Having worked at Facebook, albeit a long time ago. It’s far more likely that a conflict of events caused a false positive of an Automated spam system than Facebook giving a crap about privacy campaigns that hurt revenue.
But alas, we humans love our conspiracy theories because they tell a more interesting story.
but in the end the outcome is the same. malicious or not, facebook blocks what it should not block and that in itself is the problem. it being a false positive is not an excuse. if they don't fix this it just shows that facebook doesn't care about false positives either.
If Facebook could have a false positive rate of 0% and a false negative rate of 0%, they would absolutely make that happen. Unfortunately, due to the way statistics work, Facebook can pick its false positive rate or its false negative rate, but it's impossible to get to 0% false positives without just giving up on moderation altogether.
We're not talking about capital punishment here, we're talking about social media, and Facebook appears to have made the very reasonable decision that it's worth accidentally rate limiting some innocent accounts in order to keep spam lower than would otherwise be possible.
> We're not talking about capital punishment here, we're talking about social media, and Facebook appears to have made the very reasonable decision that it's worth accidentally rate limiting some innocent accounts in order to keep spam lower than would otherwise be possible
That sounds reasonable.
Well, reasonable unless you happen to be (or care about) one of the innocents being accidentally punished, because some corporation's algorithm said so.
Scholars have been worrying about this kind of thing in the real world's justice system for a long time (think of William Blackstone's "it is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer" quote, which is over 250 years old[0]; of the 1895 U.S. Supreme Court's "it is better to let the crime of a guilty person go unpunished than to condemn the innocent", and these weren't novel ideas, they go all the way back to the Romans).
Where are the checks and balances for the online world?
There's a world of difference between subjecting an innocent person to the penalties afforded for felonies by 18th-century English law and subjecting an innocent person to "limited access to [Facebook] for a few days." That difference completely changes the acceptable ratio of innocents-suffering to guilty-prevented-from-harm and the expected level of oversight for the process.
blocking for a few days is not rate limiting. if i am talking to a customer on facebook and i get blocked for a few days this could cause me to loose a job. (and no, sometimes i can't choose how to communicate with customers. if they insist on facebook then that's where i need to be). same for my grandparents. they may be upset if i can't talk to them and i can't reach them in other ways. the problem is that most people are not aware of this risk and it will catch them off guard which has the potential to hurt more than it would otherwise. the risk of this makes facebook an unviable option for me to communicate in the first place.
> if i am talking to a customer on facebook and i get blocked for a few days this could cause me to loose a job. (and no, sometimes i can't choose how to communicate with customers. if they insist on facebook then that's where i need to be).
This scenario feels contrived. In this hypothetical, you're talking to a customer using your personal Facebook account and that's the only way you have to contact them? And your employer somehow would see you getting blocked from Facebook as the problem, not their nutty customer relations practices.
> same for my grandparents. they may be upset if i can't talk to them and i can't reach them in other ways.
Again, this is super contrived. You act like you have no other contact method for your grandparents, and no way to get another contact method.
> the risk of this makes facebook an unviable option for me to communicate in the first place.
This is a very decent conclusion to come to. I wish more people would do the same. But there's no sense blaming Facebook for using moderation practices that any other platform in the same position would also choose.
i don't know how contrived the examples are for facebook, as i am not on it, but replace it with wechat in china and you have reality. many people really have no other way to keep in touch with some people.
apart from that, i have relatives in another country, and neither of us have our phones set up so we can make international calls (because that costs extra money), so while we could get in touch, we wouldn't unless it was something urgent. instead either of us would just wonder why the other is staying silent for a few days. and some relatives just refuse to use any other way to communicate besides the one of their choice. it's not facebook fortunately, but still, the example is not really that contrived.
i also have many friends that i can only reach through one method. if i loose that method, they are gone unless i am lucky and i can reach them through intermediaries.
ADDED:
temporarly blocks may not be that serious, but permanent blocks exist too. we have seen many of those stories even here on HN.
the problem is really that i fear many do not think that this could happen to them, so when it happens, they are caught unprepared and unaware.
i certainly lost contact to some people because we didn't consider this a possibility.
In this case some actual conspiracies have been ousted. Like when Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data to influence elections. There's a track record here.
Not saying this is true but sadly sometimes it is.
If you could prove beyond doubt that Facebook cared an iota about this person posting an EFF privacy tips link, I’ll lick any NYC subway pole you ask me to.
Accidentally a perfect analogy, because elephants do think about ants, and take steps to avoid them. The only other small animal they avoid is bees (not mice).
And just like ants, the EFF are one group that could have lots of tiny little warriors scaling up inside Facebook's fleshy trunk.
> The MythBusters hid a mouse under a ball of elephant dung, planning to flip the dung over and reveal the mouse when the elephants approach it. When they flipped the dung and revealed the mouse, the approaching elephant was startled and quickly moved away from the mouse. The MythBusters then flipped dung without the mouse under it, but the elephants did not react at all. They then repeated their first experiment to confirm their results, and the elephant noticed the mouse and actively avoided it. Even though the elephants did not panic at the sight of the mouse, their acting cautiously around them was enough to have the myth be considered plausible, as it was not known whether the reaction was due to fear of or empathy for the mouse.
... Note how they were wild elephants, in an unnatural environment, facing weird dirt behavior.
Similarly, I think there's something poetic about how elephants aren't blocked as much by fences--even if those look more significant to us humans--compared to trenches.
With a fence, the mass of the elephant helps to knock it over. With a ditch or a hole, the elephant's mass works against it. It risks getting stuck or breaking important bones that are already under a lot of stresses.
