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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now do match.com

It is not fun at all when the automated systems misfire. I am actually 'banned' from one of the 'services' and I am genuinely unsure what happened there, because I use it for stuff it is actually designed for ( local bots ), but clearly I set off an alarm somewhere. And now all I can do is wait for support to respond somehow.

I would be more annoyed if I relied on it in any serious way, but it does not change the fact that it has been a problem for a while. It is a shame, because telegram is (was?) otherwise pretty reliable for semi random mini projects.

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

Don't y'all see?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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