AIs and other opaque processes making decisions are incredibly frustrating. I'm still wondering why my tea-of-the-month business [0] got turned down by Stripe when I incorporated an LLC (technically a Godo Kaisha, as it is incorporated in Japan).
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?
> AIs and other opaque processes making decisions are incredibly frustrating.
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.
My company can't use Stripe to collect payments for our Continuing Medical Education conferences because, as a psychiatry company, we offer in-office-only esketamine therapy to a small subset of patients. No amount of explaining that we do not SELL eskatamine or ANY pharmaceuticals seems to get through to the supposed humans I've talked to at stripe. Nowhere in anything we publish including the website says we sell anything, because we don't. We don't process (and won't/can't) process patient payment though Stripe, because we accept insurance as we are a psychiatry group. All we get back are two types of responses: "We've suspended your account because you sell pharma" and "We're investigating the information you have given us". Mind you all we've been ABLE to give them is email replies because our offers of meetings and documentation to prove what we're saying go ignored.
Stripe is great, but something is going terribly wrong inside the company when it comes to customer vetting.
I can see where Stripe is coming from. At best this lands in some kind of gray area, but really it seems pretty clear why this is getting a no go.
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.
We tried, to no avail, just got the same unhelpful answer each time. Although we didn’t push too much, as we were still relying on the sole proprietorship account, and didn’t want to jeopardize that!
Now that we’re 90% done with the migration to PayPal, I think we can try again…
It sounds like the real story is you need to keep two payment processing setups active and used at all times, because you never know when one is going to mysteriously disappear.
The so called AI is very infuriating indeed. I was once banned by such dumb script because I was trying to call my cell operator via a regular telephone number and there were some technical issues either at my phone or at the base station, and calls were dropping. After about 5 tries I got a robot answer that I'm now banned from ever using support line for "abuse". And to appeal the ban, I would have to use a support line. Ok, I thought, I'll try robochat at the website. No luck - banned there too.
So I have resorted to searching the Facebook page and hoping that a human moderates it. Thankfully I got to a human support and they revoked this ban.
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.
What's wrong with your existing payment processors? This type of existential thing seems to come up over and over again with stripe, I'm surprised people still want to use them.
People want to use it because its very easy to sign up and very easy to use. Even compared to Paypal, its much easier in my experience. And the vast majority of users don't have any issues at all.
What I find most frustrating about this is that they straight up lie to you. They don't actually review your account and the ban isn't permanent. The minute people in this situation get through to a human (one with any autonomy, anyway) the ban gets reversed. So it's all about the cost and efficiency and convenience for Facebook/Meta.
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.
There exist laws about this, which provide a market solution. It's just that everybody has their fingers in their ears yelling about how big tech aren't monopolies so the existing laws aren't being applied.
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...
But why is it not in Meta's interest to have a human take a quick look at this? Or ask the user to pay for a human review? How much can it cost, in human time? $20?
They don't have enough human moderators to be able to handle it, and they don't want to hire more. You can't hire a moderator just for an hour - you'd have to recruit them, train them, continuously employ them, manage them, provide them benefits, etc. - it'd make an amortized per-review cost likely way higher than $20.
Obviously the moderators would be working full time. I don't know why it takes more than $20 of time to review this case and see that a classification mistake was made.
* 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.
In that vein, there's also dawizard, wizardnta, the amDanielan dream (in a book whose author changed the name of a character named Eric to Daniel), and a company that is now in the african-american.
My read of it is that's exactly what they were saying. The software replaced "ass" with "*", which made it even worse because now it read like the software was correcting the n-word (and in turn suggesting the person was using the n word).
This reminds me of middle school while I was temporarily in a country with heavily censored internet, where, I couldn't even search for info about sexual reproduction in plants for an assignment without a VPN because they filtered on "sex".
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.
> temporarily in a country with heavily censored internet
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.
They all have smartphones. Almost everyone single one will have a smartphone.
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.
And? You go up to them and tell them to quit or you'll call the cops for indecent exposure.
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.
I still remember when Google, in a fit of one of the many moral panics, decided to ban everything related to guns from their shopping site. Which, of course, lead to banning of all the Burgundy wines, because they have a "gun" inside! Poor fellas were so hasty to implement it they couldn't even do the filter right.
I think that's why an online card game I play won't let me name my tarot-themed deck "Tarot", it changes it to "*ot". Not sure what it means but I guess their censoring mechanism taught me a new slur?
Pretty sure I ran into this problem trying to use my American credit card to pay a bill from the University of Sussex in the UK. (Note the substring of "sex".) No matter how many humans we got involved, every attempt would immediately lock down our credit card beyond the usual fraud alert locks that I can personally revoke by responding to a text message, and would require a manual unlocking by bank support staff. Finally we just tried the PayPal option and it worked fine.
Incidentally, the name comes from a region in Japan. A university named after the same region changed its English name to "Kindai University" to avoid this issue:
In other "we can absolutely totally build ai, no really guys, this shit works" news: A friend is losing some weight via diet and exercise changes. We have a messages convo wherein I congratulated him and we discuss both our exercise routines.
One of Google's autosuggested response emojis was a kiss. This has happened repeatedly over the 6 months-long conversation.
But it may very well be correctly understanding that people like to end sentences with an emoji, combined with that being the most likely emoji used in conversations like this. That becomes plausible when combined with most such conversations using little to no emojis (more professional and dry) but those that do (more emotive) tend to be between partners. Texting a partner about these topics might be more common than texting others, or at least more commonly emoji-heavy, which would be below the noise floor until also mixing in the probabilities of sentences being followed by emoji versus being followed by any particular word. These particular conversations would tend to express passionate love more than happiness, sadness, sarcasm, taking orders, or various other emotions. Suddenly a signal emerges from the noise, which is both interesting and statistically most useful.
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.
In the early 2000s I couldn't download Winamp 3 at school because the URL contained the string 'mp3'. I'm sure the school did not care about the distinction.
The earnest answer is I wanted to play my ripped mp3s and recordings off the radio on my computer at home. We had slow dial-up and 4 kids fighting over it, but I had my own non-internet-connected computer and an early flash drive, and the school had fast internet.
I've multiple times tried to open a seller account on Ebay. Two minutes after the account was created and confirmed it got blocked due to me having violated their terms of services. At this point I had not done ANYTHING with the account yet, not even putting in a profile picture.
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.
I wounder if it was tagged as "data center" by default without knowing who/what/how it's actually being used. It certainly wouldn't be considered the most privileged (residential) by default.
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'm banned for life from all Facebook properties (except for WhatsApp) because of my surname. They believe it's fake (or too controversial) and a copy of my passport hasn't changed their minds.
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.
In my experience, once you close your facebook account, good luck re-opening one. The only way I was able to do it was getting hired by Meta (then facebook) because they required me to have one in order to on-board.
That is particularly egregious because there are plenty of people running around FB with obviously fake names. In a couple of the picture-oriented groups I'm in, I'd say more than half of the posts are from people with fake and sometimes even offensive names, but nothing ever gets done despite what I know to be multiple reports. Even a bad policy can usually be made worse by enforcing it inconsistently.
Assuming that they don't dox themselves some examples that would trigger a filter:
- 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...
> Meta won’t be seeing any of my money, whereas companies like Google, who seem to employ at least some humans in their advertising department — will
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.
My immediate thought when speed reading the blog post was "just create an advertisement company, have yourself as a client and call it a day". Sometimes we gotta fight stupid with stupid, you know?
We have the opposite experience. They pay more, it’s just that the average ad-quality is also lower. We actually had to raise the minimum price even higher for the network to not show tons of borderline scam ads (now they are delivering fewer ads, but they are more relevant and higher quality)
Interesting point. Automated bans with no recourse will mostly deter legitimate businesses. And there is a finite supply of legitimate businesses, but infinite fake ones.
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.
I once had a Google adwords campaign shut becuase I was advertising software for the Mac. The software only worked on a mac but I wasn't allowed to use Apple, Mac etc. as Google said they were trademarks. To be clear here, these words were used in context, eg. "Widget counting software for the Mac" not "Genuine Apple Software".
ISTR I appealed, and was turned down with no recourse. There was basically nothing I could do to advertise software just for the Mac.
I've had similar problems with Fabebook/Meta before and eventually gave up on buying ad services from them.
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.
> forces companies to make it possible to contact humans within a specific time frame.
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.
It's the kind of thing I thought had been handled way back in the 90s when AOL was rightly ridiculed from stopping people from entering the town Scunthorpe as their location because of a certain substring it contained.
Extrapolate this type of "unfortunate incident" to medicine, finance, insurance, policing, education, corporate hiring etc. where automation and "AI" is supposed to slash costs and improve efficiency and ponder what kind of society we are heading towards and why.
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".
Welcome to the future. Before too long this kind of bs will be an almost daily occurrence for most people who have to interact with businesses/institutions on the net. Highly automated inscrutable processes with hairtrigger banning logic and review paths that never lead to a human. Because the humans that survived the automation are too busy feeding the Algorithm to ever interact with the customers.
Government contractors seem to love it from what I’ve seen. They’ve always been about quantity over quality because most people don’t have the resources to fight the government. “AI” driven by greed and ignorance is a step towards ruining and collapsing a lot of government services in most western countries IMO.
Our legal systems have already become like this. Only those with the knowledge on how to navigate the system or those qualified to interface in the expected protocols have any hope of achieving results.
Super-corporations are now just the next rung down, adopting all the habits of their superior, but without the responsibilities.
That's the cheap route, like car manufacturers slapping big glossy crappy tablet instead of 40 high quality physical knobs (really, have you ever seen any physical button not working on any car, even 15+years old? I didn't a single time, as long as we don't talk about wrecks).
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.
I suspect the only solution for these cases is some form of small claims court / independent arbitration process (and not just for Meta, but for all of the FAANG bunch and their like).
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.
Just one more data point to add. I manage a business with 50 physical locations in a Nordic country in Google. These are the business locations that appear in Google Maps. I constantly have similar issues to get our Google Business profiles approved due to "Live animals". It's a simple word filter they just cannot get fixed. It's a constant headache. I get it fixed every time by requesting a manual review. It's work for me and work for them.
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.
In opposition to what the author thinks, I do think that the appeal was viewed by a human (probably from an outsourced agency somewhere far away) who simply didn't have 1) the capacity to understand what the author is selling 2) time enough to read the appeal, research and understand the problem and 3) possibly sufficient control over the English language
Actually, they explicitly said (on some page, or in some e-mail) that both the original evaluation and the appeal were handled automatically. I can't find that evidence, but I remember reading it and saying, "OMG, you've got to be kidding me."
Based on what they've told me, I have every reason to believe that no human ever reviewed my case.
Just create a new account and advertise with that. Or even a fake account. I know a lot of people who have dozens of fake accounts even for legitimate products and ads. Facebook is notorious for not providing any kind of support for its ad platform. Not to mention that they don't seem to do anything to stop fraudulent traffic.
One of the Meta employees suggested that I create a new business account. Except that I can't do that, because my personal account has been banned for life, as has any business account created through it.
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 galling thing to me is that these "lifetime bans" do nothing to stop scammers because they can easily create dozens of new companies and identities to continue ripping people off with. For them, it's just a cost of doing business. Either through legal or illegal means, scammers find a way to create lots of different companies and manage to get back on these platforms after their first efforts are "banned for life".
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.
This feels the same like google blocking me from using adwords; it said we definitely violated something they didn't specify and were banned for life. We sold productivity desktop software b2b. Not porn or animal abuse or guns or whatever.
They have special rules for advertising desktop software. I hit the same issue but wasn't banned. Eventually it got mostly sorted out.
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).
Wow, this is incredibly stupid (on Meta's part). Way to shoot yourself in the foot.
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.
Have they shot themselves in the foot though? As long as the money they save from not employing people to manually review cases is less than the profit they're losing by OP (and others in this situation) not advertising on their platform then a few false positives is fine for them.
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.
>Have they shot themselves in the foot though? As long as the money they save ... then a few false positives is fine for 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.
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".
I uninstalled the Facebook app, because it literally makes me depressed.
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've never had the Facebook app installed on my phone (Android). Messenger Lite worked great, until recently. Now that they've shut that down, I'm using regular Messenger, which sucks, but I finally got it working by forcing a stop and clearing the cache. You really shouldn't need the Facebook app on your phone to use Messenger in my experience, but who knows what kind of shenanigans they're pulling.
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?
> I think they just got where they are because they filled a void
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.
Not surprised by this at all. “Animal trading” is such a touchy category within Meta. Once you get flagged for this, you can basically kiss your account goodbye. It is impossible to get support, even in cases like this where it clearly has nothing to do with animals. Meta simply will not touch it. There are other categories like this too. Ultimately it is easier/safer for Meta to just wholesale ban any use of terms even if it seems really stupid. This will only continue as Meta continues its exit from detailed ad targeting. Google is doing the same thing too.
Both companies are pulling way back on targeting categories and have been for a couple years now. Most of it rolls up under privacy these days but when they started they were pretty coy about it. Eventually, they'll exit entirely.
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.
Similar story: I had an old account locked and I wanted to delete it. They asked me security questions about random Facebook friends to verify my identity, and I had no idea who they were. So I sent in my driver's license photo, which was rejected for an unknown reason.. and around and around it went.
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.
One time my instagram account was suspended for suspicious bot-like activity. submitted all the appeal forms, sent them photos of my drivers license, sent them a photo of my face with a custom handwritten note held next to it (which they literally asked for), but no response.
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 :)
AIs should be globally banned from making final decisions. Whenever an AI makes a decision, it should be guaranteed that you can demand a human to actually review the case, evaluating evidence manually. It is also questionable whether lifetieme bans should be allowed to exist, let alone full bans like when Google's AI dislikes something in your app and you loose access to your GMail and everything forever (in my oppinion not even a terrorist deserves this).
If there's enough people who were wrongfully banned for any reason on Facebook because their review process is broken, maybe it's time for a class action suit?
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.
>You don't have any anti-discrimination laws to prevent sellers choose their customers on subjective basis?
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?
This non-sensical auto bans is a well-known phenomenon in the ads industry (personal/small companies). There is even a cottage industry of companies that's specialized in recovering banned ads accounts and/or getting around bans.
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. :-)
I'm going to be redoing my site and offerings in the coming months, and I was thinking of doing some advertising along the way. There are definitely other platforms, and YouTube is one I'll be trying, but I figured it was worth a shot. Not any more, I guess!
If I may, your training is much better than your current YouTube views would indicate. I think it you spent some time on it [1] then it should pay off as your explanations are clear and concise, and it's clear from them that you're a good trainer. Your newsletter is also good, and I've had quite a few "oh, that's why that's like that" moments from reading it.
[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!!!
Thanks so much -- I know that lots of things about my YouTube channel need to change in order for me to rack up more views. I'm slowly (very slowly!) making those adjustments, but as a one-person business, all of these things take time.
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 was waiting to hear from someone else on this. We were planning on spending a decent chunk of our seed money on Meta Ads. After 3 verifications and repeated bans with no recourse we gave up.
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.
I a digital forensics investigator who owns a small business. I was also banned for life from advertising. Not told why but the only thing I’ve changed is that I started teaching a social media evidence course at university - then almost immediately banned.
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.
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.
I know I'm thinking about the wrong part of this article, but... even if the adverts really were about real pandas and pythons, the adverts were for courses in them. Am I not allowed to advertise a course on how to look after your python on Facebook? Or a course on the status of pandas in the wild? Even that seems very odd. (Maybe the adverts didn't read that way.)
I've experienced similar issues multiple times in the past with meta, especially while advertising french and italian restaurants whose names and menus, once automatically translated in english during the publishing checks, would trigger all kind of bans.
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.
I had the same thing with Ebay. Tried to sell an old linguistics textbook. First thing I ever tried to sell, new account. Instantly banned. Refused to tell me why.
I hang out in the whitewater community on Facebook and there’s tons of stories about bans for selling dagger kayaks because the systems believe you’re selling weapons.
My girlfriend also got banned from advertising on Meta for literally no reason. It’s been also a year since she last advertised her Facebook page (she’s a gerontologist).
They are probably banning most smaller advertisers and sticking with the largest ones.
Lesson learned: don't click on that Appeal button. That's the human confirmation they're looking for in the otherwise 100% automated system with no human in the loop.
My mother had cancer and was unable to get to her mailbox in a timely manner. The Post Office turned off her mail. She appealed and upset the local postmaster. Over 3 years after her death I still can't get mail at that address.
I've had a python code sharing post blocked on Facebook because it "violates community standards". If I remember right it was a script to search a word doc and highlight certain words by changing the color. Their bots are stupid.
Meta is really the worst company I have dealt with in the past. We are trying to advertise with a budget of 700€ per month (in total over 50.000€) and they just can't figure out the payment process.
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)
I've had my Facebook account for years, I've used it as Facebook in it's early days and as blank business account with real name and passport details later. My ad spent was several thousand dollars over the years, and even thought Facebook was billing me for wrong clicks (10-30% did not fit my criteria, mostly wrong country) I went back again to publish some ads.
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.
As we improve the accuracy of automation and now the neural network, once laughed as a toy idea, does cough up something half decent, people ask "But who take a responsibility when things get wrong?" My answer is nobody.
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 seems the notions of accountability and responsibility have broken down when it comes to AI. Any given AI should have clear lines of delegated responsibility from an accountable flesh and bones human. Any decision made by an AI should be marked as such and provide a channel for the decision to be reviewed by said human or a human delegate thereof should scope (in Meta’s case) be large. If it’s too much work to manage the reviews, tough shit.
There are many digital marketing executives who are banned to advertise on Facebook. FB decides they did something wrong once, and now they cannot advertise anymore. So effectively they cannot find a job in digital advertising because Meta wants you to use your personal account for advertising even when you are working for a company.
This needs to stop. Maybe this could be moved under the scope of "EU Digital Markets Act" with some effort.
"The UK GDPR gives people the right not to be subject to solely automated decisions, including profiling, which have a legal or similarly significant effect on them."
I will never understand why Facebook isn't willing to take action against known phishing pages/advertisers, and even let them boost post with advertising, while legitimate advertisers get much less impression. At one point, a scam about high-return investment targeting elders are very common. The same applies to online gambling (it may be legal in many countries like the Philippines, but not in my country) and 419 scam (known in my country as "call center scam")
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)
Out of interest, what was the text title of the ad? and which image did you use to advertise?
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.
I have no idea which ad caused me trouble, or when. The ban happened in June 2022, and I noticed it in July 2023. The most recent ads I ran were probably 2-3 years previous to that, and to the best of my recollection, they used videos of me and/or stock photos that Facebook officially offered and approved.
Regardless of the reason, of course not acceptable. We have to insist on complete transparency, and life-time bans should always be liftable through some sort of dialogue. It is impossible to have a productive relationship with someone that abuses AI to conduct reviews that should clearly have been done by a human. Facebook cannot be trusted. Period. Their conduct is extremely abusive.
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 can understand your frustration. I was banned from Google ads and to this day I have no clue why. I was selling a speech recognition product. I appealed once, but it didn't get anywhere.
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.
This reminds me of Instagram which I rarely use but one time when I did it indicated that I had been blocked for some reason.
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.
Meta is an addictive toxic shithole and a blight on the world. I deleted my Facebook account about 5 years ago and my life has been way better ever since.
So... certainly with social media, the rules the rules and only we know the rulebook.
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.
Remember when Facebook just flat out deleted Native American's accounts because they thought their names weren't "real people names?" These guys are shitty, always have been shitty, always will be shitty. They don't have good product manages who research use-cases and examples, they don't have good QA or test data, and their customer support isn't empowered to fix the issues customers report. Just a shitty company through and through.
When I created a new Instagram account for a project I'm working on, it instantly locked my account and said it was restricted. It takes you to a page where you can submit a form asking for a review, and when you submit that forms it errors out. Sigh.
At a previous job at an enterprise cybersecurity company, we were spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on ads across Facebook and Instagram and _constantly_ were having ads and posts flagged as being about "hacking".
What is the point of having all the "greatest" AI scientists in the world if you can't solve meaningful problems of these systems when used in production...
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].
FB's enforcement style is shitty but IMO the larger point here is that they're no longer built for small business advertisement
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'
Ha! I’m at Pycon MEA and yesterday a speaker from Namibia was talking about how one of the hurdles in evangelizing Python in Africa was that people thought of dangerous snakes and didn’t like it.
The elephant in the room is that this happens because these companies are too big. They command such monopolies over their walled gardens that everyone must advertise with them, so there is no requirement to provide customer service to any but the largest accounts.
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 wonder if anyone is recognizing that the fail here is in removing a human element in the support and instead relying on a far inferior technology to handle cases it can't handle.
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.
My gf last year had a Tumblr account that was banned for unknown reasons. I finally got hold of someone in the C-Suite to look at it and they said they couldn't do anything because when you get banned they delete all the data that caused the ban, so there was nothing to review?
From the comments, I think everyone here is recognizing that removing the human element is the problem. What I think is missed by some is that the human element is also the solution - don't use products whose support processes are like this.
We need a social credit system that is more like what eBay feedback was like in 1996 than what China has today.
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.
I've also been banned from advertising on Facebook. The story is pretty funny, I spent a little bit amount of money to try a campaign, none really converted so I gave up. Then 6 months later (yes you read that right), Facebook banned the completely inactive account which had done nothing during those 6 months.
They do still send me ToS updates by email though like it somehow matters and that I'm somehow bound to it.
There's a lot of debate about whether the first amendment (freedom of speech) should apply to private platforms like Facebook, but maybe such discussion should also include the sixth amendment (right to a fair judicial process), if we take the position that these rights are inherent things that society should guarantee, not just restrictions on what the government can do.
Going forward probably the answer to dumb AI which can't figure if python is snakes or code, is smarter AI. I mean FB and Google are unlikely to suddenly hire thousands more smart people to sort this but already AI like ChatGTP seems smart enough to do a reasonable job on understanding "why was I banned?" and "no, code not wild animals" etc.
In a company I worked for 20+ years ago the IT set up an email "spam filter" that used a big list of regexes, but the problem was the filter ran on the raw message, so it also filtered SMTP headers.
I noticed this when an email that was routed through smtp123.essex.hp.com or something similar never arrived to my mailbox.
This is only my experience. I had great organic reach for my page. I thought I will get even more if I advertise it. Big mistake. Advertising helped a bit, but the moment I stopped paying they cut my organic reach.
I'll never touch advertising again. It seems to be designed for start ups with VC money to burn and not small business.
I guess this message was through Message within your account?
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.
Of course we can blame AI, lack of humans and stuff.
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.
This happens to many many small businesses, they unilaterally ban you for nothing shady. I'm talking about mom and pop stores, businesses who have been using FB ads for ages. Suddenly poof, that marketing channel and the revenue that comes with it is gone and is not appealable.
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.
This is a hilarious and kinda obvious mistake to allow in your system (if you work with data for couple of month at least it is). But it is also very surprising, that this process is not being turned into a stream of profit and good pr. Like, allow paid human supervision....
I remember from twenty years ago, Amazon recommended a book for dementia patients, related to purchase of an AS/400 manual. Because of the name similarity between the IT author and other book's illustrator. We couldn't move one step forward.
TLDR: A Meta ads reviewer or AI thought he was selling Pythons and Pandas when that's just the name of the programming language he teaches. Then made worse by Meta not having any real appeal process.
...and worse again by Meta deleting information like ban reasons after 180 days, making it impossible for them to verify anything after that date other than the account having a ban flag set in the database.
In the other hand, you can post explicit hate speech against homosexuals in Facebook and they will reject your report automatically. I would have expected that FB actually uses all that NLP research...
I dont think its tripping only over the words Python and Pandas but possibly also the word "courses" used in the same sentense.
They think you are serving those fuzzy animals for dinner ;)
huh, I thought this automated suspension from twitter was ridiculous - but at least it wasn't permanent https://medium.com/p/44664b6b2b04/ - be warned reading, crude language found.
Check if anyone who is competing with you has personal connections with Meta, or someone just don't like you.
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.
From the link: "I’ve been in the computer industry for a while, and have no small number of contacts. Three friends who have worked at Meta (two current, one past) offered to check into this for me." Followed by a description of their failures.
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.
I got the exact same permanent ban for supposedly violating Facebook’s advertising policies, but I’ve never ran a single ad there.
My account was unused for about five years, when I recently logged in to try the WhatsApp API, I got an email asking for a document to confirm my identity. I sent the email and received a successful response. About a week later I received an e-mail of a permanent ban from fb ads.
Annoyingly, even though I had no plans to advertise there, I can’t generate a system user and get a longer than two months access token for my WhatsApp api. Also, my business (registered within my personal account and I’m the sole member) has full advertising capabilities.
TLDR
- I got permanently banned form ads without ever running an ad
- due to the add ban I can’t create a _system user_ and so my WhatsApp api tokens are limited to the two month extensions allowed on the temporary tokens
- my dev/business within my one account can advertise on fb normally
- obviously there nothing resembling support from fb
On Facebook I get ridiculous amounts of crypto scam ads falsely claiming to be associated with Elon Musk or his companies. I think even simple text based filters could catch them. It's been happening for years. I keep thinking surely they'll have it under control soon.
Seems they are busy creating filters & banning accounts, just not the right ones.
They checked with three Meta contacts, but because the data retention period had passed, the evidence wasn’t available anymore and the contacts were unable to progress.
The whole issue around not telling you what rule you broke "because then you might work around it" is total BS. It's like a company I complained to the other day because they didn't label one of the inputs on their password reset form because "it would help a hacker know what to type in it" (it was the password reset password they expected but you wouldn't know).
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.
In 1984 they don't have laws, only crimes, so whatever you do, you have to guess if it is illegal and will be punished or not. It is on purpose to keep the population in constant fear
Franz (not Apache) Kafka's The Trial also fits the situation:
"[..] 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."
In the 90s I had heard about this software you needed to publish web pages called 'Apache' so I googled it on Altavista expecting it to be hard to find amongst all the content about the Native American tribes. To my big surprise it was the web server that was at the very top of the search results.
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.
The fact that it's at the top now is not surprising, Google probably knows you're a programmer and is likely to show you programming-related results.
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.
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.
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 think it's just the combination of a direct match in a subdomain name, the popular and widely linked to domain name, and lack of any other context in query.
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.)
For me DDG shows a fact card at the top about Franz Kafka, linking to the Wikipedia page about him. After that comes the search results, of which the first one is about Apache Kafka.
When you see a phenomena described in literature, you have some emotional distance to it. It may be more easy for you to accept the possibility that such a phenomena can exist.
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.
Having been born as the first free generation on a post ditactorship Portugal, I definitly have another relationship growing up to stories from PIDE/DGS and colonial war survivors.
And I should note, compared to some countries, things were relatively soft on our case.
Yes, I believe you. However, other people may react differently from you, and they may react even more strongly if they have been living in the dictatorship themselves. I have spent some time in dictatorships, and it is not uncommon for some people to admire the strength of the dictator. Living in a situation changes how you think, and the more stressful the situation, the more you become emotionally committed to how you think, making it difficult to change it.
Draconian IT laws mean that in many countries you could be persecuted for threatening national security as a blanket rule with indefinitely the long harassment called investigation.
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.
Referencing 1984, Brave New World and that quote about freedom of speech that Voltaire never actually said make up the holy trinity of pseudo-intellectual posturing on the internet.
Yeah it was Voltaire's biographer who was describing what she thought was Voltaire's thinking at the time. Still a good quote though regardless of source.
Having been part of conversations with a corporate legal team about making clear policies available to explain these types of decisions, I’m sad to say it’s this and they sort of have a point.
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.
> 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.
> companies as big as Facebook should not be allowed to exist
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.
>so niche there's only one company who organises meet-ups and events around that hobby.
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.
Meta only has as much influence over our lives as we give it. I don't use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or any Meta product. What influence does the company have over me that even remotely rises to the level of "government?"
Exactly. This is a private company, and unlike a nation in which you can still have some word with your vote by becoming automatically a citizen from birth, you must buy your place as a shareholder in order to have a voice in whatever direction the company is going to.
Now imagine a private company that slowly eats every spot in which users could buy or sell product and services; what would happen if say they one day decide to limit your business in there? Indeed you can still breathe, but the western world you're pretty much dead in every other way.
When a company becomes pervasive enough to become a feature of the ambient social, commercial or economic environment, the argument of “its a private company” loses its validity.
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.
sure, ok... but in some places it functions as a public utility
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
And some of these companies pride themselves as AI technology pioneers. Yet it seems their automated systems in this case are simply doing keyword matching.
Another sad anecdote: A bank in Finland suspended an account for a text in free-form message field of a bank transfer. The message was for a vet visit of a dog named Ira. When you say "Ira's payment" in Finnish, you add suffix -n, so the text field said Iran, which of course must indicate money transfer to a sanctioned country. It is comforting to know that the bank system catches all the illegal activity that the sanction-busting criminals helpfully announce.
A bank in France (Boursorama, now Boursobank IIRC) locked someone's account because they did not provide the document.
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.
At least you got an explanation, I had my Vivid account blocked without one, the only interaction was by chatbot, the only response I got was can't disclose the reason because of compliance issues. For extra fun trying to get the funds on the account back I had to go to an online form, which didn't have the fields I was told to fill in, and again was met by no response. Eventually had to go through EU dispute settlement to get a human response and an email link to an app for digital identity validation, eventually I at least got my funds transferred to my main bank. Why the account was blocked remains a mystery, I only used it for online payments and never even contested, refunded or failed one.
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 had a financial company attempt to withhold my money so I skipped the chatbot and went straight to the CFPB. They were suddenly able to ACH the funds back to the account they originally took them from. Just goes to show how arbitrary and capricious all these companies are.
An acquaintance of mine (in Europe) had a default bank transfer message "al-qaeda terrorist fund" for years and years. That did finally raise some flags, but a visit to a bank office was enough to get the account unblocked.
Being a bit stubborn, he still kept the message and just applied rot13 to it.
I once wanted to make a small network of bots hosted at frriend's homes. These bots would talk each other by sending some Shakespeare's play excerpts where you would replace the names of the characters by names of various criminals. Just to see how long before I get caught :-)
Until I read that the law in my country explictely forbids "deceiving" the police...
You got my point. That's why I was thinking about being backed by a lawyer 'cos at some point the discussion between "deceiving" and "acting" could be raised :-)
What's funny about this is that multiple people at this bank think that a terrorist group would just freely advertise itself this way. Like some local cell leader names his accounts "Groceries", "Home Repair", "Bombing Supplies"
No, they don't. The banks know perfectly well that this doesn't catch terrorists. But by law they are liable if a terrorist uses their services if they don't have a program to detect terrorists. A key-word match on Iran, bomb, ISIS, etc. is enough in the eyes of the regulator.
No it isn't (at least in the US). Banks have to adhere to Know Your Customer laws, and have to refuse services related to any person or group that's been sanctioned. OFAC has a search tool for such persons[0], but notably says that even using their tool isn't enough to avoid liability. Just saying "we looked for 'bomb supplies' in the memo" isn't going to cut it.
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.
I chuckled. And I know you have a point. I just immediately translated the story to US and this person would have a hard time keeping that account ( or any if he continued ).
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.
> but a visit to a bank office was enough to get the account unblocked.
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.
Fun fact: one of the biggest banks in France has a branche on “Avenue de Cuba” in some city in South America (maybe Buenos Aires but I can’t quite remember because it was about 10 years ago I found this out). They get bank transfers to and from that branch blocked from time to time for “sanctions busting” because people just string match on the name “Cuba”.
They're scared of the bad press that that one criminal that does announce their payment's purpose and later gets caught will bring "See, it even said in the note field that it's for Iran and they didn't catch it. Bank X is so incompetent"
Honestly I’m not so sure it would help, as these bots would be trained on previous customer service interaction.
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.
Just an idea, but try looking for a gdpr specific email/contact form. Usually companies have a specific one for that purpose because they actually have to comply with them.
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 saw a sign last year for forestry service work happening locally to me. Apparently they're only going to provide safety announcements on Facebook.
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".
From "forestry service", I'll guess they're under state or federal authority, so "just be a squeaky wheel in local politics" is not an option.
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.).
> they're only going to provide safety announcements on Facebook.
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.
> 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.
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.
>Public institutions are free to run "outdated" web sites and ignore random people ridiculing them on HN.
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.
"While I understand, what's the alternative you propose?"
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 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.
A surprisingly large number of people chose to become serfs due to the benefits it provided. It seems wacky, but companies really are treating users in ways that lords were legally prevented from treating their surfs.
The privileges vs obligations of serfdom would be unpleasant by our standards, but it wasn’t slavery.
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.
[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.
To be somewhat fair to Meta; the "violation of unclear rules part" part is an appropriate response for spam detection.
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.
Can you? I don't know that I've seen anyone try, but I would expect the PR blowback for "pay us $1 to appeal" to be worse than "you're just not allowed to appeal".
This is a solved problem for a long time now: require upfront payment, even if it's just $1.00. Many website owners have reported that this has killed 95% to 99% of all spam they were receiving.
Genuine business wouldn't mind paying their $970 bill by first paying $1 and then paying $969.
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.
if u think about it - laws that govern lives today, are predominantly these rules of the information systems. these rules impact us more than the laws governed by the judiciary. so we ARE in this complete dystopia, question is whether we'll see any sort of uprising or dark IT ages are just beginning...
I'm not sure where the threshold is for spending. I have an account that was spending over $500K/yr on Facebook ads and we were blocked by AI with no recourse for over 6 months before we finally found a human who was able to reverse it.
Ah just like Microsoft who randomly locks my email I account I use only to receive spam email. Suddenly I’ve violated something in the terms of service and here’s a copy of the 200 page legal document. So my account is banned despite not sending emails or anything, just receiving spam email.
Oh unless I provide my phone number. Then they’ll unban me and I can continue presumably breaking the terms of service.
Only your phone number? That's almost benevolent. Here's a list of things companies have asked me for (including Facebook), and which I refused to provide:
- Copy of unspecified ID or driver's license
- High resolution copy of national ID, front and back
I've been banned from Reddit several times for absolute b**** reasons. Most recently I was banned for report abuse. But it has an incredibly huge problem with a particular style of spam account that reposts old content on certain subreddits. I was reporting those and also commenting on threads as to why I was reporting them so that others could see it. Without any discussion, comment, or initial warning to say " hey stop using this report mechanism ", my year old account was banned outright.
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.
A while ago my Reddit account of over 10 years (zero prior issues, bajllions of comments and karma) was randomly killed via a Kafkaesque process I'm calling "Schrodinger's Ban":
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.
>But it has an incredibly huge problem with a particular style of spam account that reposts old content on certain subreddits.
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.
You do not possess sovereign rights on digital platforms. I am curious about how much time it will take for the entirety of humanity to recognize that we are currently inhabiting a digital medieval era.
They also do this to save on staff costs; if you don't tell someone why they were banned, they won't have any counterarguments either, nothing to try and argue with.
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 they know, it's just that giving you the time of day costs them money and effort. Which is weird because they were earning money off of the adverts.
They won't change this unless some huge government body forces them, unfortunately. The market just follows the big players and there is nothing we can do. Something like EU should step in.
In theory the GDPR means you should be able to request all your data as well as opt out of automated decision making (which would address the "why was I flagged?" and "stop being stupid this is clearly not a snake") side of things.
Of course, that's only in Europe and it's not a very easy law to avail of, sadly.
>That’s right: I teach courses in Python and Pandas. Never mind that the first is a programming language and the second is a library for data analysis in Python. Meta’s AI system noticed that I was talking about Python and Pandas, assumed that I was talking about the animals (not the technology), and banned me.
If this is true, that is insanely embarrassing for a company that purports to be a sophisticated programmatic advertising platform.
I wanted to run ads for my plant nursery. Their bot suspended me before I can even run my first ads. They don't tell you the reason why and you have one chance to dispute. Then it's another automated response, again, not telling you the reason, you're permanently blocked after that. Their system make it feel like they actively punish legit but inexperienced business owner while letting all sort of scam running around in the wild.
Depends in what context you are talking about the animals.
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.
There would still be need for some sort of appeal/correction process, which doesn't seem to exist in a useful state now and would be required no matter what automated system you put in place.
I think if the front line bot was an LLM, rather than what is probably regex, they would probably have more true positives and less false positives that would potentially allow them to have a real person handling the exceptions - then train the LLM on the exception for the next release.
I'm assuming something to do with the illegal trading of exotic/endangered species; mentioning pythons and pandas, alongside whatever wording was used to sell the course probably triggered the bot to flag it.
Just guessing here, but if the senteces sounded like "how to use pandas to help you in work" AI could have decided that you're going to use a cute bear to lay bricks for you. Plus the "exotic animals", as someone else mentioned.
Not guessing, I used to work on that team: it’s based on keywords alone. The list of items is too big and changes too often to handle anything beyond that — more than a trillion edits per month.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you could sell endangered animals if you called them P4ndas.
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.
Even text-davinci-003 nails this (via OpenAI Playground).
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.
> Makes me wonder what's the worst possible phrasing
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.
It reminds of old Ruby anecdote. There was this guy on a Ruby conference with t-shirt with ":s*x" print, which for rubyists means "s*x symbol", but regular people will read it, well... colon s*x.
(Censored because I'm at work and I'm afraid of my VPN.)
Mmmm, I know rattlesnakes are said to be a pretty good meal. I wonder if pythons and boas taste any good. Those big snakes might make a delicious feast.
There are many laws regarding pet ownership and for good reason, if not involving an invasive species there's also animal cruelty issues. Pandas and other exotic animals need specialized care which a typical vet will not be able to provide. And that's if they aren't dangerous. Then there's the puppy mills, which is a huge issue on its own.
The puppy mills aren't running ads, they're using Groups and doing their advertising on the comments sections of local animal shelters. It's grotesque.
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!"
All existing pandas are owned by the PRC so the chance of somebody selling a panda for real, vs selling some sort of panda themed toy/book/etc, is virtually nil. No human would make this mistake; their filter is braindead.
Pythons, on the other hand, are often (illegally) sold, and can be extremely difficult to eradicate as an invasive species. Florida's Everglades are in trouble because people buy Burmese pythons and release them when they grow too big to handle.
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.
That is true that the python trade is somewhat problematic and is accordingly regulated, but there are also a lot of people who are legally selling pythons on facebook and evidently don't get banned for it. Search "facebook python breeder" and they're easy to find. My conclusion is that the filtering system is totally and inexplicably capricious. A braindead computer program making indefensible decisions that it probably can't even justify to facebook employees themselves, let alone to the people it's banning. Maybe mentioning pythons or pandas alone would be fine, but both together gets you classified as an exotic smuggler dealing in literal bears? Who knows. Probably not even facebook knows.
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.
I think it'd be embarrassing if the tech was making this sort of mistake in a high % of cases.
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 the only account I've read of this kind of error.
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).
What I mean is, there are certainly a lot more than 2 or 3 individuals or businesses that have ever advertised on FB for Python and Pandas (programming) stuff. Courses, recruiting, books, events, commercial libraries, etc.
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.
I did leave the possibility of "tight nit group of tech instructors".
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.
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.
Thanks for the detailed answer. I guess these are unavoidable without investing a lot more money on it if you are aiming for basically reducing false negatives to zero at that scale. One thing that surprised me is that Yann LeCun frequently mentions transformers have been in prod for all parts of moderation on Meta for a while already but maybe they come into play at more critical problems or at later stages.
Moderation, yes definitely. There’s are a couple billion users, they post a handful of comments per day and rarely post anything long enough to justify applying a transformer, so “everything posted to Facebook/Instagram” is several orders of magnitude smaller. Barely an inconvenience.
Messenger is bigger, but hardly one writes anything long enough to be suspicious. WhatsApp isn’t moderated the same way.
This is why we should be fighting tooth and nail against both walled gardens and monopolies. These are literally some of the most profitable companies in the world, there is no excuse for not providing a human contact who can at least verify the grounds for suspension, and some kind of appeal system.
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.
They are the most profitable companies in the world because they have scaled their revenues and do not give a damn about scaling their costs related to things such as customer service. This is exactly why this happens. In a smaller, local company this would never happen, it would be completely absurd.
I had the exact same thing happen to me, only I have never run any ads on Facebook. Got the ominous "you are suspended from running ads on Meta", which was very confusing since I've never run a single ad on any of their platforms, appealed out of curiosity and was met with the "you're banned forever" canned response. Crappy AI making stupid, arbitrary decisions.
Damn. Perhaps I should rethink the name of my new programming language, Children.
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.
Rust and Go weren’t particularly good names either. At least if you wanted people to be capable of using them as search terms. Yes, yes, you can use “lang” but still.
Swift was also a pretty well established interbank communication format which struck me as a strange choice of name. It legitimately confused me back in those days because I was working with swift messages every day.
> Now, I'm not a big believer in "there's nothing to be done",
especially when it comes to companies and software, both of which
are created and managed by people.
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".
Did I miss something in the article? His only evidence that he was banned because of python (supposedly a ban on dealing in live animals) is that some other guy on Linked In who also advertised for Python courses was also banned and he claimed, without evidence, that it was because of the live animal constraint? This is not very convincing evidence.
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.
> but OP is jumping to conclusions on pretty thin evidence.
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.
True, I don't know for sure that I was banned for Python. But it's the only information that I have so far, since Meta isn't telling me anything. And the other person confirmed that he had this problem multiple times.
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.
I don't think that I have any of the ads around any more. But please believe me when I say that they are extremely innocent, nerdy ads promoting my courses on Python and Pandas. Nothing weird or illegal in the slightest.
Facebook did ignore all my requests after they banned my account. I know I could sue or something but it's not like Facebook did give any fu*k about the laws.
It’s actually a well documented issue. For years. You can do a search (at least you could before google turned to shit) and find many similar cases.
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.
> 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.
I've got help from Google when I had a bigger account issue. Stripe isn't the fastest in responding but they really helped avoiding account issues before they became a problem.
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.
Well yeah, that's one of the problems with user account suspensions, app store review issues etc. with Big Tech: they don't tell you why they did it, so you're forced to guess! And if you're waiting to hear "the other side of the story", I wouldn't be holding my breath...
I wish this was the case. My experience is similar to OP.
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.
Yeah, it's totally my fault that I didn't jump right away to find out why I had been banned from an advertising platform, when I'm running a one-person business and hadn't been advertising for several years.
So you are saying it wasn't really necessary for years to advertise. You decided after receiving an injust ban to not appeal for over a year besides your knowledge about other horror stories. Now your life depends on being able to advertise on Facebook and the way to go forward was writing a bad sob story gladly obfuscating your own failings in it. Looks like a lot of blaming and no self reflection.
Actually, I saw that I was banned, and thought, "OK, I'll deal with this another time." I hadn't heard horror stories. I didn't know that there was any such thing as a lifetime ban. It never occurred to me that if I didn't act soon, it would make a difference.
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.
You have a lot of really strong opinions without anything backing up your bogus claims (AI, endangered animals...). The view of you and your work really took a dive for me AND every user should be worried if a random employee at meta could "just" overwrite bans. Your entitlement and worse your assumptions provided as facts are deafening.
every user should be worried if a random employee at meta could "just" overwrite bans
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.
Exactly, no one was asking for a random Meta employee to change things. Rather, three different people filed tickets through an established internal system, and were told that no, there was no way to undo this change.
I mean who cares. Some website blocked some person from spending money on advertising on their platform. This person who already has their own website and a lot of means to propagate whatever they wish and conduct business on the Internet in many other ways.
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.
No, I don't care. I removed myself from Facebook before instagram was even a thing. Only thing I'd be pissed about would be ISP censorship, or someone taking away my domain, but there are strict rules around that already, so I don't worry.
Anything else is pretty much just inconvenience and the cost of doing business.
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?
[0] https://tomotcha.com
EDIT: wording