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Comment by jazzyjackson | Hacker News Reader

I tried to make an account while forgetting my VPN was engaged. Another US IP address but one from a block of IPs I’m sure is used for nefarious purposes. So because I briefly shared an IP block with ne’erdowells, I am, without an option to appeal, banned from interacting with Facebook forever.

Google Ads is ghosting me too. I really could get behind legislation that requires companies to have a human point of contact in these cases, but I guess a private company has the right to ignore people they don’t want as customers.

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I made an account on LinkedIn while forgetting my VPN was enabled and set up my profile. They immediately flagged me as suspicious and restricted my account, and demanded I upload an ID to remove the restriction, to which I complied and they lifted the restriction. Then about a month later I tried to add my sibling as a connection and they didn't get any notification, then my sibling tried to search up my name to add me and I wasn't showing as a search result. Seems I was shadowbanned even after providing my ID, which seems insane to me that the main professional social network can just do that to someone without due process or any indication. This type of thing could sabotage someone's entire professional career or ruin their self-confidence as everyone ignores all of their messages and activity

    but I guess a private company has the right to ignore people they don’t want
    as customers.

The problem is the monopolistic power these companies have.

This is what the EU has: https://www.eu-digital-services-act.com/Digital_Services_Act...

I have the same problem with my actual residential ISP. You wouldn't think sites like Etsy would ban entire IPs, but they apparently have; can't view the site at all, just a generic "you are blocked" message.

At least half the sites I try to visit are endless captcha loops, mostly from cloudflare. Trying to make online orders with a credit card often gets the order automatically flagged or canceled. Many sites give a generic cloudflare "you are blocked" message, when I've never visited them before.

I recently tried to download some manuals from the RICOH website, and all four different residential ISPs I tried from were blocked, and these were family members' connections that aren't part of any sort of proxy botnet or similar.

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