[CGamesPlay]

Facebook and Twitter are basically closed to new users. If you've gone this far without an account, your new one will be shut down for being a bot within hours of creating a new account, or flagged for "extra verification" which requires sending a government ID to these companies so they can verify that you didn't photoshop a fake government ID.

This new approach seeks to extend this feature to the entire internet. What could possibly go wrong?

[71bw]

I create a new account every 6 months or so on Facebook when my old one gets banned for "violating the community guidelines" and I haven't been asked for an ID ever since 2019. Twitter, though, is way worse and I had to give up and I'm currently just buying aged accounts. Violates even more parts of the ToS than just ban evasion but at least the accounts last for years instead of weeks.

[randomguy0]

What in the world are you doing to keep getting banned and to also want an account enough that you’ll pay for them?

[ridgered4]

I gave up on facebook (but I wasn't trying that hard) but it seemed to be using the extortion practices a lot of services use now. At first it appears to let you create an account but upon logging in for the first time it demands a phone number for 'verification'. Microsoft was even worse when they migrated my mojang account, it let me use it for a little while before demanding the number.

Back when I had a facebook account I recall it suddenly up and demanding I scan my drivers license one day or I couldn't log in again...on the same and only machine I actually had used facebook on.

[thorin]

What do you have to do to get banned? I've seen people getting banned temporarily but I haven't heard of anyone getting banned permanently.

[pookha]

If you don't like somebody on Facebook you can report them for offensive content. I posted something that some asshole facebook friend didn't appreciate and they dug through my facebook feed and found one image that was borderline (somebody in politics in their drawers) and sent in a complaint to facebook. Got my account banned for a first strike. Same douche could have sent in more complaints and facebook would have happily given me three strikes. It's a Stasi system. Don't like your boss or your neighbor, report them...

[dncornholio]

What if my boss or neighbour didn't post anything that's against the TOS?

[Nextgrid]

It's not about what's against the ToS, it's about getting the monkeys who review the reports to judge that it's against the ToS. Given their working conditions, they have little incentive in making an accurate determination and may just be pressing buttons at random, so spamming enough reports will eventually yield a ToS violation even on perfectly clean content.

[jerf]

Your question contains the implicit assumption that "TOS" is some bright shining line that everyone, from all posters, to all of the AIs and humans analyzing whether something conforms, completely agrees with. Therefore, "just don't break the TOS" is a reasonable solution.

This is manifestly and obviously false, in numerous ways. I don't even need to cite capriciousness, cultural differences, or potential political bias; even ignoring those things, it simply isn't and can not ever be a bright shining line.

This is even before we consider that TOSs have been known to retroactively change. YouTube just made such a change; doesn't affect whether the videos are removed but the retroactively changed the monetization standards, with large effect. "Just don't break the TOS" is a non-starter in such an environment.

[nhtsamera]

That would be unusual, so you could probably report them for being a bot.

After all, Meta's TOS stipulates that you must provide accurate information about yourself, and that you cannot share anything that is misleading.

It also prohibits making groundless reports or appeals, so maybe you could take an eye for an eye it you get unfairly targeted.

[subradios]

They absolutely have, just gotta dig.

Remember the wave of people being in hot water over tweets sent in 2008?

[Buffout]

   > so they can verify that you didn't photoshop a fake government ID.

Huh. How?

[MonkeyClub]

By taking a publicly available template, and putting in your details and mugshot.

[Buffout]

I mean how can Facebook check government ID if it is legit? ( not how to photoshop ID. )

[Diggsey]

You generally can't actually check the government databases directly, but you can still determine this.

First, companies can catch most fraudulent documents simply by looking at the document (eg. are the fonts all correct, does the checksum on the MRZ add up, does the data in the MRZ match the data on the face of the document, does the data on the document match previously collected data about the individual, etc.) Some will go further by combining this with a "liveness" check (eg. they might ask you to take a picture of yourself in a certain pose, or to record a short video looking side to side)

Second, companies can use a soft credit check (if authorised by the user, which would need to be in the fine print when you sign up or when you are asked for such a document). Such a credit check won't affect your credit score, but can be used by companies to see if an individual with your details exists. Companies which offer such credit data in the UK/US/other western countries typically boast of 90-95% match rates across a population, but obviously younger people are less likely to be found since they are less likely to have a credit history. This is typically aggregated with data from non credit sources (electoral roll information, county court judgements, etc.) to reach those high match rates. They might also geo-locate the IP address from which you accessed their site and compare it against any address information they have on you (which could come from you providing it on sign up, it could be extracted from the document if it's a driving license or something, or it could come from any credit records they found relating to you)

For Facebook specifically, they might look at other online activity - other social media accounts they can link to you, etc. And throw all of that into the mix.

If at the end of all that they don't have a clear answer, they might fall back to a manual process, or allow the account to be created but have content posted by the account flagged for manual review.

[jpmattia]

> eg. are the fonts all correct, does the checksum on the MRZ add up, ...

Is that hard?

A quick googling shows websites that will generate a California driver's license for virtually no money, so I'd assume with decent programming skills should be able to put together a generator.

See eg https://www.verif.tools/en/dl_ca/

[Buffout]

That's the easy part. Checksum algorithms are public knowledge.

[htrp]

thete are actual id lookup verification services......

[ezfe]

I created a Facebook account a few months ago to use Marketplace. The profile has only a name and unique-to-facebook email. I always use it in Firefox Containers.

Still active, and I've sold a handful of things with it.

[dustedcodes]

> If you've gone this far without an account

So they admit that new generations are not interested in FB or Twitter and they will die with the boomer generation? If not then this logic makes little sense :)