The wonderful people working at Facebook, about whom I would never dare utter a single bad word, have yet to decide if I will be pardoned into their site.
At first, I really wasn't worried about Facebook disabling my account - after all, hundreds of millions of members are difficult to keep track of. But then
the Almighty, in its unquestionable wisdom, has ordered me to send them a "government issued ID with photo." I called my legal adviser to ask about the steps to take in case of overseas legal action against me. After all, who in the right state of mind
asks for a "government-issued ID" unless they mean business?
It turns out that I am not the only one forsaken by
the Almighty in this manner. Although none of us mortals can claim to understand the mysteries of
the Almighty, blogger
Jillian C. York seems to have come up with some clues: She says that the people whose accounts are disabled appear to be activists of some sort - either gay activists, or critical of Islam, or pro-Palestinian. In agreement with this hypothesis, Joel Leyden has written
this disdainful open letter.
Many others are critical of Facebook not being transparent enough. In my case as well, I was not explained why my account was disabled, only that Facebook needs my "government issued ID" to prove that I am me. (*) I am guessing that it is because somehow Facebook must think that I have a fake ID.
Combined with all the information in
Jillian C. York's blog entry, and with
Joel Leyden's own experience, this is the conclusion that I reach: Facebook workers themselves don't really know why any of the accounts get shut down. I am thinking that maybe Facebook started by a handful of workers disabling fake accounts manually. This was back when it was still a community for college students. When the community opened to the
Internetz, membership increased exponentially, and checking fake account reports in this manner was no longer feasible. The
core group of Facebook decision makers then decided, as good programmers, to automate the process - I know I would think that. The first solution that comes to mind is the artificial intelligence algorithms. I am guessing that they used something like a neural network and trained the AI algorithm with the data from their early days (when their user base were decent college boys and girls). The AI algorithm probably guesses which accounts to ban, but due to its nature, cannot explain why.
Probably, this AI does little but look at the number of different accounts listing the account as fake. The humans, being
the humans that they are, tend to report everybody that they don't like as being fake accounts. Hence, you got this mess.
Seeing that most of the articles mentioning this problem are recent, I think that the problem is increasing as more and more users realize that the reporting feature of Facebook can be used as a "hack" to disable accounts, and to organize to use this hack. I think that they'll have to find a solution to this problem, the wonderful people of Facebook.
See
more disgruntled users here, and
some funny stories right here, and
another critical article here.
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(*) This, by the way, as far as proofs go, the worst way to prove an identity. It means that once I send the picture of the ID to Facebook, anybody in Facebook, or any of the mail servers in between can impersonate me without any trouble.
