail) are also blocked/filtered-to-uselessness so that you can't reach out to anybody.
5. If you load up another established account, like a job-search throwaway from 5 years ago... the exact shame shitty sequence of events kills it too.
Well that's your problem right there. That type of spam boosts a number of activity and usage KPIs and increases engagement.
Reddit has even been caught using bots to artificially build out new subreddits by Google translating and reposting existing content from other subreddits to give the illusion of popularity in order to bootstrap new subs.
Why would they want to cut down on any of that when it would affect their bottom line?
yeah that was one of the last straws for me. When you get banned instead of the spam or harassment you report, you know the site no longer cares about real people. I don't bother browsing with an account anymore. just quick checks on some niche communities I have yet to replace.
Sucks I can't hide posts, but I can still ignore annoying users or subs with RES. So I get most of the benefit.
If this is true, that is insanely embarrassing for a company that purports to be a sophisticated programmatic advertising platform.
Also it can be difficult to reliably distinguish between an individual passing on a pet, a properly licensed breeder selling animals, and a bad actor doing the same (selling exotic animals, being an unlicensed breeder in jurisdictions where this is not permitted (generally or for particular animals), etc.). For this reason many advertising companies simply have a blanket ban on advertising any animal trading. Being more selective potentially leaves them open to legal issues if the selection process makes a bad decision and lets something illegal through, and that risk is not worth taking in order to allow (and therefore take a cut from) the more legitimate trade.
That's not to defend Facebook's approach to ad management whatsoever. I definitely agree that it is far too blunt a tool for the problem.
Pretending the problem doesn't exist, however, because one example is unlikely is just intellectually dishonest.
A post will be like "Meet Billy, he's been here at the shelter for 2 years," get a few sympathy comments and be followed up with a "look, we have puppies for sale!"
That's the only explanation I have.
Trade in animals is covered by a number of laws¹ intended to protect them, and fb has a blanket ban on advertising trading animals. This is a perfectly logical thing to declare wrong.
What has happened here, most likely, is that a right thing (selling courses about Python and Pandas, the technical things of that name not the animals) has been misidentified as that wrong thing, by an automated system that doesn't understand that two concepts can have the same names, with no practical way for the affected advertiser to appeal or even query the automated decision.
Basically this is a variant of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem.
--
[1] Morals too, of course, but companies like FB work based on laws/regulations² rather than based on what is considered [im]moral.
[2] or based on working around laws/regulations!
"Master Python and Pandas, make them work for you, attack new challanges, earn good money"
"If you find yourself fighting with Python and Pandas, I'll help you improve your technique"?
"Using Python and Pandas in the wild"?
"10 unexpected uses for Python and Pandas in the food and apparel industries"?
"Breaking all the rules for Python imports"?
"How to replace your whole ecosystem with just Python and Pandas"?
"Put Python to work on the family farm"?
There's a book called "Using Python and Pandas in the wild". What do you think it's about?
"Using Python and Pandas in the wild" likely refers to the application of the Python programming language and the Pandas library in real-world scenarios or practical use cases.
Prompt:
> The newly-released book "Using Python and Pandas in the wild" discusses
Response:
> the application of Python and Pandas for data analysis, cleaning, and transformation. It focuses on the fundamentals of Pandas, how to use it to explore and manipulate data, and offer guidance for more advanced topics, such as building data visualizations and machine learning models. Readers will also get an overview of the best practices for working with time-series data, unsupervised learning, and natural language processing. The book is designed to be a comprehensive resource for anyone who wants to learn how to use Python and Pandas for data analysis.
I got some very strange looks when buying one particular book back in the days when physical books were the norm. It was only after I got home that I realised a book called “Python Cookbook” gives an entirely different impression to non-programmers.
(Censored because I'm at work and I'm afraid of my VPN.)
I wouldn’t be surprised if you could sell endangered animals if you called them P4ndas.
> This review found inauthentic behavior or violations of our Advertising Policies or Community Guidelines
There could be thousands of other things.
Sounds like speculation to me. Anything to back that up?
1. The problem is that there is a staggering amount of “things” that can be either sold on Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp or advertised for (it’s the same service): every film on Netflix, every item for sale on Etsy, eBay, Amazon, every game on a random retro console platform, etc. There are hundreds of billions of things. Some are duplicates (humanity barely makes that many things), but not many are on the same platform anyway. The real problem is that there are even more updates: trillions. When I was there, most large partners updated all their items daily because the API didn’t let them match items dynamically easily enough, and they believed updates granted them some magical recommendation properties. All those updates have to go through a staggering amount of processes, one by one: unauthorized items, spam filters, enlarging photos, transformers to figure out what it is so it can be advertised to the right audience, etc. Why not just item creation? Because it’s all too easy to upload a valid description and then update it to sell unicorn meat. There are miracles done to figure out which items are new and which are neutral changes (like price or inventory updates) or no changes at all. Still, those aren’t nearly as effective as offering the right tools to the bigger partners (like helping them figure out which items were actually updated on their side, before sending them through an expensive, convoluted pipeline on our end). That was my recommendation, which got lost in internal politics. But at the moment, whatever “trivial“ process you recommend, you genuinely have to add 12 zeros to its computational cost.
2. Assuming you resolve internal politics, prioritize sending new products (and genuine product updates) separately from inventory, and only receive billions of materially new descriptions every day, the company has the skill and resources to run proper filters and separate a course on Python with an illegal snake trade — but why? More than any other company, Meta demands a business case for everything, and being nice to 0.000_001% of their partners isn’t a good case. Again, I’m not exaggerating: the entire economy of several large countries goes through WhatsApp. Groceries, Restaurant supplies, Job offers, Prescription drugs, Taxi services, Spare garage parts, Police uniforms, Wedding planning, Army weapon procurement contracts, there is everything going through there. Reuven is a great teacher, but his classes are a speck in that world. “All digital goods not sold by the top 15 platforms” is a tiny sliver of a slice of that pie. So you have to figure out how many second-hand VHS resellers got kicked out for offering a lightly used copy of _The Hounds of Baskerville_ but also how many bakers making custom cakes have heard of someone getting kicked and didn’t even try advertising… With barely any trace on Meta for many of those and several orders of magnitude more actual spammers and people creating accounts by the dozen genuinely trying to sell endangered species. “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” gets weirdly negative when you have all the juice in the world already.
3. On top of that, your business case has to be worth the time for several of the best teams (read: expensive) at Meta: computer vision, spam detection, parsing the largest database Meta has, etc. More importantly, their filter has to offer an absolute guarantee that not a single pangolin can be advertised or sold on any of the services: the company breathes by the strongly held belief that any compromising screenshot will end up on the front page of the NYTimes for a month (because it absolutely will). Some YouTuber selling powdered sugar as “coke” as a prank for views? He has to be banned before he can fake a screenshot. Any less, and the PR team will have headaches.
Bonus: Among the things that Meta has learned they can’t rely on through similar crises is Unicode. There’s a big scandal that (among other failures in management) hinged on a bag-things-detector failing because one language has an alphabet that wasn’t compatible with Unicode, so the bag-things-detector failed silently. Can you build a system able to detect euphemisms similar to ‘oregano :wink: :wink:’ in Hokkien, or Gondi? That shouldn’t prevent Meta from having a system that recognizes English, Spanish, Hindi, French, Mandarin, etc., and works for 95% of the items, but you can never know if you might be missing something.
A heavy-handed system, full or blatant false positive scales better, doesn’t cost that much, and is cheaper to operate, with less risk of freak actual positive.
Messenger is bigger, but hardly one writes anything long enough to be suspicious. WhatsApp isn’t moderated the same way.
Anecdotally, that's the only account I've read of this kind of error.
Not defending Facebook, they ought to deploy humans in the loop.
But saying the tech is embarrassing misses how machine learning works. It will always make mistakes, and the kind of mistakes that seem silly from a human perspective.
That's because, well, these systems aren't human.
I worked on the team that dealt with that, and you pretty much can’t mention exotic animals by name if you sell books, movies, fan art, etc.
it's still anecdotal, but the author did mention that they went to FB/LinkedIn and they got a pretty swift answer. If nothing else, it sounds like it wasn't a unique case (or the author has a very tight knit group of tech isntructors).
If this kind of error was systematic, no one would be able to run these ads. We'd have certainly already seen a public outcry about it.
That doesn't seem to be the case, here (yet)?..
With that said, it's not impossible for this to be a systematic issue considering (theoretically, I don't have formal evidence)
1. Facebook may not be the best place to reach out to the tech community
2. There may simply be too many positives (so, actual exotic animal trading) for it to be worth fixing the few false positives. And the author lacked the financial worth to properly fix the issue.
3. At the end of the day, the issue was not resolved. Leaving the potential next victim wanting to talk about Python laying in wake.
I subscribe to #2 personally.
I don’t really care how good Meta is on the open source side of things. They’re still a horrible company when it comes to literally everything else.
Pretty weird how they delete the evidence after 180 days, but apparently the automatic review is still able to pass final judgement after that window closes.
You're right of course. Axiomatically there is always "something to be done".
But corporate technology brings out laziness, contempt for others, a lack of self-respect and a blindness to ethics.
It seems we don't understand why yet. Despite a great start in social tech critique in the 1960s from people like Ellul, Postman and Mumford, it remains a frontier of psychology and computer science where almost nobody dares to tread.
Maybe a sincere and sustained research programme would turn-up that most of the systems we build today are psychologically and socially harmful to us.
Perhaps this mirrors the way it took us half a century to see how fossil fuels and unbounded growth were invisibly destroying our ecological foundations, only this time we are destroying the capital of social bonds, mutuality and care, long term planning and so much more.
It is ironic then, that these engines of societal decay like Meta started out life being called "social networks".
What? Google has humans? Where?
It definitely sounds like something has gone wrong, but OP is jumping to conclusions on pretty thin evidence. I'm also conscious we're only hearing one side of a story here. How many people have come to HN to complain about being banned from Stripe only for it to turn out they were running an illegal crypto casino or whatever.
How many people have come here, complaining that they’ve been banned from Stripe or blocked by Cloudflare, when it turns out they should not have.
We’ve seen folks from Stripe and Cloudflare on HN, effectively saying “reach out, let’s look in to this.” I expect Meta has many more employees than Stripe and Cloudflare.
I think if someone complains about a problem, the other sides are justified in responding, and should.
Facebook ignored my HN rant, my GDPR requests, any emails and the 'please check if the ban was right' button was solved in less than a minute without answer and disappeared forever.
Facebook doesn't care
Even people who worked there through Oops barely could get these things fixed and often accounts were left in halfway restricted state as the company is shipping its org chart and nothing is anyone else’s problem.
And it's true, you're only seeing one side of the story here. But I promise, I can't think of anything nefarious I've done that would get me banned. Well, aside from my crypto casino run by drug-smoking, underpaid children engaging in the illegal ivory trade, that is.
But that's all he has, given the brick wall nature of the way Meta (and Google) work in this respect. You broke the rules, we'll point to a vague document about it but not give you any details.
I had a similar thing (with far less consequences) recently, getting a new Mobile Phone contract in the UK. Failed the credit check three times. No reason for it - I've got a good credit history, own my own home, and have a reasonable bank balance (certainly enough to pay for the contract 20x over on hand, plus other savings). And the response was "You have failed the credit check. We can't tell you why because of sensitive business operations. If you attempt too many times, this may alter your credit score".
Phoned them, got an account without issue in about 5 minutes.
Does no-one else find this slightly fishy?
Some were advertising my paid courses on Python and Pandas.
Others were advertising my free courses about regular expressions.
Still others were advertising my mailing list.
None of this comes even close to anything illegal, unless I'm massively mistaken.
I noticed the ban, and then didn't do anything about it for one year.
I don't think that it's a sob story at all. I think that it's (a) incredibly funny that they would make such a mistake, (b) a combination of bad UI and bad service on Meta's part, and (c) crazy that even three Meta employees cannot undo such a ban.
So yes: It was my fault that I didn't notice or care faster. And sure, you can call this a sob story. But I think that beyond my personal experience and issues here, this points to some deeper problems with Meta, as well as other large companies that depend on AI.
sorry what?
human review should always be able to override an automatic decision. in fact, in the EU automatic decisions are actually illegal if they affect a persons life.
reuven is not asking for any of his friends at meta to be able to override the ban directly, but they should be able to escalate the case to a person or a team that actually is able to verify the claims and remove the ban.
the fact that this is not possible is both hilarious and sad.
please try to read comments as being made in good faith instead of assuming the worst possible interpretation.
I’m sure that some people made some mistake. I accept that. But I can’t accept handing out life bans for mistakes made. That’s not a town square should work. Sure we could use a different advertising platform but there aren’t that many.
It happens all, the, time. Also this non-sense is repetitive here, with nothing new to add, nothing technical, nothing intersting.
Just useless filler content, to induce some fake indignation towards some useless entertainment platform that will change nothing.
Anything else is pretty much just inconvenience and the cost of doing business.