When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

https://www.eff.org/pages/when-knowing-someone-meta-only-way-break-out-content-jail

by 01-_- • 10 months ago

311 166 10 months ago

dev_l1x_be• 10 months ago

Not opening a Facebook account for your organization is how you can avoid these.

fajmccain• 10 months ago

Great article. Another problem with Meta’s moderation on political topics is they block content worldwide rather than in the united states only

electric_muse• 10 months ago

Content is one thing. But it gets me really concerned about these kind of appeal processes when it comes to more critical things like your identity or proof of personhood.

It is not hard to imagine getting a black mark in some invisible proprietary profile that determines if you can access Uber Eats, LinkedIn, etc. and have no recourse to fix it or get another chance.

throwawaysleep• 10 months ago

You don’t need to imagine. It happens frequently.

ceejayoz• 10 months ago

And not just for stuff like Uber.

You can get locked out of the IRS, Social Security, etc. in the same way.

https://www.id.me/government

jonbiggums22• 10 months ago

I'm thinking of people who bought an Occulus Rift, which Meta then purchased and then forced people to associate a facebook account with it which they could then ban causing you to lose access to the hardware (and any games you purchased). A strong incentive to use the facebook account as little as possible since making a throwaway facebook account is now such a PITA. Infuriating since it was a bait and switch on an expensive piece of hardware. I guess the only winning move was to sell the device to some other sucker the moment the facebook purchase of Occulus was announced.

Don't worry this requirement was removed. Now you just need a Meta account which is totally different!

pavlov• 10 months ago

The Facebook acquisition of Oculus was in March 2014. The hardware that Oculus sold before that was a developer prototype.

There was no bait and switch because there was no consumer product.

There’s a lot to dislike about Meta, but this complaint doesn’t make sense. If anything, Meta has put millions more of VR devices into consumers’ hands by selling the Quest at a loss. Nobody has to buy it.

j458• 10 months ago

The online "sign in with X/Y/Z" services are a digital identity provider.

We are citizens of private corporations that are social networks.

There are not many laws there for recourse or communication.

pndy2• 10 months ago

OpenID was aiming to be a decentralized digital identity solution for everyone but then companies opted out for own solutions.

I'm seeing more and more sites pushing for signing with facebook/apple/google accounts and I'm afraid how the Internet may look like in a few years. It seems we're on path on total sanitization of online services, sites and content to the point where everything will be "safe", verified and authorized and so will be users.

diebeforei485• 10 months ago

It's important to have your own website, so you can post updates there. Use Meta to let people know that there is an update on the site.

dylan604• 10 months ago

Having your own site on someone else's corporate service is no less of a risk of being shut out of your account. Free speech is only as free as the service you are using thinks it is.

Zak• 10 months ago

Web hosting is, or can be a commodity. An organization that gets dropped by its web host can just get another.

stronglikedan• 10 months ago

I think there's only that risk if you're using a website building service like Wix. If you build your own site and then send it up to a dumb host, you can just send it up to another dumb host when the first one pisses you off. Hopefully, you're at least managing your own DNS records too, and like that service.

bigbadfeline• 10 months ago

There's risk and then there's RISK. A corporate service in the form of a simple VPS is cheap and can be had from a 1000 providers anywhere in the world. Very simple to change providers too. Nothing like the quasi-monopoly of FB/X/YT.

andyjohnson0• 10 months ago

If you have your own* domain and are reasonably diligent in keeping a local backup of your site then it is trivial to move the site to a new host. As others have aaid, web hosting is a commodity business.

* yes, I know...

j458• 10 months ago

Web hosting is much, much, much more independent that posting on social media.

Social media is a web app and mobile app.

A website is just a website. Somehow being shut out of your own hosting is something else entirely.

intended2• 10 months ago

If cloudflare goes out of business, for example, their collapse would not count as an action against speech.

Conflating free speech with Terms of Services is to mix up MANY issues. There is a distinction that must be kept upheld, between private networks, and government power.

This does’t mean that the modern issue of free speech on privately owned platforms is magically solved, just that we need a more precise set of nouns, adjectives and verbs to frame the harms and limits that arise. Otherwise we simply get caught up in the simple between actual free speech and private rights.

pdonis• 10 months ago

No, it's much less of a risk, because companies that sell domain hosting services have an actual financial relationship with you and have much better support infrastructure in place because you're a paying customer. The risk is not zero--no risk is ever zero--but compared to your risk of Facebook doing something stupid and unwarranted and you being unable to get it fixed, the risk with a domain hosting company is pretty small.

CM302• 10 months ago

100%. These large social media companies are very capricious about what counts as breaking their rules, will kill your reach at the drop of a hat and will fold under the slightest bit of pressure from someone richer/better connected than you if the latter has any issue with your work or existence at all.

Gotta own your own platform to make sure you have a backup when that happens, and have at least some control over your own audience.

pndy2• 10 months ago

I'm not sure if that's still a thing but I remember period where companies were using their fb profiles and messenger to provide customer support. That gave me shivers back then.

fn-mote• 10 months ago

Absolutely still going on. They don't even know it's a bad idea.

johnisgood2• 10 months ago

It is worse now. Customer support on Facebook? Check. Making appointments only through Facebook? CHECK.

I called up some place (yes, via phone) for an appointment, they told me to get one through Facebook.

a5c112• 10 months ago

Back when the internet was a nice place, I mean years 1999-2010, it was full of websites managed by individuals. Each site was different, some were pretty-hideous, quite frequently with unusual knowledge and curiosities. It was so much fun to Google them (Google was a damn good search engine back then too). Most people knew how to use FTP to upload a basic HTML page.

Now it's an expert level knowledge, especially amongst younger generation. Private websites are nearly extinct, thanks to (and not only) Google and SEO cancer.

Corporations like Meta are scared of people taking control over their own data, so they put lots of effort into making the content creation process as brainless as possible.

alex11385• 10 months ago

Brainless as in "We'll just make an account for you"

leakycap2• 10 months ago

Back when the internet was a nice place, I mean years 1999-2010

By 1999, Internet Explorer on Windows had over 95% of the web browser market. Modems were 56K. This is not comparable to the web in 2010, much less the web today.

You're experiencing nostalgia - it isn't factual, though.

Private websites are nearly extinct

I wonder what these password managers are all about, then?

Corporations like Meta are scared of people taking control over their own data, so they put lots of effort into making the content creation process as brainless as possible.

How exactly does Meta have any role in the ease or difficulty of content creation? Last I checked Meta makes zero of the top content creation tools and is mostly an ad company.

mschuster91• 10 months ago

It's not just Meta. All big tech companies (including Amazon, if you are a vendor) have gotten infamous for basically only getting a human to intervene with automated moderation or outsourced lowest-effort moderation if one raises a big-enough stink on social media or manages to secure a court judgement, but even that isn't foolproof these days. Twitter has recently gotten under fire for ignoring German court orders.

CM302• 10 months ago

Yep. It's why the only way most people get their hacked YouTube channels back is by begging the Team YouTube account on Twitter for help, and hoping enough people bother the staff there that something actually gets fixed.

If you're a popular creator that doesn't have much of a social media following, friends at Google or lots of lawyer money, RIP any chance of getting your channel back before/after it gets banned due to the hackers.

greyb• 10 months ago

This remembers of the Youtube channel TRNGL [1]. They got banned from posting for some reason, and their channel was about to be deleted within a few days. They had no following, so they instead looked for bypasses to put a video publicly. They found that while their uploading rights were disabled, they were able to use Creator Studio to record a webcam video begging for help since nobody was hearing their pleas. They have ~200k subscribers too.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@TRNGL

linsomniac2• 10 months ago

Google, especially Google Corp, is very much that way too. One of my users is currently getting a fair bit of spam because a spammer figured out that if they send a message with envelope sender @google.com, rcpt @gmail.com, google.com MX will accept it, then bounce it with NoSuchUser and gmail will accept it. I spent an hour yesterday looking for a way to contact Google about it, but couldn't find anything. Made harder because most things assume you are talking about gmail or youtube, not google.com itself.

It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them.

Benlights• 10 months ago

I've been having the same issue

hollow-moe• 10 months ago

This has been going for months already, it will most likely never be fixed.

throw-the-towel• 10 months ago

s/months/years

Sleaker• 10 months ago

I saw these spam mails start showing up a few months ago, and I was like WOW how is google infra just letting nefarious actors use their own domain to bounce spam/fishing emails?

afandian• 10 months ago

Amusingly Firebase auth (a Google product) has such a bad reputation with GMail that standard procedure is to bring your own mail service. Or your password-reset emails are binned.

kulahan• 10 months ago

Is that what that was? I had sent myself an email the day before it started happening to me, so I thought it was just the system glitching out. That’s such a nefarious scheme!

underlipton• 10 months ago

I would not be surprised to discover that much of the rest of the company is collapsing because of the amount of resources that have to be poured into AI. There's precedence for this: look at how many game studios have fallen to, "Let's make an MMO!". Even in cases where it succeeds (Square Enix) and becomes a money-printer, most of the rest of the business suffers; because it's the cash-cow, nothing - nothing - is more important than keeping it running (including the judicious production of the last half-dozen games in two of SE's flagship franchises). It's easy to imagine Google diverting and squeezing resources, trying to first catch up and then stay ahead in the LLM AI race, leading to terminal enshittification of Search, and then YouTube, and now Gmail.

pricechild• 10 months ago

I've been receiving this also. Rather annoying!! I wonder if abuse@ or postmaster@ would be able to help... /s

linsomniac2• 10 months ago

I did send my details to both of those locations, just in case. No response so far. I also posted on the artist formerly known as twitter, and I know I have some friends there in Google infra, I was hoping they'd pick up on it without calling them out specifically, but I might target them more specifically. Thought it sounds like it might be a deliberate, unfortunate, choice. I just can't understand why they'd want that.

jimbo808• 10 months ago

Customer service is for customers, not for products. You are the product.

fmajid• 10 months ago

Oh you sweet summer child, Google gives the cold shoulder to everyone, including paying customers.

annoyingcyclist• 10 months ago

I've been slowly migrating logins off of a @gmail.com email and onto an email at a domain that I own/control for this reason. It's tedious and feels a little like an overreaction (presumably the odds of this happening to individual users are pretty low). On the other hand, the thought of some faceless fraud algorithm deciding that I should no longer have access to the credentials I use to log in to my bank, investment accounts, DMV, etc and having no real recourse beyond posting on HN and hoping that a sympathetic employee reads is pretty scary.

(I didn't want to actually host my own mail stack, so I just have a custom domain set up with fastmail and point the MX to them. Their UI is great and a breath of fresh air compared to gmail. I guess they could in theory decide to lock me out randomly too, though I trust them to have actual customer support and can just point the MX somewhere else in the worst case)

bsder3• 10 months ago

I didn't want to actually host my own mail stack

Is there a way to only host the receive portion?

I'm happy to pay someone to handle all the idiocy around sending email and getting it through Google and Microsoft, but I'd really like to hold my emails myself.

2muchcoffeeman• 10 months ago

What mail provider are you using?

Edit: NVM. I see Fastmail when I reread the comment.

citizenpaul• 10 months ago

I did the exact same thing last year. Ive beem very happy with fsstmail.

afiori• 10 months ago

I too would like to make this move, but one of the considerations stopping me is the risk associated with payments

Google: anonymous inscrutable guillotine

Fastmail: payments fail and I do not notice for too long

dfxm12• 10 months ago

It gives scammers more plausibility too. If the top hit in a web search is Google's support page, which gives no phone number, then scammers can get race to get the number two hit with their number...

brewdad• 10 months ago

I've been getting multiple of those a day too. It's pretty annoying. I'd love to treat them the way other junk mail gets treated but I don't want to inadvertently end up auto-binning legit mails from GMail or Google in the process.

jacobgkau2• 10 months ago

I just got my first one of those @google.com bounces to my Gmail today.

noman-land• 10 months ago

You should use this same technique to spam the CEO about your issue.

barbazoo2• 10 months ago

It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them.

Along the same lines, I think organizations shouldn't be allowed to send out email but not receive email at the same address, e.g. noreply@. That's just hostile in general.

freedomben7• 10 months ago

I fully agree that it is shameful that we can't contact these companies, but suppose you want to send 2fa tokens as a startup. Should you not be allowed to offer 2fa through email unless you're at a scale where you can answer every reply email?

randycupertino4• 10 months ago

It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them.

There was a thread on reddit from an escort who was on a podcast talking about how she was banned from instagram and facebook (for promoting her escorting!) and the only way she was able to get her account back was to seduce some high-level meta employees via linkedin, date them and then convince them to reinstate her accounts.

edit- not sure if this is the same girl but here is a similar article about this scenario: https://www.newsweek.com/onlyfans-star-slept-meta-employees-...

casey2• 10 months ago

https://support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse

If they can't figure out the problem from there with you description then they are just incompetent and you shouldn't be doing business with incompetent companies no matter how large or popular they are.

You should bring everything you rely on in house as much as possible if not possible then on business that has an incentive to work with you. If you can't afford to then question if your product is really providing value. Why anybody with greater memory than a goldfish would build on top of a google service is beyond me (probably just people falling for ads or propaganda) it's no different then building on known vulnerable software.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 297 times (+ all the soft killed services without adequate support) , shame on me!

sizzle• 10 months ago

Hey I’ve been getting these sketchy Delivery Status Notification (Failure) emails too with my gmail handle but @google.com

“ The response was: The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try double-checking the recipient's email address for typos or unnecessary spaces. For more information, go to https://support.google(.)com/mail/?p=NoSuchUser”

Then it has a phishing email copied below trying to look legitimate.

Can I create a filter to block this spam for good? It’s been happening for over a year now and makes me think one of my emails failed to send so I jump to open it ugh.

AndrewKemendo• 10 months ago

It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them

This is by design in order to prevent any meaningful path to having to manage user complaints. Companies, broadly, used to have teams of customer support people and you could call and someone would answer to route your issue. That still exists in a lot of family run business (trash collection, home services like cleaning, custom parts etc…) but is frankly extremely rare for the majority of corporate interactions.

That’s not coming back because it’s clear that having a black hole for service saves money and doesn’t prevent repeat customers because there’s no real competition in any market, in a way that would bring customer support back.

It’s just gone.

Schmoigel• 10 months ago

It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them.

It's sadly all too common these days for companies to have no general customer support, only forums full of powerless volunteers. It's even started to become that phone support lines don't have anyone on the other end anymore; Microsoft for instance basically just has an LLM on the other end that waits for you to talk, then tells you to fuck off to the powerless support forum.

_-_-__-_-_-• 10 months ago

I lost my facebook account about five years ago--total outright account ban. No recourse at all. It happened to a group of about 10 people that had been administrators of a local non-profit's facebook page and who had managed groups for the organization in the past. Our non-profit was non-denominational and helped local teens with after school type programs. We never knew why our personal accounts were banned. Best we could figure was that we used a tagline in the past in some facebook comments and posts that later got co-opted and spread by a "white power" group in the USA. We were located in Canada.

At the time, some people recommended buying an Occulus device and calling their support because they were able to recover accounts and they had human support. We tried appealing to the company on social media, but we didn't have any luck.

I had to rebuild my social media profile and our organizations profiles and I lost 14 years of Messenger conversations, posts, and photos. These memories were just gone. It sucked. For the non-profit, it meant lost donations and lost connections for our alumni. Keep your own content off-platform.

ToucanLoucan• 10 months ago

I registered an instagram account to share my art, and was banned entirely, immediately, before I could even upload an avatar, with zero explanation. I emailed several times, did the license scan thing, and even messaged support from my personal account, and I still have never gotten any sort of explanation.

shrug This and that other thread today about Slack just seems to be what happens when you're determined to remove as many humans from your processes as possible.

j458• 10 months ago

Makes a good case to have separate brand accounts for nearly everything and to do little from your own personal identity accounts

pogue7• 10 months ago

Try Pixelfed or even Bluesky. Pixelfed is the fediverse alternative to Instagram, and there are some independent app devs working on Bluesky apps to be similar in look to it.

You won't find the reach, but you'll find a little community of other artists that can be a lot more personal & fulfilling than you would find on mainstream social media.

https://pixelfed.org/

alex11385• 10 months ago

I know this happens with a lot of companies but I see this as a direct consequence of Mark Zuckerberg owning companies

Everybody knows his history. Yes you can, "steal an idea". He does it to everyone. He did it to Snapchat. It shouldn't be a surprise the things he owns are substandard garbage

stult• 10 months ago

The internet has been like this forever. In the 90s I was banned from hotmail for having an inappropriate email address because my last name is Cummings. No recourse for some idiotic regex filter.

kstrauser• 10 months ago

Clbuttic.

msm_2• 10 months ago

I guess the only solution is to self-host. I've even been migrating my dedicated server to a homelab I'm slowly building. But that's a very time-consuming option, has a high chance of breakage, and not even available for 99.5% of people. And most people don't wants to spend hours and hours of private time to babysit own email server, which is understandable. Finally, it's not free.

I wonder what would have to happen for people to become more digitally sovereign, but I doubt it'll ever happen. If anything, we're going in the other direction.

walrus01• 10 months ago

What happens if your last name is Cummings and your home address is in Penistone, South Yorkshire, England?

Or perhaps in the quaint fishing town of Dildo, Newfoundland.

mimentum• 10 months ago

Hi Richard

freedomben7• 10 months ago

Indeed, I got my Hotmail suspended because of something not terribly different. Thank God in those days not every account insisted on 2fa through email

_9ptr2• 10 months ago

I know that feel, I'm Hugh Mongous.

FireBeyond• 10 months ago

Ahh, it's called the Scunthorpe problem! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

chicagojoe• 10 months ago

Buying an Oculus actually did allow me to successfully restore my wife's Facebook after it was hacked, thanks to finding probably the same thread you're referencing.

The amount of emotional capital held in various platforms is terrifying when you consider how easy it is to be locked out.

I now regularly "takeout" all of our actively used platforms and store them on physical media.

hsbauauvhabzb3• 10 months ago

Does this still work?

alex11385• 10 months ago

This is corporate fraud and I would love there to be an internal email discovered, "Hey, our game plan is to control the Oculus ecosystem purely so people have to buy it if they want their Facebook account unbanned (which we'll randomly do on occasion, to ensure this happening)"

pjc50• 10 months ago

At the time, some people recommended buying an Occulus device and calling their support because they were able to recover accounts and they had human support. We tried appealing to the company on social media, but we didn't have any luck.

This is one of the weird things about social media; it can be extremely valuable to people, but there's no way to actually pay the company providing it for the privilege of having a fair manual review from customer service.

cwmoore• 10 months ago

Now do match.com

ruralfam• 10 months ago

I had a Youtube video account with I think two videos. Got a notice it was suspended for content violations (these were self-created videos with no copyright content). Asked for reinstatement. Nada. This was years ago. On a lark recently decided to ask again. Got approved. Have no idea why/how/what/who/etc.

_9ptr2• 10 months ago

youtube giveth and youtube taketh away

EGreg2• 10 months ago

Don't y'all see?

Every other day a story comes out about a centralized platform either:

1) Extorting for money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887

2) Canceling accounts: https://www.eff.org/pages/when-knowing-someone-meta-only-way...

3) Has their algorithms choose what you see and hear: https://x.com/i/grok/share/NwPcWVxZiHQytvGs8MONRdpCi

4) Deplatforms you anytime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deplatforming

5) Demonetizes you, after taking over half to begin with: https://podcastle.ai/blog/how-much-money-do-youtubers-make-p...

6) Allows governments easy surveillance and even hacking your account: https://natlawreview.com/article/even-hacking-field-governme...

7) Sends your information to advertisers, etc. etc.

8) Makes everyone increasingly depressed, angry and distrustful of others https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

Now I ask you, why do people put up with this, especially content creators with large audiences?

Because they have no viable open alternative that they can host easily themselves.

And why is that? Here is what it would look like if they did: https://qbix.com/community.pdf

I think it's because just like in Web3, the incentives of Web2 are to make a lot of money for your early stage investors, the VCs, and very few choose not to sell out after they hit the critical mass and get massive centralized power and network effects. I've seen "indieweb" come and go, "decentralizedweb.net" is down but they used to have TimBL speaking at it. I've seen Diaspora come out 13 years ago and sadly one of the founders killed himself. I've seen Mastodon, which Trump's team forked to make Truth Social (one of the few deplatformed guys who actually got his own platform, had to spend millions on it).

Why do you think there is no good alternative to Big Tech, the way that, say, at least the Incredible Burger is an alternative for people who want to opt of meat?

the_real_cher2• 10 months ago

we need to move away from centralized platforms asap

EGreg2• 10 months ago

I’m working on it

For now it’s already extremely full-featured, but still only web developers will be able to use it: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

If you do give it a try, come back here and write about your experience.

Glyptodon• 10 months ago

This is pretty much the case for non-abortion, non-political situations, too. For example, MMI, a small watch company out of Singapore, had their Facebook page removed in the middle of one of their Kickstarter campaigns earlier this year.

To anyone on the outside, it's not clear at all if (a) there really was some kind of issue that consumers would want to know about, or (b) their page shouldn't have been removed to begin with.

It's not only (I'm sure) annoying to the company, which, being small, has responded in a relatively circumspect way, but annoying as a consumer because it's not very easy to interpret the signal.

In the same ballpark, but reverse, my news feed always has one or two posts from maybe fake groups that have seemingly AI-written stories that carefully mention the Tedoo app, and FB is all too happy to let that slide no matter how many times I report it as spam...

OptionOfT• 10 months ago

Same with bugs. Reporting bugs rarely seems effective anymore. Maybe my use-cases are more unique, but sometimes I stumble upon things where there the bug I encounter is 2 years old with 0 responses from the company, but I don't know how many comments from customers.

And it's already a hassle to report, so actual amount of people encountering the issue is probably higher.

One example comes to mind... I can't ask my Google Mini anymore to ping my remote. Many reports. Nothing from Google.

the_real_cher2• 10 months ago

We all need to get off of centralized platforms quickly.

intended2• 10 months ago

Oh boy isn’t this the truth.

Firstly - Hah! this is the easier situation! This is Americans talking about reaching out to Americans. It’s even more fun when you are in another country, and need to go through your network to get attention to an issue.

Secondly - Everyone I know, who is in a T&S team or does content moderation hates this situation, and is glad that this is being highlighted. it’s considered unfair and absurd. Getting recourse because people know someone who know someone to get it to the right team, is NOT how things should work. Let alone at global levels.

I can give maybe a smaller firm or platform a pass. But at FAANG scales? Cmon.

——

This is also a reason why I think that Reddit dug its own grave, back when it found the testicular fortitude to oust moderators during the API black outs.

If a firm has the willingness to remove mods and craft new philosophies of engagement when the bottom line at risk - does it magically lose that capability during the remainder of the financial year?

pogue7• 10 months ago

Unrelated to reproductive rights, but my private Instagram account got suspended for community guidelines violations out of the blue & I lost all access to my old photos, my friends, contacts, years of DMs. I don't have the slightest idea what triggered it (and of course they won't tell you), nor is there apparently any way I'm aware of to appeal. Interestingly, I still have access to meta[.]ai for whatever reason, so I'm wondering if there is some way to talk to it to get out of InstaJail, or finding a prompt to get it to give you more info on who to contact or ANYTHING at all.

However, after hunting around on reddit for solutions, I was quickly made aware of underground groups of individuals (hackers? I'm not sure what you'd call them) who offer account recovery for up to 1 to 2 grand per instance. These aren't just the people who send you phishing messages claiming to get your account back, but offer full services such as promotion, getting unbanned, having other users banned and etc.

We've seen news reports in the past where individuals or groups get backend access into Meta and then offer these sorts of features. [1]

But who else has access to these sorts of tools & features? I wouldn't be surprised at all if Meta moderators or employees are making a very nice side hustle for themselves doing this, as they'd have not only the access, but presumably know how to hide their tracks.

Just a theory. Anyway, if anyone has any ideas on getting an Instagram account back or filing an appeal or whatever, any info would be appreciated.

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-instagram-fac...

United8572• 10 months ago

These are not hackers but Meta employees/contractors who make money on the side by using their access to internal support tooling/channels. It's a fireable offense (it's only intended for actual friends/family) but still happens a lot.

pogue7• 10 months ago

Do you have proof of this though? Otherwise, we're just speculating it's a likely possibility.

qingcharles4• 10 months ago

There are plenty at Twitter and TikTok too.

Sadly I can't find anyone to pay off at Google yet to fix my gmail (I have the username, password, and everything is forwarded to the recovery email I own, I just lost access to the phone number and they enabled 2FA without asking).

Reddit also, I can't find anyone there to unban my friend's account that got locked (due to a server outage), even after speaking directly to spez about it.

One tip: if your IG/FB account get suspended, then it's way cheaper to get it unbanned via black hat routes than if you roll the dice and try to appeal it. Appeals often end in perma-bans that are much harder for Meta employees to undo.

alex11385• 10 months ago

There's a post on HN about someone being banned from Facebook because they violated (supposedly; who knows what violated even means) Whatsapp TOS from 3 years prior (possibly even before FB acquisition)

Someone needs to tell Zuckerberg about this thing called "antitrust" and not being a dick and that you can't run your company(ies????) like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122

commandersaki• 10 months ago

Another case was some fellow selling Python & Pandas educational content on FB and was completely banned from advertising because AI flagged it as promoting animal cruelty and then AI reviewed itself and said it has done nothing wrong.

bdcravens• 10 months ago

I feel like this is a cultural value pretty common among modern companies, where the "proper channels" is a broken system and we have to work around it. We've seen it often, where the only way someone will get support requests looked at is by commenting here, on Twitter, etc. Once a furniture company wasn't really taking action on my warranty claim until I commented about it on a promotional Facebook post.

cptnapalm• 10 months ago

I've been banned for over a decade from leaving reviews on Amazon. I have no idea why.

jongjong2• 10 months ago

I bet they have a team of people whose job is to keep employees in a kind of trance. Part of that would involve responding swiftly to employee concerns so that the employees maintain the illusion that the company cares and that it was just a mistake. From the perspective of the employees, they must think their employers are extra nice.

They must think it reflects the broader reality of how they treat everyone else.

Terr_2• 10 months ago

I had a weird and painful experience like that with Reddit, where my account and 10+ years of content all vanished one morning for no reason... but its "appeals" webpage insists that my account is in good-standing, so therefore I can't submit any kind of request for help.

A real hard wake-up call on the importance of owning your own online identity and content.

qingcharles4• 10 months ago

That's odd. You can't log into it at all, right?

99% of the time you can still log into a banned Reddit account and visit the internal appeals page. You are usually just "shadowbanned".

randycupertino4• 10 months ago

My reddit is IP and hardware device banned- when I create a new account it's banned within 24-hours. All from pissing off a "power mod" of a main bay area subreddit. So aggravating.

Terr_2• 10 months ago

I described the final state for brevity, but the slightly longer version is:

1. One morning my account was shadowbanned. Literally everything from any time in any subreddit, including truncating threads and taking other people's replies with it.

2. I logged in and used the appeals page... and it was eventually "granted" with an apologetic message!

3. But nothing changed, except that appeals page stopped working, as it claims the account is normal.

4. Mods can briefly approve what I post, but it doesn't stick. After a few minutes it becomes blocked again, with no audit-trail.

5. So... I dug up an old resume-feedback throwaway account from ~5 years ago to go asking for help...

6. Within a day, it got shadowbanned the same way.

7. For a few months, I did a monthly attempt to make a ticket via support.reddithelp.com, but never got any kind of response.

8. I guess I gave up trying to fight the faceless Kafkaesque system and slid into mild depression, as Reddit had been my primary social conduit after the pandemic.

Even if I go back and try to build up a presence again, without answers I'll be plagued by anxiety waiting for some mysterious stupid algorithm to stab me in the back and destroy everything again.

rr808• 10 months ago

Your life is infinitely better without Instagram or Facebook anyway.

Ensorceled2• 10 months ago

Interesting this is on front page the same day Hack Club got their costs reduced by Slack by complaining on here about the bait and switch.

brendank310• 10 months ago

I got a panicked call from my parents when Facebook deleted my brother's profile, probably 5 or 6 years after he passed away. After looking into just trying to get the profile restored, I came to the same conclusion as the title essentially. The "memories" feature frequently shuffled posts and pictures of him and had become a comfort for them. They bring it up every now and then, maybe some day I'll find a way to sort it out.

kashunstva2• 10 months ago

The big LLM players are getting in on the act now, too. In May 2025, out of the blue my account with Anthropic was auto-banned. Your recourse? Fill out a Google form to appeal and wait. Over 4 months in, I’m still waiting. Early on, I did manage to correspond with a human called “Destiny at Anthropic” but now they’ve put up some AI chatbot. The answer is always “wait.”

At scale, the value of individual users approaches zero.

kashunstva2• 10 months ago

Meta has repeatedly demonstrated its disregard for free speech and privacy. Within the span of a year, it has utterly cowed to the demands of the current U.S. administration. I don’t think it’s going to be a place for promoting progressive causes such as reproductive rights.

Razengan• 10 months ago

Apple's "iCloud Keychain" API lets Facebook and other apps track you across multiple devices and even device resets, because it's tied to your iCloud account. There's no way for a user to see or delete that secret data, except asking and trusting those apps to delete it.

This "exploit" has been there for years.

I only ever used throwaway accounts on Facebook, just to access some services that were only accessible via FB. At some point FB banned my account. I created a new one on the browser. Worked fine. When I signed into that account on my iPhone: instant ban. Delete FB app on iPhone, reinstall FB, try new account, same thing. Try a new iPhone, same iCloud account, new FB account: instant ban again.

They can not only track you across app reinstalls, device resets, but also across multiple devices. And Apple facilitates it.

pbiggar• 10 months ago

This is exactly what happened to people speaking up about the genocide in Gaza. 7amleh documented this in multiple reports [1][2][3]. See also [4]

[1] https://7amleh.org/post/erased-and-suppressed-palestinian-te... [2] https://meta.7amleh.org/ [3] https://7amleh.org/post/hashtag-palestine-2024-en [4] https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...

Wondering where the EFF was for that issue?

puchatek• 10 months ago

So this is the reality of the free speech utopia that Zuckerberg promised when he let go of content moderators at meta.

chistev• 10 months ago

My Facebook account got unfairly suspended for integrity issues, and all emails to Meta have not been responded to. Pisses me off.

When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

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