What Made Meta Suddenly Ban Tens of Thousands of Accounts? (bbc.com) 93
"For months, tens of thousands of people around the world have been complaining Meta has been banning their Instagram and Facebook accounts in error..." the BBC reported this month...
More than 500 of them have contacted the BBC to say they have lost cherished photos and seen businesses upended — but some also speak of the profound personal toll it has taken on them, including concerns that the police could become involved.
Meta acknowledged a problem with the erroneous banning of Facebook Groups in June, but has denied there is wider issue on Facebook or Instagram at all. It has repeatedly refused to comment on the problems its users are facing — though it has frequently overturned bans when the BBC has raised individual cases with it.
One examples is a woman lost the Instagram profile for her boutique dress shop. ("Over 5,000 followers, gone in an instant.") "After the BBC sent questions about her case to Meta's press office, her Instagram accounts were reinstated... Five minutes later, her personal Instagram was suspended again — but the account for the dress shop remained."
Another user spent a month appealing. ("In June, the BBC understands a human moderator double checked," but concluded he'd breached a policy.) And then "his account was abruptly restored at the end of July. 'We're sorry we've got this wrong,' Instagram said in an email to him, adding that he had done nothing wrong." Hours after the BBC contacted Meta's press office to ask questions about his experience, he was banned again on Instagram and, for the first time, Facebook... His Facebook account was back two days later — but he was still blocked from Instagram.
None of the banned users in the BBC's examples were ever told what post breached the platform's rules. Over 36,000 people have signed a petition accusing Meta of falsely banning accounts; thousands more are in Reddit forums or on social media posting about it. Their central accusation — Meta's AI is unfairly banning people, with the tech also being used to deal with the appeals. The only way to speak to a human is to pay for Meta Verified, and even then many are frustrated.
Meta has not commented on these claims. Instagram states AI is central to its "content review process" and Meta has outlined how technology and humans enforce its policies.
The Guardian reports there's been "talk of a class action against Meta over the bans." Users report Meta has typically been unresponsive to their pleas for assistance, often with standardised responses to requests for review, almost all of which have been rejected... But the company claims there has not been an increase in incorrect account suspension, and the volume of users complaining was not indicative of new targeting or over-enforcement. "We take action on accounts that violate our policies, and people can appeal if they think we've made a mistake," a spokesperson for Meta said.
"It happened to me this morning," writes long-time Slashdot reader Daemon Duck," asking if any other Slashdot readers had their personal (or business) account unreasonably banned. (And wondering what to do next...)
Meta acknowledged a problem with the erroneous banning of Facebook Groups in June, but has denied there is wider issue on Facebook or Instagram at all. It has repeatedly refused to comment on the problems its users are facing — though it has frequently overturned bans when the BBC has raised individual cases with it.
One examples is a woman lost the Instagram profile for her boutique dress shop. ("Over 5,000 followers, gone in an instant.") "After the BBC sent questions about her case to Meta's press office, her Instagram accounts were reinstated... Five minutes later, her personal Instagram was suspended again — but the account for the dress shop remained."
Another user spent a month appealing. ("In June, the BBC understands a human moderator double checked," but concluded he'd breached a policy.) And then "his account was abruptly restored at the end of July. 'We're sorry we've got this wrong,' Instagram said in an email to him, adding that he had done nothing wrong." Hours after the BBC contacted Meta's press office to ask questions about his experience, he was banned again on Instagram and, for the first time, Facebook... His Facebook account was back two days later — but he was still blocked from Instagram.
None of the banned users in the BBC's examples were ever told what post breached the platform's rules. Over 36,000 people have signed a petition accusing Meta of falsely banning accounts; thousands more are in Reddit forums or on social media posting about it. Their central accusation — Meta's AI is unfairly banning people, with the tech also being used to deal with the appeals. The only way to speak to a human is to pay for Meta Verified, and even then many are frustrated.
Meta has not commented on these claims. Instagram states AI is central to its "content review process" and Meta has outlined how technology and humans enforce its policies.
The Guardian reports there's been "talk of a class action against Meta over the bans." Users report Meta has typically been unresponsive to their pleas for assistance, often with standardised responses to requests for review, almost all of which have been rejected... But the company claims there has not been an increase in incorrect account suspension, and the volume of users complaining was not indicative of new targeting or over-enforcement. "We take action on accounts that violate our policies, and people can appeal if they think we've made a mistake," a spokesperson for Meta said.
"It happened to me this morning," writes long-time Slashdot reader Daemon Duck," asking if any other Slashdot readers had their personal (or business) account unreasonably banned. (And wondering what to do next...)
A good reason to avoid Facebook (Score:5, Informative)
You can't trust them and don't use them for anything important. Many AIs hallucinate randomly or are trigged by things like mixed language, jargong or false hash positives where a legal and an illegal image can have the same hash.
Re:A good reason to avoid Facebook (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just about AI and not just FB, Google (and probably MS ) also.
The worst is if you use a gmail account as your primary account and then it gets locked for some reason. Now you basically can't even "email support" since you don't have access to it. You're possibly locked out of banks and all sorts of 3rd party services.
Locked out of your phone, out of google drive files and calendar and contacts.
It's pretty scary stuff. I ... haven't done what i should to prevent this. ( like pay for a proton mail account and use that as primary and gmail as backup or some ??? other thing)
Re: (Score:2)
Lame, really.
Re:A good reason to avoid Facebook (Score:5, Informative)
Free services come with no tech support, and therefore, should not be relied-upon for anything important. It's that simple.
Proton is not the only paid mail provider. There are others, like Fastmail (which I prefer). These services are very affordable ($30 bucks a year give or take), and the interface is nice and clean since they don't serve you ads. And they have every incentive to give you customer service when you need it.
There is also Apple's iCloud mail. It's "free" in that there is no yearly subscription for the basic tier, but you set one up when you buy Apple hardware, so they still make money that way, and still have the right incentives. I have one of these addresses too and have received customer support from living, breathing, human beings at Apple the one time I needed it.
So, that's my recommendation to everyone: Use one of these instead of Google/Yahoo/Microflop/AnythingFree. And if you need to host a website for your business, use something you actually pay for, not Meta.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
These services auto-renew. And even if you can't pay, they only suspend the account, they don't just instantly delete everything, so you can re-activate it when you do pay.
Re: (Score:3)
Free services come with no tech support, and therefore, should not be relied-upon for anything important. It's that simple.
That does not follow. A free service none the less makes a profit somewhere and there is an expectation of tech support, especially when that service gate keeps the industry.
In the EU at least the consumer rights directive makes no distinction between a free service and a paid for service.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh I certainly agree with your reasoning: free services should come with tech support. But that does not mean they actually do. Google, in particular, has been notorious for giving users the middle finger when they were in need.
I would like to see these free services get nailed in EU, under this "consumer rights directive." I would further like to see America follow the EU's example, in that case. But until then, I am sticking with cheap paid services that have proven their reliability.
Re: (Score:2)
In the EU at least the consumer rights directive makes no distinction between a free service and a paid for service.
True. But there is a very fundamental difference between them wanting to provide good service and you having to force them to.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. For email, you can also use your ISP in many cases, many domain-registrars offer it, and you can run your own if you want to (I do, about 10h/year effort is my estimate). The problem is that the big and "free" ones do not care one bit about you.
Re: A good reason to avoid Facebook (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Google pretty much has no support, if the automated system doesn't work for you then you're screwed.
I have a gmail account with recovery email and recovery phone numbers set, i still have access to the recovery email but because i no longer have the phone number i can't access the account.. Luckily it's not an important account, i set it up to test something and i keep getting emails about it but i can't do anything about them.
Same with any free service, you shouldn't rely on a free service like facebook or
Re: (Score:3)
For an SME, the only sane thing these days is to use a smaller, local service provider for email and probably everything else. If thy are larger, they can also run their own infrastructure. It is not that hard or expensive. The whole "cloud" idea is just as bad as well as soon as you depend on it working.
Re:A good reason to avoid Facebook (Score:4, Interesting)
You can't trust them and don't use them for anything important.
What's the alternative? You may not know this, but one of the reasons Facebook is designated as a gatekeeper in the DMA is because promotion on the platform of businesses (especially in the arts world) has a material impact on revenue.
What your post is equivalent to is saying "You can't trust advertising, don't advertise" and then wondering why no one knows about your business.
As for those people who lost personal pictures on their personal accounts, yes they are idiots. But even with personal cases there is a clear problem here. Meta wants to push Messenger as a messaging app for people to communicate with their friends, but banning you effectively cuts you off in this regard.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Because most end user ISPs won't allow that, or will actively prevent it by putting you behind CGNAT.
Re: (Score:2)
Because the network doesn't care about you. And "the network" in this case is the social one, I.e. where the people are. Websites are dead ends for all but managing final sales. Marketing on social media is many industries is really a key part of their income.
Shouting into the void doesn't help. Even if you don't want to be in a room, it helps to shout in a room full of people.
Re: (Score:3)
Yes. You cannot really depend on any of the big providers these days and that is getting worse.
Were accounts also legitimately banned? (Score:2)
I wonder if they legitimately banned a larger number of accounts, probably using a classifier or LLM to decide which posts are bad. And since LLMs are not smart, a lot of good accounts were banned along with the bad ones.
Have business owners finally learned... (Score:5, Informative)
Secret 20th Century hack to protect your online presence...
Don't use what is essentially a privately-owned gated community to host your site. Run your own fucking website on a normal pubic webhosting company, where anyone in the globe can reach you and you won't see your site taken down at the whims of a third-world moderation team or power-tripping CEO.
Re:Have business owners finally learned... (Score:5, Funny)
You don't use Facebook for the hosting (Score:3, Insightful)
When you have a company that isn't evil you get something like steam where good games get promoted to audiences that want them.
Facebook does have some redeeming qualities in terms of actual social media. I know quite a few people who find friends and communities and fellow hobbyists using Facebook.
On the other hand Facebook could care less about how or why you engage so it is more than happy to use rage bait, racism, or any other of a number of terrible human tra
Re: (Score:2)
What proportion of those who are potential customers are on each of those sites?
It really shouldn't be your only internet presence, you should have your own web site, that's linked to by various social media, but the relative importance of the different social media is "What proportion customers are on *that* site?".
It's remarkably hard to drive traffic (Score:2)
So yeah I guess you can make your own website but if you've got three people a month hitting it then let's just wasted time and money.
Re: (Score:2)
Run your own fucking website on a normal pubic webhosting company
How will that help promote your business on social media sites? The problem with 20th Century hacks is they only work well in the 20th century. There are entire classes of businesses that may as well not exist if they don't have a detailed presence on Instagram, Facebook, and other social media.
Welcome to the 21st Century, yeah it sucks but I didn't get to choose when my mom and dad boinked.
Re: (Score:2)
There are entire classes of businesses that may as well not exist if they don't have a detailed presence on Instagram, Facebook, and other social media.
Indeed, I can recall a few. Porn, exhibitionism for sale, "shopping like a billionaire".
What else?
Re: (Score:2)
No, porn does not need promotion on social media. People who want to see porn will go to porn sites. They are not difficult to find.
People find local businesses through facebook and google maps. And probably apple maps, but... the poor fuckers.
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, I forgot, coaching, that's the other "business" one can find on the "social networking" in addition to porn, exhibitionism and promotion of cheap junk from China.
Re: (Score:2)
Music, art, handmade goods, basically anything that isn't mainstream.
You basically failed on all fronts with your comment. Porn is virtually banned, as is exhibitionism for sale, and "shopping like a billionaire" (god Temu is a cancer) is not done through accounts on social media, it's done through accounts on AdSense and Meta Ads accounts which isn't what anyone is talking about.
Re: (Score:2)
So, basically, there is nothing one wants there and I haven't lost anything since leaving the boil of "soshul networking" 15 years ago.
Good to know from an "insider".
Obvious answer... (Score:3)
They're using AI to do this? Duh?
Kinda doubt some of those stories (Score:3)
DSA rule 17 is pretty clear, they have to give clear and specific reasons for a ban. So for the Dutch victim just saying "account integrity" would never stand up in court.
Re: (Score:2)
...would never stand up in court.
Court? What court? When you pay nothing and get nothing that's not "damages". It's life.
For some, as stated in the story, it's their actual business. They even likely either paid for the account, or for ads, or both.
Re:Kinda doubt some of those stories (Score:4, Informative)
The moderation decision impacted her business, so there are damages.
Any breach of DSA obligations allows them to be sued for compensation of those damages, no contract or payment needed. See article 54 of the DSA.
Re: (Score:2)
...would never stand up in court.
Court? What court?
I see you have no clue how the DSA works. Maybe get some info before shooting your mouth off?
Re: (Score:2)
DSA rule 17 is pretty clear
"Every win fails eventually"? Or were you thinking of Rule 36, "No matter how fucked up it is, there is always worse than what you just saw"?
Re: (Score:2)
Perfect (Score:2)
I have a perfect methodology for avoiding having any accounts that get banned.
Friends don't let friends use Metastabook (Score:5, Insightful)
Friends don't let friends use Metastabook. Remember, Metastabook's entire business model is based on reinforcing your negative thoughts.
OK, here come the paid Metastabook social media troll downvotes. Rotten organization from top to bottom.
Re: (Score:2)
Friends don't let friends use Metastabook
What about businesses? Do you let businesses use Metastabook? I mean they are a place where promotion is a big positive in a whole class of industries.
Re: (Score:3)
Putting your business into the hands of Metastabook seems like an incredibly bad business decision.
Re: (Score:2)
What if it is the business decision that your relevant industry made? It seems like a bad business decision to *not* market in the ways your target audience expects right?
I mean what's the risk to your business other than a bit of time used to manage your social media account? The reward is clear, you can tell that by the fact that people put actual time and effort into maintaining those accounts as it boosts their returns for relatively low investment.
By the way the world has been like this since the early
This one is easy (Score:2)
NOT A FREE WEBSITE (Score:5, Insightful)
If your business has no website and you rely on a FaceBook page you should remember that every day it actually works you're getting MORE than your money's worth. One day when it's OFFLINE you're getting exactly your money's worth -zero-.
If you need the web in order to interact with clients, vendors, and potential ones, GET A REAL WEBSITE. Only then would you have reason to pitch a fit when your "5,000" clients can't reach you.
Seriously, FB and IG are great for keeping up with grandma's knitting or junior's skateboarding or whatever stupid meaningless crap you like, but it's NOT a BUSINESS gateway.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
If your business has no website, you deserve to go out of business.
Fastest way to make me lose interest in your business? Not have a website.
Re: (Score:1)
SO you're a self-hating homosexual.
South Park did it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Bye Felicia
This is pretty standard for social media (Score:4, Interesting)
It's one of the many reasons I wouldn't want to be a professional YouTuber. It is incredibly high stress work. It takes years and years to build up a following and once you do you're guaranteed to have trolls going after your channel to try and get it banned for fun. Stuff like fake copyright notices and whatnot.
And you have to be pretty enormous to be immune to that. Even channels with hundreds of thousands of views have been taken off line by a bunch of trolls here and there.
I'd say about 2 or 3 times a year some professional YouTube where I subscribe to has their channel either stolen or taken down by trolls.
Meta[stasize] is evil. (Score:2)
A cancer of the internet. There's no other explanation.
Meta has finally understood the power of denial .. (Score:2)
Uhhh (Score:4, Insightful)
They'll ban you for (Score:1)
trying to create an account from behind a corporate firewall, for one thing.
Good thing I've got other personal email addresses...
I remember when the face space was a workstation in Zuck's dorm room. And it lost data and pix every time he poked at it to add features.
Not much changed it seems. The weight of the crown did not settle his head....
What perfect timing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
I tried to create a twitter account. Just personal use, nothing interesting. No content since I was, you know, trying to CREATE an account.
I never was successful. Eventually just gave up. Oh well.
Re: What perfect timing (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I was totally unable to sign up for discord, got instantly banned and told to contact support. I even took full logs of all the traffic in burpsuite and sent them to support but never heard anything.
My assumption is it's due to the CGNAT here, some other customer of the same ISP did something and since discord still doesn't support ipv6 all the traffic gets merged together.
Re: (Score:1)
I just was not that motivated. I mean, just another time suck that is probably best avoided anyway. It didn't take much for me to say "oh well" and move on to some other way to waste my time.
Facebook doesn't allow new accounts? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Same! It is indeed very suspicious, why would you ever make a FB account? Crazy.
Best way to hurt them (Score:3)
It's not using the average Facebook user is something on the order of $100 a year to them. Take their money away and stop using them. Yeah you'll scroll on your phone less it'll be better for you.
The easy answer (Score:3)
br. This inevitable rot eventually infests every aspect of a organization. From development to support. All it takes is complexity due to size and time for management to corrupt every process. I have seen it at several different companies and organizations over the years and have no reason to see meta as being in anyway different. It seems worse with 'social' tech companies.
Tens of Thousands? (Score:2)
Tens of Thousands? That's approximately 0.000001% of the Brad Pitt Official romance scammer accounts. Why not ban all of them?
Administer a group, constantly reporting fake acco (Score:4, Insightful)
Banned for "advertising" because I helped a guy (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Err different thing. You fell afoul of some idiot running a group. Nothing at all to do with Facebook, of Facebook sucking, everything to do with morons on the internet.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Try changing your date of birth to todays date. Instaban with no recovery possible.
Re: (Score:2)
Try changing your date of birth to todays date. Instaban with no recovery possible.
is this really true? If so, I'm going to try and start a new version of the "Facebook does not have my permission" meme telling my friends and family that updating their date of birth will protect their personal information somehow. I might be preventing a few dozen people from an inevitable romance or pig butchering scam, and we ALL know that Facebook does nothing to prevent those scams from thriving on their platform.
Sometimes a clean sweep is good. (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't rely on the permanence of accounts on these "free" social media portals. Reddit blew away all of my accounts (primary and alts, some with more than 10 years of good quality contributions) based on a couple of posts that were flagged by their automated tools.
The flipside is that periodic wiping of your social media presence is a good thing as it reduces the amount of information about you that's available to others (although, I'm sure that in my case, Reddit will most likely not purge my data from their own data mining).
Slopes game room (Score:3)
cyberpunk here we come (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the part about the cyberpunk genre that gets sidelined so easily for the visuals and computer stuff - corps making the rules up as they please.
If you are arrested and put on trial, you have a right to be told what you did wrong.
But corps can fuck you over and never explain anything.
Sadly, we missed the point at which we could've said "well, you're basically a public place now and here's the set of rules you need to follow".
Re: (Score:2)
That's a really good point.
I for one am not anti-corporations. And in the last 10 or 20 years it just seems that there's far too much a concentration of power and influence, especially as they also influence each other. And it isn't even some grand plan, it's just the way the systems play out. If the corporation was a technology, we'd have to put it into the bucket of things which are too advanced for use to manage wisely, like nukes. And we've done it to ourselves, as maybe one or two billion people work f
Re: (Score:2)
And when I say 10 or 20 that's just because I haven't studied history and so there's obviously injustices and damage caused by corps probably going right back to their original time of invention.
The Corporation:
The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
Joel Bakan
can be an interesting read.
Re: (Score:2)
Sadly, we missed the point at which we could've said "well, you're basically a public place now and here's the set of rules you need to follow".
We didn't miss it in a sense that we didn't realize it was happened. It just a lot of people liked when banning was weaponized against their political opponents and now its use is entrenched.
Grey bans (Score:2)
It seems part of Meta's issue is that they only have "ban" or "no ban" in their toolbox. Wrongdoing complaints have to be thoroughly investigated, and they err on one side or the other. Why not create more options, like:
* tarpit ban: require logging in again after each action - people can still use their account somewhat, for attackers it becomes annoying, rate-limit how many followers can see new posts (first 10 after 1 hour, first 100 after 2 hours, etc).
* hidden ban: hide all activity of a user to non-fr
If your business depends on Meta/Instagram.... (Score:3)
lost cherished photos and seen businesses upended (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe you should make sure not to be that dependent from Meta?
Backup your photos. Get a homepage for your business!
Don't use Meta's products in the first place (Score:1)
Not worth the effort... (Score:3)
Look, Meta's content moderation efforts are garbage. I left the platform because of things like flagging security camera video and stills as "AI generated"... which is sort of ironic. Or more likely "moronic" given their use of AI. Their "community standards" Billy-Bubbas were all really Trumpers trying to force their world views on everyone else. My timeline went full "proud-trash white-boy" three years ago and I dumped them and never looked back. They don't deserve my trust and they'll never have it again, even if they merge with a cigarette manufacturer and change their name to hide their identity. (Again.) It was time to just leave and find different venues to be in.
Don't use Facebook. It's a crappy platform driven by a giant, malevolent company that will be happy to kill you or let you die if they can make a buck off of it. LinkedIn is just "Facebook For Work" and they're just as bad since Microsoft bought them. You need Need NEED to understand, these large platforms operate on a "cash and kill" basis and they don't care if they got it wrong on ten thousand accounts when they have hundreds of millions of users. THEY DON'T DESERVE YOUR TRUST. There, I said it. Don't use them. Find somewhere else to be, because you're not really connecting with people on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and their ilk anymore. You're just subjecting yourself to the Dopamine "drip drip drip" that they pedal and they REALLY need your attention addiction to push their advertising so that they can make more money. And when you die, they believe there will be someone in line behind you to take your place so you really don't matter that much. Just say no to big social media, you'll be happier, healthier, and live longer.
They banned me instantly (Score:2)
I never had a FB account. Tried to make one last week to comment on a lost dog running up and down in our street. As soon as I made my account, it was banned.