Yes, I know that many of you loathe FB yada yada. I don’t need your criticism of the platform here, this is a thread to actually find out how one goes about challenging a temp suspension or a total ban.
Recently someone I know was in a real-life minor altercation with a person who I shall from hereon in call ‘Soccer Mum’. In actuality, she’s a soccer mum, the manager of our local U9 soccer team. The soccer mum wanted to institute a new policy that all the U9 kids would be assigned permanent positions on the field for the season, so Joey would be goalie for the whole season, and all the other kids would just roam around the field.
The person I know thought this was a bad idea. This is an U9 team fer’ goodness sakes, and expressed that view to the Soccer Mum. Soccer Mum didn’t appreciate the feedback.
A day later, the person I know had been given a temp suspension on ALL of the FB pages he/she subscribed to. No reason given, just suck it up, apparently the posts as per FB went ‘against their community standards’. Nothing about the soccer issue was ever posted on those pages, it was to advertise his/her recently created business seeking customers for a cottage-based industry.
So, my guess is that Soccer Mum and a few of her cronies flooded the pages with complaints as payback. Yeah, that sucks, but sucky people are sucky people.
But how does one go about challenging a FB decree? The person I know tried to contact FB, but after filing a challenge, was told that no-one would ever read it, so sucks to be you HA HA.
Does anyone know how one could go about actually contacting a person at FB in order to either challenge a suspension or ban? It seems so arbitrary now, any individual could totally RUIN another’s life if they set their mind to it, surely there must be some way??
you’re welcome.
However, I have no knowledge of whether or not this process is easy or even fair. The webs are filled with stories of people who feel they were unfairly suspended or banned and found no relief in the process. So…it’s likely to be an uphill battle!
Don’t you need an actual obviously offensive post to be banned, or is the collective anger of another group sufficient? Just how “standard” is their “community standard”?
Agreed. Its all but impossible. Even more frustrating, there’s no email, no phone number, I guess you could write a letter if there’s even a physical address. I’ve also reported other users for racist, homophobic statements, even personal threats and almost every time those users comments did not violate “community standards”. HOW???
A lot of FB’s standards-enforcement functions are now largely or entirely automated. The vast amount of material posted to the platform has eliminated any reasonable ability of human reviewers to screen it, even on the basis of flagged material only. Instead, there are trigger words and natural language processors that catch supposedly offensive content; this happened to me when I made reference to a controversial discussion happening in the media and this was somehow seen by their automatic interpreter as violating their standards, resulting in a three-day suspension. It’s maddening and infuriating, but it’s how they run their platform.
In the particular case of the OP, one of the components of this automation is taking action on the basis of user reports. The FB logic says, if a lot of people report this, then there’s probably an issue with it, so the safest course is to hide it and pause the contributor’s access. This all happens without any kind of human decision-making.
It’s been the bane of political commenters for ages; Jim Wright, of Stonekettle Station, used to have his access regularly interrupted because his anti-Trump essays elicited the ire of MAGA Nation, and they’d flood FB with content flags, thereby tripping the automated killswitch. His account would be suspended until a human came in and restored it. This has improved somewhat lately, though because FB doesn’t reveal its rules and procedures, it’s impossible to know if it’s because the reporting algorithm has been improved or if Wright has been put on some sort of protected status so trolls can’t kill his access at will. Even so, the comment threads under his posts are still randomly closed and locked for unspecified standards violations, so there’s probably still a lot of outside interference happening.
It sucks, but it is what it is, and FB doesn’t have any real incentive to change it.
Is it possible that her ban has nothing to do with the altercation, and instead has to do with spam? I’m in several teacher-focused FB groups, and they all have a “no advertising” policy; I regularly report posts that violate this rule, because I don’t want the groups to devolve into a bajillion posts about so-and-so’s multi-level marketing opportunity.
The order of events seems to be:
She got in a fight with a jerk.
She posted advertisements on a bunch of FB pages (or in groups, maybe?)
She’s banned, not from FB, but from those groups.
It seems possible that 3 is caused by 2, not by 1.
I’m not sure what this means exactly. I would assume if she was banned from Facebook altogether, that’s what would have been said, so I assume that she has either been blocked from business pages or from Facebook groups. And while I’m not saying that Facebook doesn’t have standards for those groups/pages, the pages/groups also have their own - and they can be just as nitpicky as HOA rules can be. In addition to the “no advertising” rules previously mentioned, I’ve seen people get banned because they invited multiple friends to join the group ( the group had a rule that you couldn’t “invite” , people, they had to join themselves) , because they criticized admin decisions, because they posted on a colored background and so on.
I got 30 days off for “violating their standards”. I posted a pic of the My Pillow asshole where the pillow he was holding was a nazi flag. I put it on my homepage and sent it to one friend. Oh, well.
