AT&T wrote me up for missing pages while I was battling cancer! And I supposedly had std/ltd/fmla/etc. my current job , which I’m grateful for beyond words , would just about be sick at the idea of treating anyone like that.
When it’s in a status where they’re demanding ID it “should be” deactivated.
Now they will delete the account after some time if if you refuse to give them ID. But they didn’t always do that, which meant they had your data and refuse to give it up. Basically forever.
They’re not a great company and they don’t care about anything. You might be better off claiming you live in California USA and demanding they delete it under CCPA, than to try as EU Right to be forgotten or EU privacy. And that’s dismal too because your laws are supposed to be better than ours.
You should be able to get a UPS store Mail Drop for a month or two while you correspond with them and or the California attorney generals office and raise some hell. Yes it’s garbage to suggest this but it works. They take ID and all that over the web to open a mailbox and “voila I live in California now.” If you have any friends online there , just ask if you can “live there” and get some mail there while you write letters to the AG and or meta
They *have to* comply with the California request. I had to resort to this to get Kinto Share to stop accessing my background and credit every year. (Another trash fire company that doesn’t care how much you beg threaten or cry.)
But if the deactivated account was still there for you to try and access and for fb to reactivate it and then you come and try to impersonate that old account with a new one the system has good reasons not let you do that and not telling the potential identity thief about these reasons is the right way to do it.
I agree with you too and I think most of this is automated. A client triggered this like you did and the only way I found was to get a dedicated phone with a new sim (for social media accounts). I don't even dare to check if the trigger account is still there (they promised to delete it after some time) - I know the one from before that, which triggered the ban is still fine - nothing happening there in 8 years. Why can't it be simple like skype in the old days when Mum made a new account every time she forgot her password...
The point is not "This is fine" vs "This is not", it's that the exact same images are allowed by advertisers, but not allowed from users. It is a blatant, damning example of who the customers are, and who matters, advertisers or users.
If you don't want it, that's reasonable. If you think we should be less strict, you can make that argument too. It's a personal choice, a line each user has to decide for themselves (which is why centralized and centrally-moderated social media can't really work: we all draw different lines, and few of us agree with where Facebook's line is).
Right now though, nobody wins: advertisers are given one set of rules, and users another, so under the current system, most parties lose. Advertisers could be banned if they draw too much heat. Users bristle under the hypocrisy. Facebook comes out ahead though, with that sweet ad revenue
Meta has failed (abysmally) at identifying and categorizing content where you’ve said “show me less of this.”
Bluesky’s not my favorite website but Xblock is proof that the app can go “this is a twitter screenshot and she doesn’t want to see those” at scale.
AI could identify, label, and hide all of these things.
On bluesky it already does: “this is rude” or “this content promotes self harm” , I wish both websites could suppress , snooze, or completely nuke “viral” or political content be it left or right. In bluesky’s case it’s not that I disagree with them. It’s just that I’ve had this shit that I more or less agree with shoved down my throat from every angle for a decade and I’m exhausted and don’t want to see or engage with it anymore. People who have nothing else to say 24/7 every single day of their life and mine just need to go away and I wish the AI on bluesky would just let me filter people whose content is primarily political temper tantrums because I don’t have the time or will to mute or block them all so I just don’t use the product.
In fact for moderation purposes, Facebook already is doing that on their back end. (a few years ago you could see automatically generated alt text like “a woman holding a baby” though I don’t use meta at the present time and don’t know if it’s still doing this.)
AI is already analyzing the memes and purging ones with themes they don’t like on FB though . Unlike bluesky moderation, it’s not presented as something I can leverage or access to make my experience more enjoyable on Facebook.
But that’s not how they’re leveraging AI right now. They won’t let it prevent me from seeing memes posts and content with themes **i** don’t like.
It just seems I’m doing the google -> bing -> yandex thing a lot now.
And then I don’t bother with many competitors because they’re all bing based anyway.
Way down the list sometimes I resort to Brave search. Not because it’s good. But in fact, because it’s so bad, it might be indexing something the others tried getting rid of for a good year or two after everyone else tried to memory hole it.
Which has helped me pull cached versions of something interesting “to me” that wasn’t interesting enough for someone else to have gotten with archive.today
Think the most recent one I went down the whole rabbit hole on was a tv show called “that’s my bush” from Comedy Central. I was willing to buy them but they were Unobtainium. I did end up finding the episodes on archive.org and on torrents, via yandex. Great example of something harmless and hilarious that Big Social and Big Search just HAS to protect my delicate sensibilities and my fragile mind from.
Just to underscore how stupid and petty some of this stuff has gotten. Even if it’s not outright censorship of (at best) tangentially “political” content (they had planned on lampooning whoever won, thinking Al Gore was going to be president, and it’s the same guys who did South Park so it’s culturally and historically interesting to some of us) it proves how increasingly irrelevant Google has become.
Google and Bing both hid their availability on archive.org from me and I would not have thought to look there. Meanwhile, first hit on Yandex.
Twitter used to have a problem with retaliation if you dared talk back or correct the “wrong person” (mass reporting, suspending, taking down anyone who bruises an influencers massive ego - which still works unfortunately and is still a problem under Musk. But CN made sure this wouldn’t happen to you for telling the truth.)
Or a minor nitpicking comment or correction becomes a flame war and now someone’s digging up your high school year book photo or your DUI mugshot from 20 years ago. (Root cause being, again, twitters retaliatory culture) CN just kinda stops people from shooting the messenger.
And sometimes the messenger sucks but still has a point.
CN is a twitter-specific solution to Twitter-specific problems.
It would have also been good if they’d stop suspending people with no human review just because an influencers army of flying monkeys reported them. It “only” takes about 50 and then you’re done forever and all appeals denied. This is one of several reasons I don’t use Twitter, none of which are political or about it’s supposed “owner.”
You can’t block these guys, god forbid you reply to one- no thanks
The Fed is cutting its balance sheet and thus losing money [1]. (When the Fed wants to lower rates it buys bonds, thus raising their price. That creates accounting profits. When it wants to prop rates up it sells bonds; that depresses their price leading to accounting losses.)
The Fed isn’t pocketing change owed to the Treasury. It hasn’t properly owed anything on account of having shrunk its balance sheet by trillions of dollars [2].
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