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've been slowly migrating logins off of a @gmail.com email and onto an email at a domain that I own/control for this reason. It's tedious and feels a little like an overreaction (presumably the odds of this happening to individual users are pretty low). On the other hand, the thought of some faceless fraud algorithm deciding that I should no longer have access to the credentials I use to log in to my bank, investment accounts, DMV, etc and having no real recourse beyond posting on HN and hoping that a sympathetic employee reads is pretty scary.
(I didn't want to actually host my own mail stack, so I just have a custom domain set up with fastmail and point the MX to them. Their UI is great and a breath of fresh air compared to gmail. I guess they could in theory decide to lock me out randomly too, though I trust them to have actual customer support and can just point the MX somewhere else in the worst case)
> I didn't want to actually host my own mail stack
Is there a way to only host the receive portion?
I'm happy to pay someone to handle all the idiocy around sending email and getting it through Google and Microsoft, but I'd really like to hold my emails myself.
> > I didn't want to actually host my own mail stack
>
> Is there a way to only host the receive portion?
>
> I'm happy to pay someone to handle all the idiocy around sending email and getting it through Google and Microsoft, but I'd really like to hold my emails myself.
Sure. Set your MX to your own SMTP server but pay a mail delivery service to send your emails & use their SMTP servers as your outgoing server. You'll have to setup SPF & DKIM appropriately of course.
It's not trivial to do this, but it should be possible.
You could use a desktop e-mail client like Thunderbird and include its data in your backups and maybe occasionally export it somewhere in a standard exchange format for e-mail folders. You can even re-upload such local data to another e-email provider if you switch.
All of that seems easier than setting up a server to keep your e-mails.
I saw these spam mails start showing up a few months ago, and I was like WOW how is google infra just letting nefarious actors use their own domain to bounce spam/fishing emails?
Amusingly Firebase auth (a Google product) has such a bad reputation with GMail that standard procedure is to bring your own mail service. Or your password-reset emails are binned.
Firebase technicians allegedly attempted to contact gmail support, but found that gmail did not have an inbound support contact and thus the firebase technicians were unable to rectify their issue.*
*This entire post is fabricated satire. Though, I would not be shocked if it were true.
It gives scammers more plausibility too. If the top hit in a web search is Google's support page, which gives no phone number, then scammers can get race to get the number two hit with their number...
See, I've been wondering about this. I would have thought paying gives you a better chance of contacting, unlike Meta Verified which is useless. Is that not the case?
It really depends. Sales people will bend over backwards and will escalate things internally, but once they realize you “need” them (eg: for ads or due to lockin) they stop caring.
Used to work in marketing-adjacent teams and know this too well.
I've been an App Engine user for 15 years. Last year I needed some help and I had to pay some small amount for support and get an engineer to actually look at my account and tell me how to do something.
I don't remember how much it was, not much. I subscribed to the support for one month, then canceled. I've paid them hundreds a month for years, so it feels kind of cheap of them, but I did manage to get the help I needed.
I've been getting multiple of those a day too. It's pretty annoying. I'd love to treat them the way other junk mail gets treated but I don't want to inadvertently end up auto-binning legit mails from GMail or Google in the process.
I did send my details to both of those locations, just in case. No response so far. I also posted on the artist formerly known as twitter, and I know I have some friends there in Google infra, I was hoping they'd pick up on it without calling them out specifically, but I might target them more specifically. Thought it sounds like it might be a deliberate, unfortunate, choice. I just can't understand why they'd want that.
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.
Buying an Oculus actually did allow me to successfully restore my wife's Facebook after it was hacked, thanks to finding probably the same thread you're referencing.
The amount of emotional capital held in various platforms is terrifying when you consider how easy it is to be locked out.
I now regularly "takeout" all of our actively used platforms and store them on physical media.
The internet has been like this forever. In the 90s I was banned from hotmail for having an inappropriate email address because my last name is Cummings. No recourse for some idiotic regex filter.
I guess the only solution is to self-host. I've even been migrating my dedicated server to a homelab I'm slowly building. But that's a very time-consuming option, has a high chance of breakage, and not even available for 99.5% of people. And most people don't wants to spend hours and hours of private time to babysit own email server, which is understandable. Finally, it's not free.
I wonder what would have to happen for people to become more digitally sovereign, but I doubt it'll ever happen. If anything, we're going in the other direction.
I registered an instagram account to share my art, and was banned entirely, immediately, before I could even upload an avatar, with zero explanation. I emailed several times, did the license scan thing, and even messaged support from my personal account, and I still have never gotten any sort of explanation.
shrug This and that other thread today about Slack just seems to be what happens when you're determined to remove as many humans from your processes as possible.
Try Pixelfed or even Bluesky. Pixelfed is the fediverse alternative to Instagram, and there are some independent app devs working on Bluesky apps to be similar in look to it.
You won't find the reach, but you'll find a little community of other artists that can be a lot more personal & fulfilling than you would find on mainstream social media.
I know this happens with a lot of companies but I see this as a direct consequence of Mark Zuckerberg owning companies
Everybody knows his history. Yes you can, "steal an idea". He does it to everyone. He did it to Snapchat. It shouldn't be a surprise the things he owns are substandard garbage
Unrelated to reproductive rights, but my private Instagram account got suspended for community guidelines violations out of the blue & I lost all access to my old photos, my friends, contacts, years of DMs. I don't have the slightest idea what triggered it (and of course they won't tell you), nor is there apparently any way I'm aware of to appeal. Interestingly, I still have access to meta[.]ai for whatever reason, so I'm wondering if there is some way to talk to it to get out of InstaJail, or finding a prompt to get it to give you more info on who to contact or ANYTHING at all.
However, after hunting around on reddit for solutions, I was quickly made aware of underground groups of individuals (hackers? I'm not sure what you'd call them) who offer account recovery for up to 1 to 2 grand per instance. These aren't just the people who send you phishing messages claiming to get your account back, but offer full services such as promotion, getting unbanned, having other users banned and etc.
We've seen news reports in the past where individuals or groups get backend access into Meta and then offer these sorts of features. [1]
But who else has access to these sorts of tools & features? I wouldn't be surprised at all if Meta moderators or employees are making a very nice side hustle for themselves doing this, as they'd have not only the access, but presumably know how to hide their tracks.
Just a theory. Anyway, if anyone has any ideas on getting an Instagram account back or filing an appeal or whatever, any info would be appreciated.
These are not hackers but Meta employees/contractors who make money on the side by using their access to internal support tooling/channels. It's a fireable offense (it's only intended for actual friends/family) but still happens a lot.
To be fair, he just said it's a fireable offense-- presumably (and according to the article he linked) to use the tools for people you don't know at all, not just to take money for it. (It's probably easier for Meta to prove an employee used the recovery tool than to prove they received money for it.) I do hope you get your account back, though.
Tbh, I'd be curious if it's even recoverable and what triggered the ban. I just got an email out of the blue asking me to fill out a captcha, reply to an SMS and send a selfie. I did all that and just got a reply I had violated "community guidelines" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Since it was a private account I never posted anything on, I was racking my brain what could have possibly got me flagged. All I did was reply to pics of ppl's pets (and sometimes cute girlies). Definitely nothing abusive.
From what I've read, the SMS was used just to automatically block any new account you make.
100%. These large social media companies are very capricious about what counts as breaking their rules, will kill your reach at the drop of a hat and will fold under the slightest bit of pressure from someone richer/better connected than you if the latter has any issue with your work or existence at all.
Gotta own your own platform to make sure you have a backup when that happens, and have at least some control over your own audience.
Having your own site on someone else's corporate service is no less of a risk of being shut out of your account. Free speech is only as free as the service you are using thinks it is.
There's risk and then there's RISK. A corporate service in the form of a simple VPS is cheap and can be had from a 1000 providers anywhere in the world. Very simple to change providers too. Nothing like the quasi-monopoly of FB/X/YT.
And VPS providers are mostly interchangeable. If one of them goes crazy and starts using AI to randomly ban customers, just take all your toys over to the next one. At the end of the day it's just a commodity root shell.
As long as? I'm not sure if there's a common way, largely practiced by many people where they don't own their own domain name that they can point anywhere?
It used to be common to let an outside agency run your website, and they may own the domain. It's probably still very common to manage your domain with your hosting company. If you get blacklisted by your hosting company, you may not be able to transfer your domain out.
No, it's much less of a risk, because companies that sell domain hosting services have an actual financial relationship with you and have much better support infrastructure in place because you're a paying customer. The risk is not zero--no risk is ever zero--but compared to your risk of Facebook doing something stupid and unwarranted and you being unable to get it fixed, the risk with a domain hosting company is pretty small.
I think there's only that risk if you're using a website building service like Wix. If you build your own site and then send it up to a dumb host, you can just send it up to another dumb host when the first one pisses you off. Hopefully, you're at least managing your own DNS records too, and like that service.
If cloudflare goes out of business, for example, their collapse would not count as an action against speech.
Conflating free speech with Terms of Services is to mix up MANY issues. There is a distinction that must be kept upheld, between private networks, and government power.
This does’t mean that the modern issue of free speech on privately owned platforms is magically solved, just that we need a more precise set of nouns, adjectives and verbs to frame the harms and limits that arise. Otherwise we simply get caught up in the simple between actual free speech and private rights.
If you have your own* domain and are reasonably diligent in keeping a local backup of your site then it is trivial to move the site to a new host. As others have aaid, web hosting is a commodity business.
I'm not sure if that's still a thing but I remember period where companies were using their fb profiles and messenger to provide customer support. That gave me shivers back then.
Back when the internet was a nice place, I mean years 1999-2010, it was full of websites managed by individuals. Each site was different, some were pretty-hideous, quite frequently with unusual knowledge and curiosities. It was so much fun to Google them (Google was a damn good search engine back then too). Most people knew how to use FTP to upload a basic HTML page.
Now it's an expert level knowledge, especially amongst younger generation. Private websites are nearly extinct, thanks to (and not only) Google and SEO cancer.
Corporations like Meta are scared of people taking control over their own data, so they put lots of effort into making the content creation process as brainless as possible.
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...
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.
I'm thinking of people who bought an Occulus Rift, which Meta then purchased and then forced people to associate a facebook account with it which they could then ban causing you to lose access to the hardware (and any games you purchased). A strong incentive to use the facebook account as little as possible since making a throwaway facebook account is now such a PITA. Infuriating since it was a bait and switch on an expensive piece of hardware. I guess the only winning move was to sell the device to some other sucker the moment the facebook purchase of Occulus was announced.
Don't worry this requirement was removed. Now you just need a Meta account which is totally different!
The Facebook acquisition of Oculus was in March 2014. The hardware that Oculus sold before that was a developer prototype.
There was no bait and switch because there was no consumer product.
There’s a lot to dislike about Meta, but this complaint doesn’t make sense. If anything, Meta has put millions more of VR devices into consumers’ hands by selling the Quest at a loss. Nobody has to buy it.
OpenID was aiming to be a decentralized digital identity solution for everyone but then companies opted out for own solutions.
I'm seeing more and more sites pushing for signing with facebook/apple/google accounts and I'm afraid how the Internet may look like in a few years.
It seems we're on path on total sanitization of online services, sites and content to the point where everything will be "safe", verified and authorized and so will be users.
I feel like this is a cultural value pretty common among modern companies, where the "proper channels" is a broken system and we have to work around it. We've seen it often, where the only way someone will get support requests looked at is by commenting here, on Twitter, etc. Once a furniture company wasn't really taking action on my warranty claim until I commented about it on a promotional Facebook post.
I bet they have a team of people whose job is to keep employees in a kind of trance. Part of that would involve responding swiftly to employee concerns so that the employees maintain the illusion that the company cares and that it was just a mistake. From the perspective of the employees, they must think their employers are extra nice.
They must think it reflects the broader reality of how they treat everyone else.
Firstly - Hah! this is the easier situation! This is Americans talking about reaching out to Americans. It’s even more fun when you are in another country, and need to go through your network to get attention to an issue.
Secondly - Everyone I know, who is in a T&S team or does content moderation hates this situation, and is glad that this is being highlighted. it’s considered unfair and absurd. Getting recourse because people know someone who know someone to get it to the right team, is NOT how things should work. Let alone at global levels.
I can give maybe a smaller firm or platform a pass. But at FAANG scales? Cmon.
——
This is also a reason why I think that Reddit dug its own grave, back when it found the testicular fortitude to oust moderators during the API black outs.
If a firm has the willingness to remove mods and craft new philosophies of engagement when the bottom line at risk - does it magically lose that capability during the remainder of the financial year?
Same with bugs. Reporting bugs rarely seems effective anymore. Maybe my use-cases are more unique, but sometimes I stumble upon things where there the bug I encounter is 2 years old with 0 responses from the company, but I don't know how many comments from customers.
And it's already a hassle to report, so actual amount of people encountering the issue is probably higher.
One example comes to mind... I can't ask my Google Mini anymore to ping my remote. Many reports. Nothing from Google.
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.
Another case was some fellow selling Python & Pandas educational content on FB and was completely banned from advertising because AI flagged it as promoting animal cruelty and then AI reviewed itself and said it has done nothing wrong.
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.
Yep. It's why the only way most people get their hacked YouTube channels back is by begging the Team YouTube account on Twitter for help, and hoping enough people bother the staff there that something actually gets fixed.
If you're a popular creator that doesn't have much of a social media following, friends at Google or lots of lawyer money, RIP any chance of getting your channel back before/after it gets banned due to the hackers.
There's a post on HN about someone being banned from Facebook because they violated (supposedly; who knows what violated even means) Whatsapp TOS from 3 years prior (possibly even before FB acquisition)
Someone needs to tell Zuckerberg about this thing called "antitrust" and not being a dick and that you can't run your company(ies????) like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
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?
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've been slowly migrating logins off of a @gmail.com email and onto an email at a domain that I own/control for this reason. It's tedious and feels a little like an overreaction (presumably the odds of this happening to individual users are pretty low). On the other hand, the thought of some faceless fraud algorithm deciding that I should no longer have access to the credentials I use to log in to my bank, investment accounts, DMV, etc and having no real recourse beyond posting on HN and hoping that a sympathetic employee reads is pretty scary.
(I didn't want to actually host my own mail stack, so I just have a custom domain set up with fastmail and point the MX to them. Their UI is great and a breath of fresh air compared to gmail. I guess they could in theory decide to lock me out randomly too, though I trust them to have actual customer support and can just point the MX somewhere else in the worst case)
What mail provider are you using?
Edit: NVM. I see Fastmail when I reread the comment.
> I didn't want to actually host my own mail stack
Is there a way to only host the receive portion?
I'm happy to pay someone to handle all the idiocy around sending email and getting it through Google and Microsoft, but I'd really like to hold my emails myself.
> > I didn't want to actually host my own mail stack > > Is there a way to only host the receive portion? > > I'm happy to pay someone to handle all the idiocy around sending email and getting it through Google and Microsoft, but I'd really like to hold my emails myself.
Sure. Set your MX to your own SMTP server but pay a mail delivery service to send your emails & use their SMTP servers as your outgoing server. You'll have to setup SPF & DKIM appropriately of course.
It's not trivial to do this, but it should be possible.
You could use a desktop e-mail client like Thunderbird and include its data in your backups and maybe occasionally export it somewhere in a standard exchange format for e-mail folders. You can even re-upload such local data to another e-email provider if you switch.
All of that seems easier than setting up a server to keep your e-mails.
If you have your own domain, you can do whatever you want (including splitting sending and receiving).
I use AWS SES. You pay 0.01 cent per e-mail.
Two email addrs, with your TX email having a Reply-To header pointing to the RX one?
No, that will get marked as spam super fast.
That has not been my experience, but one data point is not statistical data
I saw these spam mails start showing up a few months ago, and I was like WOW how is google infra just letting nefarious actors use their own domain to bounce spam/fishing emails?
Amusingly Firebase auth (a Google product) has such a bad reputation with GMail that standard procedure is to bring your own mail service. Or your password-reset emails are binned.
Firebase technicians allegedly attempted to contact gmail support, but found that gmail did not have an inbound support contact and thus the firebase technicians were unable to rectify their issue.*
*This entire post is fabricated satire. Though, I would not be shocked if it were true.
You should use this same technique to spam the CEO about your issue.
This has been going for months already, it will most likely never be fixed.
s/months/years
I just got my first one of those @google.com bounces to my Gmail today.
It gives scammers more plausibility too. If the top hit in a web search is Google's support page, which gives no phone number, then scammers can get race to get the number two hit with their number...
I've been having the same issue
Customer service is for customers, not for products. You are the product.
Oh you sweet summer child, Google gives the cold shoulder to everyone, including paying customers.
Including governments (except maybe US gov? But even that is not sure).
I’ve always wondered if litigation avenues would be a viable approach, if not dangerous
for google you are just a paying product
See, I've been wondering about this. I would have thought paying gives you a better chance of contacting, unlike Meta Verified which is useless. Is that not the case?
It really depends. Sales people will bend over backwards and will escalate things internally, but once they realize you “need” them (eg: for ads or due to lockin) they stop caring.
Used to work in marketing-adjacent teams and know this too well.
I've been an App Engine user for 15 years. Last year I needed some help and I had to pay some small amount for support and get an engineer to actually look at my account and tell me how to do something.
I don't remember how much it was, not much. I subscribed to the support for one month, then canceled. I've paid them hundreds a month for years, so it feels kind of cheap of them, but I did manage to get the help I needed.
I've been getting multiple of those a day too. It's pretty annoying. I'd love to treat them the way other junk mail gets treated but I don't want to inadvertently end up auto-binning legit mails from GMail or Google in the process.
I've been receiving this also. Rather annoying!! I wonder if abuse@ or postmaster@ would be able to help... /s
I did send my details to both of those locations, just in case. No response so far. I also posted on the artist formerly known as twitter, and I know I have some friends there in Google infra, I was hoping they'd pick up on it without calling them out specifically, but I might target them more specifically. Thought it sounds like it might be a deliberate, unfortunate, choice. I just can't understand why they'd want that.
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.
Buying an Oculus actually did allow me to successfully restore my wife's Facebook after it was hacked, thanks to finding probably the same thread you're referencing.
The amount of emotional capital held in various platforms is terrifying when you consider how easy it is to be locked out.
I now regularly "takeout" all of our actively used platforms and store them on physical media.
Does this still work?
The internet has been like this forever. In the 90s I was banned from hotmail for having an inappropriate email address because my last name is Cummings. No recourse for some idiotic regex filter.
I guess the only solution is to self-host. I've even been migrating my dedicated server to a homelab I'm slowly building. But that's a very time-consuming option, has a high chance of breakage, and not even available for 99.5% of people. And most people don't wants to spend hours and hours of private time to babysit own email server, which is understandable. Finally, it's not free.
I wonder what would have to happen for people to become more digitally sovereign, but I doubt it'll ever happen. If anything, we're going in the other direction.
Hi Richard
Clbuttic.
What happens if your last name is Cummings and your home address is in Penistone, South Yorkshire, England?
Or perhaps in the quaint fishing town of Dildo, Newfoundland.
Don’t forget about Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, England!
I registered an instagram account to share my art, and was banned entirely, immediately, before I could even upload an avatar, with zero explanation. I emailed several times, did the license scan thing, and even messaged support from my personal account, and I still have never gotten any sort of explanation.
shrug This and that other thread today about Slack just seems to be what happens when you're determined to remove as many humans from your processes as possible.
Try Pixelfed or even Bluesky. Pixelfed is the fediverse alternative to Instagram, and there are some independent app devs working on Bluesky apps to be similar in look to it.
You won't find the reach, but you'll find a little community of other artists that can be a lot more personal & fulfilling than you would find on mainstream social media.
https://pixelfed.org/
I know this happens with a lot of companies but I see this as a direct consequence of Mark Zuckerberg owning companies
Everybody knows his history. Yes you can, "steal an idea". He does it to everyone. He did it to Snapchat. It shouldn't be a surprise the things he owns are substandard garbage
Makes a good case to have separate brand accounts for nearly everything and to do little from your own personal identity accounts
Unrelated to reproductive rights, but my private Instagram account got suspended for community guidelines violations out of the blue & I lost all access to my old photos, my friends, contacts, years of DMs. I don't have the slightest idea what triggered it (and of course they won't tell you), nor is there apparently any way I'm aware of to appeal. Interestingly, I still have access to meta[.]ai for whatever reason, so I'm wondering if there is some way to talk to it to get out of InstaJail, or finding a prompt to get it to give you more info on who to contact or ANYTHING at all.
However, after hunting around on reddit for solutions, I was quickly made aware of underground groups of individuals (hackers? I'm not sure what you'd call them) who offer account recovery for up to 1 to 2 grand per instance. These aren't just the people who send you phishing messages claiming to get your account back, but offer full services such as promotion, getting unbanned, having other users banned and etc.
We've seen news reports in the past where individuals or groups get backend access into Meta and then offer these sorts of features. [1]
But who else has access to these sorts of tools & features? I wouldn't be surprised at all if Meta moderators or employees are making a very nice side hustle for themselves doing this, as they'd have not only the access, but presumably know how to hide their tracks.
Just a theory. Anyway, if anyone has any ideas on getting an Instagram account back or filing an appeal or whatever, any info would be appreciated.
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-instagram-fac...
These are not hackers but Meta employees/contractors who make money on the side by using their access to internal support tooling/channels. It's a fireable offense (it's only intended for actual friends/family) but still happens a lot.
Do you have proof of this though? Otherwise, we're just speculating it's a likely possibility.
I am a Meta employee. Don't want to disclose any inside info or dox myself but there's been other articles written about this, e.g. https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/17/23464297/meta-allegedly-...
Gotcha. Don't suppose you could help me with my Instagram account? :)
If pogue972 on Instagram suddenly got a reset email or something, I definitely wouldn't ask any questions.
To be fair, he just said it's a fireable offense-- presumably (and according to the article he linked) to use the tools for people you don't know at all, not just to take money for it. (It's probably easier for Meta to prove an employee used the recovery tool than to prove they received money for it.) I do hope you get your account back, though.
Oh, I thought maybe I'd made a friend... :'(
Tbh, I'd be curious if it's even recoverable and what triggered the ban. I just got an email out of the blue asking me to fill out a captcha, reply to an SMS and send a selfie. I did all that and just got a reply I had violated "community guidelines" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Since it was a private account I never posted anything on, I was racking my brain what could have possibly got me flagged. All I did was reply to pics of ppl's pets (and sometimes cute girlies). Definitely nothing abusive.
From what I've read, the SMS was used just to automatically block any new account you make.
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.
100%. These large social media companies are very capricious about what counts as breaking their rules, will kill your reach at the drop of a hat and will fold under the slightest bit of pressure from someone richer/better connected than you if the latter has any issue with your work or existence at all.
Gotta own your own platform to make sure you have a backup when that happens, and have at least some control over your own audience.
Having your own site on someone else's corporate service is no less of a risk of being shut out of your account. Free speech is only as free as the service you are using thinks it is.
There's risk and then there's RISK. A corporate service in the form of a simple VPS is cheap and can be had from a 1000 providers anywhere in the world. Very simple to change providers too. Nothing like the quasi-monopoly of FB/X/YT.
VPS providers are many orders of magnitude simpler and smaller corporate services than social media companies.
Remotely trying to correlate or compare them defies any reasonable semblance of comparability.
You can mail your own server to a co-location service if you want to host the metal yourself.
If you need to go a step further and not rely on one host, it's inexpensive enough to get multiple hosts.
And VPS providers are mostly interchangeable. If one of them goes crazy and starts using AI to randomly ban customers, just take all your toys over to the next one. At the end of the day it's just a commodity root shell.
Web hosting is, or can be a commodity. An organization that gets dropped by its web host can just get another.
Sure, but as long as you own you domain name you're a DNS update away of moving it elsewhere.
As long as? I'm not sure if there's a common way, largely practiced by many people where they don't own their own domain name that they can point anywhere?
It used to be common to let an outside agency run your website, and they may own the domain. It's probably still very common to manage your domain with your hosting company. If you get blacklisted by your hosting company, you may not be able to transfer your domain out.
If someone built you a house and retained the master keys to the house that's more on the buyer being lead through the process more ethically.
No, it's much less of a risk, because companies that sell domain hosting services have an actual financial relationship with you and have much better support infrastructure in place because you're a paying customer. The risk is not zero--no risk is ever zero--but compared to your risk of Facebook doing something stupid and unwarranted and you being unable to get it fixed, the risk with a domain hosting company is pretty small.
I think there's only that risk if you're using a website building service like Wix. If you build your own site and then send it up to a dumb host, you can just send it up to another dumb host when the first one pisses you off. Hopefully, you're at least managing your own DNS records too, and like that service.
If cloudflare goes out of business, for example, their collapse would not count as an action against speech.
Conflating free speech with Terms of Services is to mix up MANY issues. There is a distinction that must be kept upheld, between private networks, and government power.
This does’t mean that the modern issue of free speech on privately owned platforms is magically solved, just that we need a more precise set of nouns, adjectives and verbs to frame the harms and limits that arise. Otherwise we simply get caught up in the simple between actual free speech and private rights.
If you have your own* domain and are reasonably diligent in keeping a local backup of your site then it is trivial to move the site to a new host. As others have aaid, web hosting is a commodity business.
* yes, I know...
Web hosting is much, much, much more independent that posting on social media.
Social media is a web app and mobile app.
A website is just a website. Somehow being shut out of your own hosting is something else entirely.
I'm not sure if that's still a thing but I remember period where companies were using their fb profiles and messenger to provide customer support. That gave me shivers back then.
Back when the internet was a nice place, I mean years 1999-2010, it was full of websites managed by individuals. Each site was different, some were pretty-hideous, quite frequently with unusual knowledge and curiosities. It was so much fun to Google them (Google was a damn good search engine back then too). Most people knew how to use FTP to upload a basic HTML page.
Now it's an expert level knowledge, especially amongst younger generation. Private websites are nearly extinct, thanks to (and not only) Google and SEO cancer.
Corporations like Meta are scared of people taking control over their own data, so they put lots of effort into making the content creation process as brainless as possible.
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...
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.
I'm thinking of people who bought an Occulus Rift, which Meta then purchased and then forced people to associate a facebook account with it which they could then ban causing you to lose access to the hardware (and any games you purchased). A strong incentive to use the facebook account as little as possible since making a throwaway facebook account is now such a PITA. Infuriating since it was a bait and switch on an expensive piece of hardware. I guess the only winning move was to sell the device to some other sucker the moment the facebook purchase of Occulus was announced.
Don't worry this requirement was removed. Now you just need a Meta account which is totally different!
The Facebook acquisition of Oculus was in March 2014. The hardware that Oculus sold before that was a developer prototype.
There was no bait and switch because there was no consumer product.
There’s a lot to dislike about Meta, but this complaint doesn’t make sense. If anything, Meta has put millions more of VR devices into consumers’ hands by selling the Quest at a loss. Nobody has to buy it.
When I bought my Quest, I was allowed (initially) to only use an Oculus account. The FB requirement came later.
You don’t need to imagine. It happens frequently.
And not just for stuff like Uber.
You can get locked out of the IRS, Social Security, etc. in the same way.
https://www.id.me/government
The online "sign in with X/Y/Z" services are a digital identity provider.
We are citizens of private corporations that are social networks.
There are not many laws there for recourse or communication.
OpenID was aiming to be a decentralized digital identity solution for everyone but then companies opted out for own solutions.
I'm seeing more and more sites pushing for signing with facebook/apple/google accounts and I'm afraid how the Internet may look like in a few years. It seems we're on path on total sanitization of online services, sites and content to the point where everything will be "safe", verified and authorized and so will be users.
I feel like this is a cultural value pretty common among modern companies, where the "proper channels" is a broken system and we have to work around it. We've seen it often, where the only way someone will get support requests looked at is by commenting here, on Twitter, etc. Once a furniture company wasn't really taking action on my warranty claim until I commented about it on a promotional Facebook post.
I've been banned for over a decade from leaving reviews on Amazon. I have no idea why.
I bet they have a team of people whose job is to keep employees in a kind of trance. Part of that would involve responding swiftly to employee concerns so that the employees maintain the illusion that the company cares and that it was just a mistake. From the perspective of the employees, they must think their employers are extra nice.
They must think it reflects the broader reality of how they treat everyone else.
Not opening a Facebook account for your organization is how you can avoid these.
Oh boy isn’t this the truth.
Firstly - Hah! this is the easier situation! This is Americans talking about reaching out to Americans. It’s even more fun when you are in another country, and need to go through your network to get attention to an issue.
Secondly - Everyone I know, who is in a T&S team or does content moderation hates this situation, and is glad that this is being highlighted. it’s considered unfair and absurd. Getting recourse because people know someone who know someone to get it to the right team, is NOT how things should work. Let alone at global levels.
I can give maybe a smaller firm or platform a pass. But at FAANG scales? Cmon.
——
This is also a reason why I think that Reddit dug its own grave, back when it found the testicular fortitude to oust moderators during the API black outs.
If a firm has the willingness to remove mods and craft new philosophies of engagement when the bottom line at risk - does it magically lose that capability during the remainder of the financial year?
Great article. Another problem with Meta’s moderation on political topics is they block content worldwide rather than in the united states only
Same with bugs. Reporting bugs rarely seems effective anymore. Maybe my use-cases are more unique, but sometimes I stumble upon things where there the bug I encounter is 2 years old with 0 responses from the company, but I don't know how many comments from customers.
And it's already a hassle to report, so actual amount of people encountering the issue is probably higher.
One example comes to mind... I can't ask my Google Mini anymore to ping my remote. Many reports. Nothing from Google.
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.
Another case was some fellow selling Python & Pandas educational content on FB and was completely banned from advertising because AI flagged it as promoting animal cruelty and then AI reviewed itself and said it has done nothing wrong.
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.
Yep. It's why the only way most people get their hacked YouTube channels back is by begging the Team YouTube account on Twitter for help, and hoping enough people bother the staff there that something actually gets fixed.
If you're a popular creator that doesn't have much of a social media following, friends at Google or lots of lawyer money, RIP any chance of getting your channel back before/after it gets banned due to the hackers.
We all need to get off of centralized platforms quickly.
There's a post on HN about someone being banned from Facebook because they violated (supposedly; who knows what violated even means) Whatsapp TOS from 3 years prior (possibly even before FB acquisition)
Someone needs to tell Zuckerberg about this thing called "antitrust" and not being a dick and that you can't run your company(ies????) like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
Now do match.com
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?
we need to move away from centralized platforms asap