Comment by dgoldstein0
11 days ago
My bet is that some sort of auto ban logic kicked in, maybe due to abuse of reporting features. It'd if course be worse if a human moderator took it down or affirmed such a decision but not impossible.
Meta and other big tech usually over-relies on automated enforcement because it's easier on their wallets than hiring enough moderators to keep up in near-real time. And it's hella easy for a group of motivated people to coordinate flagging of content, which the automation often takes at face value.
Clearly having public spaces in private hands like this is tricky, as if we try to require better moderation that ends up to expensive, private interests will probably find a way to just kick anything controversial / political off their platforms.
Agree, especially given the suspension only lasted 90 minutes.
If Meta actually wanted to deplatform the No Kings, they would nuke it permanently and handwave terrorism or national security or something. (See also, Reddit's long track record of nuking inconvenient subs like /r/TheDonald, back in the days when they were out of favor.)
r/TheDonald wasn't nuked because of "inconvenience", but rather because the mods were unable or unwilling to control hate speech, threats of violence, and other abusive behavior. Nor was there a "long track record" -- it was one of about 2000 subs that were nuked in one major purge (many of them were inactive). As for "back in the days", Reddit still bans such behavior.
The suspension that was public facing lasted 90 minutes, but they couldn’t log into the account for hours
See https://bsky.app/profile/ezralevin.bsky.social/post/3my43atj...
> like /r/TheDonald
Lets people forget, theDonald created entirely new ways of trolling r/all and by extension everyone who never wanted anything to do with them.
This included having multiple posts trend one beneath the other to let people know what they thought.
This is ignoring the stuff that happened within the subreddit. When they got booted and went to whatever the other site was they were overrun with hate speech so bad that even their own mods had to reintroduce bans.
I'm not sure why you think Meta would take such a heavy approach, as opposed to just the right amount at the right time for the minimal price and the least commitment.
As if auto-moderation is an excuse? In past Meta/Facebook has heavily hired human moderators.
We're seriously not going to start abdicating responsibility to automated machines, are we?
That's a done deal -- Facebook started letting their human moderators (and other contracted workers) go in 2023, and then switched to "free speech" automated moderation in Jan 2025.
One of the contributing factors was a $52 million settlement in 2020 for causing PTSD in those human moderators -- dealing with all that abusive shit was very emotionally taxing.
I agree with most, except the settlement is definitely not the straw that broke the camels back. Meta has larger contracts than that with smaller outsourcers.
Trust and safety is a cost center, and not valued in Tech.
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In the before times, we used government regulation to enforce private company responsibility in accordance with authority.
If Meta and X want to be a public square, then one of the costs should be hiring enough human moderators to rapidly review critical cases (political, health, hate/conspiracy, etc).
If they don't... fine, then make money doing something else.
But at their current scale, this is really a resource allocation question about whether their margin is a few points higher or lower.
Absolving themselves of democratic responsibilities in exchange for a few bucks is gross.
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Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.
An account was suspended for 90 minutes. Why is the automatic assumption that it was malicious?
In fact, if Meta had protections against this I’m sure some people would be crying about “obvious political favoritism”.
Hopefully they can move the needle that makes the system in general harder to abuse. But wow, the outrage is insane.
> Why is the automatic assumption that it was malicious?
Because the business model is malicious.
Meta has, quite intentionally, wedged itself in-between large amounts of human interaction. They know some people are malicious. They know the machine will frequently make the wrong call, because the auto-moderator can neither reason, nor account for context.
But hiring enough moderators to run moderation through the computer, provide a default "suggested" action, and having a human approve or deny, would be too expensive. It would demolish their profit, and may even pull Meta from black to red, financially. Their business model relies on making the wrong call, and having outrage bring it to the attention of actual Meta staff to correct it.
Meta does not get to blame the computer they put in charge of moderation instead of hiring adequate staff; computers can never be held accountable, so accountability moves up the chain to the people that programmed the computer and left it in charge.
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they probably can reduce the error rate and triage false positives basically instantly with ai, but we all know how society feels about that
you abdicate responsibility to an automated system whenever you deposit a check into an atm (which you probably don't because you use the banking system in an even more automated way)
if the accusation is political cronyism then yes, whether it was automated or discretionary is obviously relevant
There's a big deterministic gulf between numerical OCR and judging whether a particular piece of free text is breaking TOS.
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Yes, no matter what happened Meta are responsible and should provide answers.
There’s still an important distinction to make though: if it was automated then the No Kings page was not deliberately targeted for political reasons.
Not targeted by Meta at least. I've heard plenty of stories of people getting banned due to other users flagging - and that's definitely an abusable vector.
Agreed, but Meta will never tell us if the action was deliberate, so we are reduced to guessing from shreds of evidence.
Meta put it's thumb in the scale against Lula in Brazil. Why would this be any different?
What evidence do you have that it was an autoban?
Autobans happen to ad accounts on FB all the time.
And this account posted ads?
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Autoban? I thought they have whitelists of accounts it leaves alone, for this exact reason.
It's possible, of course, but taking anything Meta says at face value is very naive IMO. It's just as possible that they let it be banned and then measured the response, to determine if they continue the ban
Perhaps, but why were the owners of the account then unable to sign into it after it was restored?
Time and time again we see cases of non-aligned targets of censorship as some sort of autoban or technical issue. It's a lie and repeating it only help the liars.
Why should we doubt it's an auto ban?
To be clear I totally think we should demand better off their automated systems. Just because they made a robot do things and the robot did it wrong doesn't absolve them of any responsibility. They just are too cheap to pay enough actual people to be in the loop of automated decisions or quickly reviewing them.
Hopefully it's a lesson learned by those involved.
Don't use platforms like this to organize in the future.
Don't use the only platforms that have millions of people on them to organize millions of people in the future?
Yeah. Stuff still gets done without Meta in the loop. They’re not a dependency for democracy.
Also curious where the “millions” estimate for No Kings events today comes from.
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Don’t use JUST platforms like that. Use Instagram, but also have a dedicated website
Quite a few political channels I follow take the time every video to mention this very thing happening and urging you to sign up for an ol' fashioned mailing list for that reason. One or two might plug the mailing list instead of urging to subscribe to the channel itself.
Logic failure. There is no reason to use fewer channels.
Come on. You’re not going to organize a political movement over RSS in 2026.
I like that RSS was the best alternative you could think of.