[logifail]

> We're not talking about capital punishment here, we're talking about social media, and Facebook appears to have made the very reasonable decision that it's worth accidentally rate limiting some innocent accounts in order to keep spam lower than would otherwise be possible

That sounds reasonable.

Well, reasonable unless you happen to be (or care about) one of the innocents being accidentally punished, because some corporation's algorithm said so.

Scholars have been worrying about this kind of thing in the real world's justice system for a long time (think of William Blackstone's "it is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer" quote, which is over 250 years old[0]; of the 1895 U.S. Supreme Court's "it is better to let the crime of a guilty person go unpunished than to condemn the innocent", and these weren't novel ideas, they go all the way back to the Romans).

Where are the checks and balances for the online world?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentaries_on_the_Laws_of_En...

[lolinder]

There's a world of difference between subjecting an innocent person to the penalties afforded for felonies by 18th-century English law and subjecting an innocent person to "limited access to [Facebook] for a few days." That difference completely changes the acceptable ratio of innocents-suffering to guilty-prevented-from-harm and the expected level of oversight for the process.

[em-bee]

blocking for a few days is not rate limiting. if i am talking to a customer on facebook and i get blocked for a few days this could cause me to loose a job. (and no, sometimes i can't choose how to communicate with customers. if they insist on facebook then that's where i need to be). same for my grandparents. they may be upset if i can't talk to them and i can't reach them in other ways. the problem is that most people are not aware of this risk and it will catch them off guard which has the potential to hurt more than it would otherwise. the risk of this makes facebook an unviable option for me to communicate in the first place.

[lolinder]

> blocking for a few days is not rate limiting.

Yes, it is.

> if i am talking to a customer on facebook and i get blocked for a few days this could cause me to loose a job. (and no, sometimes i can't choose how to communicate with customers. if they insist on facebook then that's where i need to be).

This scenario feels contrived. In this hypothetical, you're talking to a customer using your personal Facebook account and that's the only way you have to contact them? And your employer somehow would see you getting blocked from Facebook as the problem, not their nutty customer relations practices.

> same for my grandparents. they may be upset if i can't talk to them and i can't reach them in other ways.

Again, this is super contrived. You act like you have no other contact method for your grandparents, and no way to get another contact method.

> the risk of this makes facebook an unviable option for me to communicate in the first place.

This is a very decent conclusion to come to. I wish more people would do the same. But there's no sense blaming Facebook for using moderation practices that any other platform in the same position would also choose.

[em-bee]

i don't know how contrived the examples are for facebook, as i am not on it, but replace it with wechat in china and you have reality. many people really have no other way to keep in touch with some people.

apart from that, i have relatives in another country, and neither of us have our phones set up so we can make international calls (because that costs extra money), so while we could get in touch, we wouldn't unless it was something urgent. instead either of us would just wonder why the other is staying silent for a few days. and some relatives just refuse to use any other way to communicate besides the one of their choice. it's not facebook fortunately, but still, the example is not really that contrived.

i also have many friends that i can only reach through one method. if i loose that method, they are gone unless i am lucky and i can reach them through intermediaries.

ADDED:

temporarly blocks may not be that serious, but permanent blocks exist too. we have seen many of those stories even here on HN.

the problem is really that i fear many do not think that this could happen to them, so when it happens, they are caught unprepared and unaware.

i certainly lost contact to some people because we didn't consider this a possibility.