>The website has all this time been incorrectly labelled “by our automated tools” as spam, according to the spokesperson. “Our apologies for the inconvenience.”
It seems the large tech companies just have a policy to automate as much as possible and if it impacts some folks unfairly, that's just how it works and they've no interest in dealing with it unless it gets PR. Otherwise screw those little people.
I had a domain through blogger that I registered ages ago on the blogger site. Google started emailing me that it was expiring and directed me to Gsuite.... but I don't have a Gsuite account and google didn't make one for me...
The domain didn't appear in my Google domains account.
Google had just pointed blogger domain users to Gsuite and called it a day.
Google was no help, I never got a response from the handful of ways (none of them good) trying to reach out to them.
Finally I found the old registrar google used behind the scenes and they let me renew the domain.
I never heard back from google other than all the spam about my domain expiring and asking me to login to Gsuite... repeatedly.. sent to an email without a Gusite account.. someone just flipped a switch and screw everyone I guess.
FB predictably reacted only when an article came out. It seems likely that they blatantly censor all kinds of things for their own partisan reasons. It is only when you have a friend close to the media outlets and are able to generate some publicity that they go into damage limitation mode and blame it on "automated tools". How convenient!
Making things right 100% of the time costs a ton. Sometimes the business is willing to pay: something related to money or legal compliance, the serious stuff.
Sometimes it's cheaper to have things work, say, 90% of time, and maybe manually fix some stuff when badly needed, on a best-effort basis. Often it's the only viable way. Usually, if there's no written contract, best-effort is the only treatment you can expect. (Even Google's support is said to be much better for paid users.)
I wouldn't categorize this as best-effort. This is why we need more consumer protections because I think any reasonable person can agree that this is not how consumers should be treated and we shouldn't normalize it by providing a flawed rationalization of "Google needs to make more money"
If you are not paying for a service, should you expect the same protections?
If you do but implicitly (by sharing info good for ad targeting, etc), should it not be made explicit then? It should stop being "free" and legally become "free* (conditions apply)".
The grandparent comment that we're talking in the context of said that they registered a domain through Google's blogger service. I assume they paid for that domain.
And I've used paid Google services, support really isn't any better.
> It seems the large tech companies just have a policy to automate as much as possible
Mistakes happen at scale regardless of whether it's automated or human-controlled. Having actual humans do the work is hardly a magic bullet, because people make mistakes frequently as well. Worse yet, humans are more prone to being compromised or acting maliciously, such as in recent attacks on prominent companies.
It's not so much as a policy as a necessity. Facebook's number of users is counted in the billions. They have about 50,000 users for each Facebook employee.
Most importantly: People aren't paying Facebook. It's just not realistic to expect a free platform serving billions of users to have 100% perfect execution.
A few years ago I bought a laundry washer and dryer set. They were nice, mid-range units and I was pretty happy with them. About a year after purchase, the plastic clips that held the handle on the dryer broke off. I called the phone number on my warranty papers and spoke to a human being in Tennessee. I told her what happened, and she asked me for the model number and my address. They shipped a replacement that arrived at my house two days later.
A mistake happened, the plastic was too weak (Or maybe I pulled too hard, I don't know!) but I was able to contact the company and get it fixed.
It doesn't matter what mistakes are made if there is a way to fix it. If these systems are automated, fine. But if a mistake is made, why isn't there a way to get it fixed? That's where humans come in.
btw, Alphabet's income is about 42 times that of the company that made my washer/dryer. How is it that they can afford phone reps when Alphabet can't?
There are good benefits of having centralised services though. I don’t like this either, but I don’t think the solution is as simple as “they shouldn’t exist”.
I think the issues come down to incorrect or misaligned incentives.
I think you're losing sight of the argument. People know Facebook and Google don't take customer service seriously, but then seem amazed when they have a problem and Google and Facebook won't solve it. Meanwhile, one side says that these problems could be fixed if big companies wanted to spend some money on it, and others who say it's not a problem because it hasn't inconvenienced them yet.
I can fully respect a smug "told ya so" attitude. But this "maybe xyz shouldn't exist" attitude irritates me. I accept there's a risk to using these low-touch services... and that's my decision, no?
Having only 50k employees is something they control. Their Net income is ~20B/year at that’s enough to pay for about 1 million low level customer service agents.
I am not saying they need to do so, but the solution is to make it unnecessary to call not simply to have nobody to reach.
Why would they pay out all their net income, provide better customer contact/service, and go from being massively profitable to break-even?
What’s in it for them to do that?
Even if they went 25% of the way there, does it make them a stronger company in the long-term? That they don’t do it suggests they don’t think it would.
25% would probably be vast overkill. The point is they could have say 100,000 people doing customer support without a massive hit to their profitability, especially if that support ended up increasing revenue.
In other words the real limitation isn’t their current number of employees or really their business model. They are simply acting like a monopoly which lacks competition. I am sure they think simply buying any social network that starts to get traction is cheaper than providing a better product.
I would say that “over $2 Billion/year” is a massive hit to profitability for any company, even if that is “only” 10% of the total income.
If your boss came to you and said, “Retric, we’re making the world better, but as a side-effect, we’re cutting your pay by only 10%,” how would you react? That’s probably close to how the board and shareholders would react to Google doing it.
That assumes having a large dedicated support staff had absolutely zero positives for the company. I think that’s extraordinarily unlikely as even just the feedback from support calls is valuable information. Remember, Facebook etc is making money by directly selling advertising and individual support calls can be quite profitable for them.
Sometimes a support call from a tiny new account that costs them 2$ can be worth a new 20,000$+/month revenue stream. Or that same account can walk away with a bad taste in their mouth. Similarly, if their getting thousands of calls about something that’s often a fixable problem which they would otherwise never know about.
Which isn’t to say it’s profitable in the short or long term, just significantly less expensive than the sticker shock suggests.
As a global company Facebook is not bound to pay US workers US wages. Around 300$/month is the Median wage for a call center job in India. They could pay ~3x as much and sill have plenty left over for the overhead involved.
Even just assigning call centers based on the callers country of origin would be dramatically cheaper than US wages for everyone.
I hear this argument all the time, but Facebook is one of the richest companies in the world so they could definitely afford to hire some more people that could look at complaints. They just choose not to because they don't care. If it suddenly would affect their bottom line I bet you they would hire people very quickly.
> Mistakes happen at scale regardless of whether it's automated or human-controlled.
I think the problem here isn't that there was a mistake, but that de Zwart had no reocurse when it happened.
> It's not so much as a policy as a necessity. Facebook's number of users is counted in the billions. They have about 50,000 users for each Facebook employee.
So what? How often do things like this happen? If it happens enough that Facebook's customer support can't keep up, that suggests their automation needs some serious work.
Facebook is trying to administer a 2 billion member virtual city with about 20k people.
Most of the fires that start and actual administration details are just conveniently left to real world politicians, bureaucracies, journos, school boards, parents and police depts to work out.
This retarded unsustainable model has been sold as the magic of Scale.
Scaling user base = Scaling up issues. No free lunch.
Regulators can be asking a simple question - how many people are needed to administrate a 2 billion member city? How many does Facebook have to do the job. And if they dont have enough how to charge them for all the resource/energy drainage they offload to the real world.
We not only don't charge them, our governments actually give them money to do it. The Netherlands actually gave Microsoft 500 million euro in free energy credit (by building them subsidized windmills) just so they would build their enormous data center here, an enormous datacenter that is going to employ only 125 people.
And those windmills, they were pitched to the people as being able to power 370.000 households. The kicker of course that they won't power even a single one, as 100% of the energy has been sold to Microsoft.
The municipality abused the subsidy to lure in a corporation instead of using it to power homes. It would've been better for the environment if Microsoft paid full dime for their own windmills and the subsidy was spent on something that actually reduced greenhouse gases.
The datacente will then create revenue through services and add jobs. Jobs wont be just employees, you're going to have security, shipping, power plant jobs, recycling servers, etc.
It also seems that they'll get some energy from datacenter heat back plus greenhouse heat... so a nice opportunity to do research and create bleeding edge facilities.
It's also credits, as in Microsoft first invests and then gets free electricity for a while...
Then there's a nice national security benefit having datacenter in your country.
I suppose it is, still it's an abuse of the subsidy. They should have found some other way to give Microsoft 500 million. This way it's literally stealing from a fund that's meant to save the environment.
It's the problem anyone who moderates a system faces, when the users vastly outnumbers the moderators your moderation has to have some level of opaqueness and unpredictability or else you have no chance of keeping up with people gaming the system.
If your moderation is the equivalent of a low fence keeping people away from the other side, with 2B users the fence will always be swamped by people leaning over it and bending it while looking you in the eye and going "See ? I'm not passing it. This is what you allow."
If you randomly bring the hammer down on a fraction of the people who just touch the fence, the fence will be pretty clear of people leaning over. But you'll sure gain a reputation for opaque capricious moderation.
NB: I am not against this system, and I recognize it's widely applied in the world.
> NB: I am not against this system, and I recognize it's widely applied in the world.
The problem is that what is "widely applied in the world" is using the grey-area of who to bring the hammer down on randomly to tip the scales in some way.
Or you delegate. Grant trusted individuals power to moderate sub-communities.
How do you ensure you select trusted individuals? Create institutional mechanisms with accountability and checks and balances; e.g. community voting to bestow time-limited power on individuals, and appeal boards to as a check on abuses of that power, and perhaps recall votes to remove someone.
Opaqueness isn't the answer. Opaqueness leads to injustice.
You certainly don't have a chance of keeping up if you don't use the technology we've developed over thousands of years specifically to deal with people gaming systems. The technology of government.
Are there sites that have done this at scale? Reddit and Wikipedia come to mind as counter examples, where the people with the most time and desire for power end up doing almost all the moderation.
I'd say the issue with Reddit, in the context of this discussion, is that it doesn't work. For whatever reason you like, Reddit doesn't delegate the community to its moderators. It delegates the responsibilities, but not the rights. Reddit still has an overarching "community standards" and is thus, at that level, still just one big community, with the accompanying failure. The attempt to solve that with subreddits was a good try, and solved some things, but it doesn't get around the sorts of problems being discussed in this overall thread.
(I'm only talking about what the case is, in this context, not why, nor judging it at the moment.)
Reddit is an inconsistent mess because it's fundamentally reactive at the very top. Someone Who Matters notices they host racist communities? They ban the most obvious ones, but not communities like /r/Sino which are blatantly racist in ways the Western Media finds difficult to complain about. Someone Who Matters notices they have transphobic communities? Ban the most obvious ones, except ones like /r/ShitRedditSays which hide behind a twisted interpretation of feminism, as they could play a more effective card were they to be banned.
And so on and so forth. It's administration by reacting to bad press.
That may be somewhat due to policy changes. Reddit did try to be more hands-off in the past.
But perhaps a better example than reddit is the internet as a whole. ISP and hosters are dumb carriers and moderation is mostly left to the individual sites. Depending on your hoster it may take a court order for them to do anything at all.
In other words we need more platforms that put themselves front and center, avoiding that also avoids the reputation problems with a hands-off approach.
Many city, state, and even country subreddits have been taken over by right-wing moderators. This has been a coordinated process over many years. And while you can create new subreddit for your country easily you're still can't be /r/canada.
Moderation is labor, and you get what you pay for. Given how notoriously mental health threatening Facebook moderation has turned out to be, adding unpaid moderators with no health care benefits and especially no mental health protections seems the exact wrong direction for Facebook.
That said, I absolutely agree that the answer is likely one of checks/balances/as much transparency to the adjudication process as possible, and yes Facebook has a lot to learn there from existing governmental technology.
That's certainly a great strategy if you have those options available. However, if you can't maintain a certain moderator to user ratio then that's going to be impossible.
Government gives free lawyers in some cases. Perhaps we could get free access to get support from something like this.
Also it's kinda messed up Facebook can't just add more moderators because it's gonna cost them. They are worth 786b because they decided not to moderate their content enough.
Finally why isn't advertising taxed like oil and cigarettes is? Seems obvious we should disincestivise consumption, but then FED's primary goal is minimise unemployment...
There's a simple solution: cap the number of users. With a closed system you don't have to worry about the registration mechanisms being gamed, and moderation of a fixed-size group is easy to plan out.
Similarly you could use an invite system with limited invites, if you want growth at a constant rate- although this could still lead to moderation problems if you don't grow your moderation team at the same rate.
> And if they dont have enough how to charge them for all the resource/energy drainage they offload to the real world.
That's the million (billion?) dollar question for me. I observe that it will sadly follow the precedent of the oil industry and other industries -- a slap on the wrist to the tune of a fraction of the true damage, with society left to bear the brunt of the externality in perpetuity and prosecutors able to say "at least we tried!"
I can't help but wonder if there isn't a better way.
Trillion dollar question, really. When you have a multi-billion dollar platform costing magnitudes more in social disruption, election and democracy itself being disrupted.
What fraction of the 2B actually post vs “just” read & like?
If it’s 1% then the moderator to writer ratio is 1:1000 instead of 1:100,000.
And presumably the moderators are working full time (?) whereas the posters hopefully don’t spend more than 1h or so on average per day writing. So the moderator hours to writer hours ratio may be closer to 1:200?
Add some AI based admin tools and it doesn’t seem quite so ridiculous?
This assumes that facebook creates the problems that exist on their platform.
All of Facebook's problems exist independent of Facebook. Facebook's existence guarantees that those problems will become a part of them.
I'm not saying they shouldn't be held responsible for not doing their due diligence, but the argument that they ought to be charged for "offloading" problems on the "real world" isn't great. That's like saying car manufacturers need to be charged for offloading automotive deaths on society.
>That's like saying car manufacturers need to be charged for offloading automotive deaths on society.
Devil's advocate but why shouldn't they? At the end of the day _someone_ has to bear that cost, why should we force society at large to deal with issues that arise as a result of a small group of people finding a new way to enrich themselves?
Because they aren't making the choices that result in the deaths.
If you force the industry to pay for the negative externalities of the industry, the fixes/costs can be baked into the product (e.g., safety equipment, emissions standards).
If you force the industry to pay for things that are the result of government (e.g. overly-permissive licensing standards, building large suburbs that require vehicles) or consumer behavior (e.g., driving drunk, reckless driving), you'll either: (1) destroy the industry or (2) create strong incentives for the industry to lobby government to make such behavior impossible (say by passing an amendment to ban the consumption of alcohol).
You also either create a situation where victims can double-dip, getting paid both from the industry and from the individual consumer—who has already paid in aggregate by paying the industry; or a situation where the consumer has no direct responsibility, which will likely have the effect of riskier behavior; at least until the industry successfully lobbies the government.
In practical terms I absolutely do agree with you. People collectively respond to whatever incentives they're allowed to, you _do_ get riskier behavior when you reduce individual responsibility for actions. If you'll forgive me for going on a wide ranting tangent though, consider the following:
>Because they aren't making the choices that result in the deaths.
I've yet to see compelling evidence that "free will" actually exists, I think it's just a convenient moral abstraction we've developed to grease the wheels of the world. Supposing it doesn't exist, how could we make a just high-functioning society? One that recognizes my hypothesis regarding the illlegitimacy of absolute individual responsibility while also resulting in equal or better collective behavior?
Going back towards the car example, I don't think hammer manufacturers should bear responsibility for the apocryphal homicidal misuse of their tools since removing a hammer from a toolbox just means the crime would be committed with a knife or rocks in a sock. This argument gets blurrier when you consider firearms manufacturers where the explicit intent of the tool is often to kill. You can make a solid argument either way there.
So what about cars? They are involved in roughly 100 fatalities a day in the united states. Were cars designed to kill? No (although we do have the case where a manufacturer decided it was cheaper to keep selling unsafe cars and just pay out lawsuits rather than fix their screwup). Manufacturers generally do what they can to make them safer with each passing year. Despite that though, society still has to bear the cost of tens of thousands of deaths per year and two orders of magnitude more injuries. Those injuries, fatal and nonfatal, would _not_ have happened in a world without cars. A portion of them would not have happened without car ads and popular culture that makes driving fast and irresponsibly look cool. It's convenient, sure, to place absolute blame on the people who don't think just watch cool car go zoom in tv then buy cool car on credit and go zoom into building. Doing what we do now and removing those people from society at that point is a viable solution, but what if we put more effort into not letting industrial psychologists develop good little consumers like that in the first place? The US is the "land of the free" with high levels of individual responsibility and we've got astronomical household debt and the world's highest proportion of our population incarcerated to show for it. I think we can do better.
> Those injuries, fatal and nonfatal, would _not_ have happened in a world without cars.
This isn't true. If you require auto manufacturers to be responsible for auto deaths and they decide to get out of business, then what? Trains? But won't the train manufacturers be held responsible for train-related deaths? Then you have the same problem, just with trains rather than autos. At that point, you either keep whittling things down until some mode of transportation is cheap and safe enough (but potentially very sub-optimal along other vectors) or everyone walks and goods don't get anywhere, which has its own cost in lives.
> A portion of them would not have happened without car ads and popular culture that makes driving fast and irresponsibly look cool.
I'd argue that this is both a tiny proportion of deaths and a tiny influence. Despite this advertisement and culture, the vast majority of people are responsible/reasonable (if unskilled and/or ignorant) drivers.
I think governments could reduce the number of deaths far more greatly by having more stringent licensing guidelines (including regular re-testing), safer roads, saner zoning policies, better public transit options, etc. than by silencing any speech that suggests a correlation between speed and fun.
> I think we can do better.
Certainly. However, I'm not convinced removing agency from individuals and ascribing fault to entities with no direct (and at best marginal indirect) control over specific or aggregated situations will get us there.
Fair, I'm willing to concede that transportation incidents are fungible for the purposes of this discussion. That segues right into the question of relative safety per unit distance traveled. A quick google search brought up this article from the washington post [0] which gives the following:
Motorcycle: 212.57 fatalities per billion passenger miles
Car: 7.28
Ferry: 3.17
Train: 0.43
Subway: 0.24
Bus: 0.11
Plane: 0.07
Granted this is skewed by cars being the only viable last-mile rural transportation method but we can examine that too. According to USDOT, urban motor vehicle crash deaths overtook rural crash deaths in 2016 in a reversal of the previous longstanding trend of deaths being 60% rural and 40% urban [1]. You _do_ still have the problem of people dying as a result of private industry, but the rate at which people die per mile is an order of magnitude lower if you take the bus versus a car. That's almost 90 lives saved per day if we all rode the bus. I suspect this rate is tied to CDL and bus maintenance standards and would remain largely unchanged if buses became the transportation method of the majority.
>I'd argue that this is both a tiny proportion of deaths and a tiny influence.
I'd love to see some data but given what I've seen of the local street racer scene and how they view certain movie franchises that glorify their subculture I think the influence is significant. Would society be better if we straight up banned everything that shows people doing bad stuff? Probably not, but media still has a tremendous impact on how people behave. It's again a case where an industry offloads negative externalities onto society.
>I think governments could reduce the number of deaths far more greatly by having more stringent licensing guidelines (including regular re-testing), safer roads, saner zoning policies, better public transit options, etc. than by silencing any speech that suggests a correlation between speed and fun.
Forcing manufacturers to deal with the externalities we're discussing would also incentivize them to encourage safe driving, no? I used to be a vocal proponent of not yielding an inch of freedom as well but I'm less and less convinced about that as time goes on. Just because the harm isn't as immediate as people getting trampled 30 seconds after one yells fire in the crowded theater doesn't mean it's still not real harm that could've been avoided. There's a significant amount of internal propaganda here in the US about how amazing freedom is but I'm really not sold on the idea that the average person's life here is better as a result of it compared to a society that recognizes the complexity and interconnectedness of the world and responds to it with structure rather than "individual freedom" and a literal world-leading number of people sitting around making license plates in jail.
> You _do_ still have the problem of people dying as a result of private industry, but the rate at which people die per mile is an order of magnitude lower if you take the bus versus a car.
These numbers don't reflect the absolute difference in safety between these modes of transportation. Imagine a world in which buses replace cars as the primary mode of transportation. You've now got many, many more buses on the road. So, if there is a collision, rather than probably being car-on-car or car-on-bus, it's most likely to be bus-on-bus. That will raise the fatalities per billion passenger miles in two ways: (1) The amount of energy in a bus-on-bus collision will be quite a bit larger than when a car hits a bus or a car hits a car. (2) When there is a fatal collision, the number of fatalities is likely to be higher. (It takes no stretch of the imagination to imagine if one person on a bus dies in a collision, his fellow passengers are more likely to also die.)
You also have second-order effects, like vastly reduced visibility for bus-drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists...
> Forcing manufacturers to deal with the externalities we're discussing would also incentivize them to encourage safe driving, no?
No. Not if they don't actually have any control or responsibility over the externality, like in the case of drunk driving, which was my original point. The only things a manufacturer could do in that case is fight for prohibition or install a breathalyzer in every car. The former was tried and turned out to be pretty bad for society. The latter probably would destroy the industry and/or be trivially worked around by the dedicated drunk.
>Supposing free will doesn't exist, why would you think we can decide to do anything to make things other than they are?
For the exact same reason as people who do believe in free will, some combination of our inherent traits and environment made us want to change things.
There's really no immediate practical application of free will (or the lack thereof), human behavior is what it is whether we have it or not. If we all believe in it then it's very easy to say "the buck stops here at the individual" in regards to antisocial behavior. If we don't have it then the causal chain is a lot messier and one reasonably could assign shared responsibility towards institutions that encourage suboptimal behavior (such as the advertising industry).
On man, if an economist saw this they would be rubbing their hands together like Sylvester the Cat finding Tweety bound-and-gagged and covered in BBQ sauce. You'd have to flee before they locked the door and started pulling out chalk and graphs and a STATA license code from their economist's trenchcoat.
"A collective action problem or social dilemma is a situation in which all individuals would be better off cooperating but fail to do so because of conflicting interests between individuals that discourage joint action. The collective action problem has been addressed in political philosophy for centuries, but was most clearly established in 1965 in Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action.
Problems arise when too many group members choose to pursue individual profit and immediate satisfaction rather than behave in the group's best long-term interests. Social dilemmas can take many forms and are studied across disciplines such as psychology, economics, and political science. Examples of phenomena that can be explained using social dilemmas include resource depletion, low voter turnout, and overpopulation. The collective action problem can be understood through the analysis of game theory and the free-rider problem, which results from the provision of public goods. Additionally, the collective problem can be applied to numerous public policy concerns that countries across the world currently face."
The part of the wiki that deals with this specific problem (vehicles) is unfortunately broken for some reason, but, eh, we get the point.
Terrific read, thank you. I'd be interested in seeing an economist's take on the viability and effectiveness of forcing industries to deal with their own externalities.
There are so many ways to have a problem with Facebook and be unable to get help. The list of ways grows...
My "favorite" is if you once had a spare FB account for playing some game, and later FB has blocked that account (for inactivity, or being obviously fake _after_ they instituted the real name policy)... but you still get occasional emails from FB begging you to come back and login - your friends miss you! Of course you cannot login, and you cannot stop the fucking emails from FB. There's no process for dealing with this, so you ultimately have to write a custom filter to process these zombie FB emails.
I urge everyone, no matter what your "need" to have an account on FB is, to just stop logging in. Don't delete the account... just never login again.
Facebook will continue as a bad and irresponsible actor of global proportions until we collectively send it the way of MySpace.
The problem is people having a positive experience by becoming angrier and angrier. They're having a great day on Facebook. Then they go out and make other people's lives worse, because the information they're acting on is faulty.
It's not a majority of Facebook users, but it has an impact on a majority of people, or at least a very large minority.
I tried that for a while, I would go months without logging in, but for one reason or another I would log in to check something.
The last time I did this my news feed left me feeling so negative I decided that I was done and I deleted my account.
So far it has been easier to say "I don't have a facebook account" than to explain why I never post anything or answer did you see what I posted questions.
I really wonder why anyone advocates "not logging in" and if it's ever in good faith? Something always drags you back and it's just a quick step to get sucked in again. I tried to use it less and it just never worked, FB pays billions to optimize sucking you back in.
Deleted my account and it was perfect, no emails, no getting drawn if, if someone wants to talk with me there's a dozen chat service to choose from besides facebook.
Perhaps it is my paranoia, but I worry that someone could create a lookalike to my account and misrepresent me. So I leave my real account there and simply don't mess with it. Occasionally I post that people should reach me by email.
What harm could someone do with a fake account, also doesn't FB go through creepy lengths to verify your identity?
I'm more paranoid about FB hoovering all my personal information by proxy of having an account and friends tagging me in picture and friending me, filling out my real life social network in their database.
If you are European you can report them for this as it goes against the GDPR[0]. You can also just send an angry email to their data officer which they have to reply to by law, and enjoy the template reaction of "we are currently too busy" followed by dismissal a few months later.
If you are not European you can probably still use their mechanisms for complying with the GDPR to fix this as they cant really tell who is a European citizen and who is not.
I read stuff on FB occasionally but almost never post. The last time I posted anything I was instantly logged out because apparently my single comment was "unusual activity on my account."
This reminds me of studying ethics from a deontological and utilitarian model. The discussion was about whether it’s better to optimize for the greater good or to have a rules based system of right and wrong.
To me, utilitarian seems like the best outcome because the most people are improved. But the way to get there, I think, is through deontological methods because it’s actually unclear what actions can be taken to lead to an outcome. So trying to optimize in the short term can lead to unexpected side effects.
Having a rules based system and following it even if it costs $1M to fix a $1 problem seems better in the long run because it is predictable and solves hidden problems.
It seems Facebook is MLing itself into a feedback loop that is missing any core value other than “let’s make it work for 99% and not worry.” But I think this piles up little slices of technical debt until it eventually breaks.
The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger
Oh yes. At some point this was a very annoying problem on Facebook. Our last name has ‘de’ as well and Facebook refused to have ‘de’ in lowercase in my wife’s name unless she sent them a photo copy of her ID.
At some point they started permitting lowercase Dutch ‘tussenvoegsels’ again.
But it showed so little appreciation of other languages and cultures. (It’s like Apple/Siri and others pretending that everyone uses a single language in their daily life.)
If there's one thing that's constant amongst American companies (through various extents) is their blindness to other cultures and conventions (even things like the metric system or DD/MM/AA formats) .
> He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger: “It is the arrogance of a giant American corporation which considers the correct spelling of the names of millions of Dutch people an edge case.”
This reminds me of the excellent "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" [1].
As a person with a hyphen in his first name I also get regularly mistreated by all kinds of web forms, worst of all flight tickets, which is especially ironic as you are usually explicitly requested to provide the name as stated in the passport.
Yeah, in the Netherlands we also don't use the "de" and "van" for sorting so it was confusing to find my badge under the "v" at American conferences the first time. Ah well, what can you do? A friend of mine had his FB acount blocked for failing to provide a real name (his last name is "Fun"), ironically after he gave FB a false name they did accept it.
> A friend of mine had his FB acount blocked for failing to provide a real name (his last name is "Fun")
Don't they have a process where you can submit a government ID and have your name accepted? Honestly I don't blame the minimum wage person responsible for name screening for flagging a name that is both uncommon and one of the most common adjectives in the English language, if the policy is that fake names aren't allowed.
> I don't blame the minimum wage person responsible for name screening
My expectation is that the person who wrote the code responsible for rejecting my name in the mid-to-late 2000s was paid somewhat more than minimum wage.
I think GP was implying there was no support staff using that system -- it's entirely automated. That's why the engineer was so highly paid to begin with.
They do have a process for providing copies of your government ID to have your account unblocked, but I have 2 friends who did that and neither one ever heard anything back or successfully got their accounts unblocked. Normal American names, nothing funky. As far as any of us can figure out, they hadn’t done anything wrong in the first place, just randomly unluckily somehow displeased The Algorithm.
Facebook is fine until you get caught in the machine at no fault and with no recourse. I would have closed my account by now but I work in low-budget theater and Facebook events and Facebook advertising are unfortunately required to make it in the industry.
One example I remember from high school is a person whose first name is Admin. Granted, it's an uncommon name, but he's unable to use his real name in many, many online services (Facebook being one of them of course).
Sites used to refuse the "van der " in my last name all the time. Had to remove the whitespaces to get it to work.
Also, sites out my last name under v, which isn't how names are sorted here.
"van der Name" is usually written as "Name, van der" in printed lists to make checking for names easier.
And many dutch IT systems have a separate field for this. We call it a "tussenvoegsel". Which would roughly translate to a "middle addition". It's not a middle/second name either. Cause those are processed separately here as well.
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso
(https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso)
Indeed. I consider "gender" even sillier - e.g. Facebook adding 100s of different genders to their website - how about just removing the field altogether? Same about "legal sex" - why would the government care in the first place?! (Doctors might, but the rest of the government, not really.)
I can see wanting to know what pronouns someone uses so you can autogenerate reasonable sentences about that person (i.e. "Tomp marked himself safe from the rabid bears in Honolulu")
Phone, email, messenger, basically any collaboration software? My university assigned email addresses by initials - e.g. if you name was John Anderson Smith and you were the 167th person with the initials JAS, you'd be jas167@example.edu. Which is easier to find, search, and read in a contact list - John Smith or jas167?
Hello X near the content you're looking for is a confirmation that you're logged in; without having to look at the header (which is usually more explicit). Having a friendly name there is an attempt to use less space.
When I'm looking at my contacts in Google Docs or Slack or whatever it's critical to have the names there. If it was bigchungus12@gmail.com and db23423@exxon.com it would be very annoying.
Another thing is overlooked, which is strange since these companies hire so many statisticians and much about their work is about understanding populations and individual preferences.
When you have huge populations (2B) you're outliers are going to be similarly huge. The meaning and usefulness of means and medians over large and/or disparate populations loses its meaning. There are tons of distinguishable subpopulations (Dutch) which are pointless to lump in with Americans. Etc etc etc. You'd think someone would be familiar with subpopulations and the limitations of treating 2B users as a normal distribution, but yet that seems yet to be discovered.
I am still surprised that the two-character icons which Zoom uses for accounts without profile pictures become "A�" for anyone called "Alice Ørland" or similar.
It is even more surprising that Ö, Š, etc. become �, but 文军 shows up fine.
Not so weird when you consider the context. Zoom is an North American company with most (if not all) of it's product/engineering development happening in China. Just reading public information, it seems they have no development teams in the North of Europe nor Eastern Europe, so it's only natural that some character sets ends up better supported than others.
It's likely that all the characters are being transferred and stored in the same charset (probably a Unicode one) regardless of what character is entered. The replacement glyph (the question mark) might be caused by their use of a font with incomplete Unicode coverage, or (more likely) by a buggy "take the first character of each word in their name" algorithm, for example using the first byte and then special-casing Chinese under the mistaken impression that nothing else needs more than one byte.
Unicode doesn't magically make this stuff go away, much less any specific encoding of it. A glyph can consist of multiple codepoints, and then those can sometimes be standardized to other codepoints. For instance, Unicode has codepoint U+00C4 for an A with a diaeresis (aka umlaut). But it also has codepoints U+0041 U+0308 for an A with a combining diaeresis, which should then map to the combined U+00C4 for font rendering.
Specifically for that example, Zoom is written and maintained in China, so I would expect the developers made special code for segmenting chinese names but not non-English latin ones.
I always worry with plane tickets because I have a middle name on my passport but many buying services don't take middle names into account.
Also the name of my town has a "Ą" letter in it, which also is problematic in online forms and I often just write A instead just to be on the safe side.
By definition there is no legal middle names here in Finland (all of the 1 to 4 names given to you are called "first name" in the law). And thus all of your names will be in the passport too.
Filling some foreign (or poorly done/ported local) it system forms can be bit of a guess work.
Also as a bonus space " " is a legal character in a name. Both "Jukka Pekka" and "Jukka-Pekka" are valid names (also you could have 2 names "Jukka" and "Pekka")
In most important official documents name is not the only identifier as you also add the national identification number. I guess in most other use cases you just trust humans to get it right.
As for how to register such a name correctly for a baby I have no clue. Also you don't have to give the baby a name at birth (you have 60 days) but the national identification number is given to the baby at birth (it is just date of birth, sequence number and a checksum character). All I know is that I have a colleague which such a name and have seen people before with space instead of - on a 2 part name
edit: How we usually do forms for this stuff is just 2 fields. One for all of your first names and the second for your family name(s) (you can have multiple for example both of your parents or some foreign with de/von/etc). Validation is mostly "check that they are not empty"
Ah, it's so interesting to contrast different approaches.
For example, in Latvia, the legal treatment is that if you have two first names (two is the legal limit) then they are space delimited and if you have two surnames (it's becoming popular to join the surnames after marriage instead of changing the surname of one spouse) then they are hyphenated.
So if you see "Alpha Beta Gamma" then that means Alpha and Beta as given names and Gamma as the surname; and "Alpha Beta-Gamma" means that Alpha is the given name and Beta-Gamma is the surname, so the name in any official documents can be unambiguously parsed.
> "all of the 1 to 4 names given to you are called "first name" in the law"
Is 4 a hard maximum? Because in Dutch it's not unheard of to have more. Not common (most people have 1 or 2), but at least one famous politician had 5 first names.
Current law only allows 4 but allows exception for foreigners (but then the name has to fulfill that other countries naming conventions). Though there is a superseding law that roughly says "the name must not intentionally bring harm to the child" meaning they can block you from giving weird/stupid name to a child (so name like Elon Musks youngest "X Æ A-12" would never be allowed to be given to a baby here)
I have three first names, and round these parts they are space separated. Turns out that in a neighbouring country I should be comma separating them, or they are treated as a single first name (that happens to have spaces).
More precisely: the first letter of a name is always capitalised.
So in "Hans de Zwart", the 'H' is the first letter, and therefore capitalised. But in "De Zwart", the 'D' is the first letter, and therefore capitalised, even if it normally wouldn't be.
There might be an exception to that if that letter is not part of a whole word. "De" is a word, but I once knew a guy whose last name was 't Zet. The "'t" is not a word (it's short for "het", the neutral version of "the", whereas "de" is gendered[0]), so probably wouldn't be capitalised[1]. Now imagine 200 countries and languages with exceptions like that and imagine having to write software to handle all of that correctly. This stuff was never a problem before the internet, but I expect the next century is going to see a lot of simplifications in language.
[0] Yeah, in Dutch, there are two articles: "de" which is gendered, and "het" which isn't. Compare to French "le" and "la", which are both gendered, one male and one female, and there's no neural article. In Dutch there is, but the gendered article doesn't care whether it's male or female; it works for both and doesn't actually care about gender, just that it's there. So it's gendered in a neutral way. Wrap your head around that.
[1] This is also true at the start of a sentence: always capitalised, except when it's not a complete word. If you start a sentence with 's avonds ("in the evening), you capitalise the 'A', not the 's', which is actually the last letter of the archaic possessive 'des'.
> [0] Yeah, in Dutch, there are two articles: "de" which is gendered, and "het" which isn't. Compare to French "le" and "la", which are both gendered, one male and one female, and there's no neural article. In Dutch there is, but the gendered article doesn't care whether it's male or female; it works for both and doesn't actually care about gender, just that it's there. So it's gendered in a neutral way. Wrap your head around that.
That's a curious way to present it. "het" is gendered, it corresponds to the neuter gender. There is nothing neutral about it, that's just a (bad) name. In Russian for example, they call it the middle gender. Dutch nouns take one of two genders (three in some Belgian dialects), just like in French.
Both Latin and Proto-Germanic had three genders, which correspond to what we would now call male, female and neuter. Over the span of centuries Latin merged male and neuter into one, leaving French with male/female, whereas in the Germanic languages usually male and female merged into a common gender, leaving common/neuter. But apart from that, it's exactly the same phenomenon.
Since we're bringing up fun facts about Dutch capitalisation, when the first two letters are "IJ", which pronounced as a single letter (a vowel) in Dutch, then both are capitalised.
There are (a lot of) people who consider the 'ij' to be a single letter. When asked whether that means Dutch has 27 letters in the alphabet or the 'y' is not a Dutch letter, the discussion becomes very confused. Best explanation is probably that the 'ij' is a letter that's not in the alphabet, or it is, but shares the 25th spot in the alphabet with the 'y'. But it is still a different letter, because "symbool" and "royaal" are also valid Dutch words. The situation isn't helped by the fact that some names and words that currently contain an 'ij' used to contain an 'y'.
(Personally I think it's two letters, but there are very serious sources, including a major encyclopedia as well as primary schools, that disagree. In games and puzzles it's also usually considered to be a single letter.)
> This article was written by Reinier Kist and originally appeared in Dutch in NRC on August 3rd, 2020. It was translated into English by Hans de Zwart.
In the original source: https://archive.is/g6H0F it is also "De Zwart" when without the first name, and I would reasonably trust NRC to get it right.
Note that this sentence (and the whole article) contains the same mis-capitalization the articles complains Facebook is doing. It is most likely an aggressive final pass of spellcheck or auto-correct that wasn't re-incorrected before publishing, but really ironic all the same.
Honestly, this sounds less like "falsehoods programmers believe about names", and more like "natural language processing is terrible". A real name policy is unconscionable, of course, but "Found 1 sheeps."-isms on the display side are only a serious problem (rather than a nuisance) to the extent that they trigger (possibly latent) serious problems in something else.
I'm not a web developer but whenever this kind of thing happens I just wonder why there isn't a single standard library in every common web language to deal with this and if there is, why it's not being used more often.
I guess most plain english words would be curse words in other languages. Conversely, many plain words and names in other languages will be incorrectly interpreted as english curse words. There's no way to avoid this. Forbidding english curse words would be extremely offensive to people whose name coincides with those words.
And these are discussions to be had when developing, including what to do when someone does abuse the lack of curse word filters. Because people WILL abuse it.
The same discussion will also have to talk about whether Mr. SomepornwebsiteDOTcom or Mrs. Hitlerdidnothingwrong are real people and what to do about it.
The issue is that many developers have an urge to do some 'clever' processing on them when, really, my conclusion is that they should be left alone. Just sanitise them for security purpose and that's it. This is a typical 'less is more' scenario.
The best person to write a specific name as it should be is the person the name belongs to, so just let them do it.
> The best person to write a specific name as it should be is the person the name belongs to, so just let them do it.
It's inconvenient to have the person you are writing about copyedit all of your writing. How would that even work?
And if you don't allow them to do that, how do you account for the situation here where Mr de Zwart's name is capitalized differently depending on context? I'm not even sure if I have it right here.
In this case, the problem arises, because they are using Mr de Zwart [sic], but can this not by avoided by simply using the full name? Mr Thomas de Zwart?
Previously I wasn't a big fan of this style, but it has grown on me, and I see it now as similar using "they" instead of he/she for an unspecified person. Why assume anything about the name, when you can reuse it verbatim when needed?
This seems like a reasonable try but there are some problems here too. What if you're quoting someone else who called him (in speech) Mr de Zwart? Or when you find out that it's correct to use the Emperor of Japan's full name in some circumstances, but extremely insulting in another?
I think at some point you abandon looking for a general solution, and employ an expert editor who can advise you on the right style. If you're writing for a small town newspaper far away from the Netherlands and get this wrong because you don't have that expert editor, that's OK, you tried. But if you're Facebook and you have 10 million Dutch customers and you get this wrong setting the policy for the most prominent few words on the whole site, you can afford to have better standards than that.
Depends on the language and what you'll use the name for.
Some names change capitalisation when the last name is used by itself vs full name for example.
In some languages a name affect the words around it in a sentence (for a random example, an "o" in Spanish (or) becomes "u" when the next word starts by the "o" sound -> "Carlos o Maria", but "Carlos u Oscar".
In general, for a sufficiently large and well-localised application you will need to modify or parse the name at some point. Not sure that a library can do that properly though.
There is no need for a libaray, there is just need for a consistent standard.
Meaning, if all programms would use UTF-8, fine. But they don't.
But character -encoding is somewhat complicated, because there are a lot of languages out there. Some who even need more than 2 bytes per character, so you get special cases, which break on another system etc.
Being in the public sector, doing our 3rd party integration and being from Denmark gets me the joy of having to deal with a lot of relatively different APIs of very varied quality and æøå in names.
Sometimes when people think they are using UTF-8, they aren’t. I’m not sure if that’s because they are incompetent or if their tooling lies to them, but I’ve gone through soooooo many weird encodings over the years trying to match what was specified as standard UTF-8.
Most programs use something that is compatible with UTF-8. And UTF-8 is also backwards compatible with ASCII which is why A-z usually works. I actually think UTF-16 is the most common. The issues start to arise when three or more code points/bytes are combined into one character/glyph.
I got this problem with several payment processors as the allowed name and name on my credit/debit cards never match. After a few years, I changed(modified) my name.
There are actually a whole series of algorithms used to help match the name on your passport with the name in the airline reservation system, due to absolute mayhem when dealing with asian names for example
People already started having emojis in their name, having hyphen is just a minor annoyance, and I'm willing to bet it being dropped does not change anything for you
> He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger: “It is the arrogance of a giant American corporation which considers the correct spelling of the names of millions of Dutch people an edge case.”
I am really confused. I am assuming the correct spelling is "de Zwart" ... since a human is writing this article, it shouldn't have been too hard for him to use the correct spelling or check the work of any computer involved in publishing the piece.
It was actually translated into English by De Zwart himself. I believe that proper capitalisation of Dutch names with 'de' is to keep the 'd' lowercase if stating the full name (Hans de Zwart), but to capitalise the 'd' if stating just the last name (De Zwart), which the article seems to do consistently (except when quoting Facebook's mangling of the name).
In this context, Dutch refers to the country The Netherlands, not the language.
Based on my non-linguist opinion, I would say you're correct. Dutch people tend to not capitalise their Ds in surnames. When only mentioning the surname, it is treated as a mini-sentence, hence the capitalisaiton.
In northern Belgium (AKA Flanders), Dutch speakers tend to capitalise their Ds in surnames, so you would see "De Zwart" regardless of where it appears in the sentence. In case you're wondering: yes, there are quite a few surnames that exist both in The Netherlands with "de" and in Belgium with "De". The same goes for "van" (of) and "vander/van der" (of the), for instance.
Then again, if they're nobility, they might not capitalise the "de" because it might be the French "of" as opposed to the Dutch "de", meaning "the". Confusing stuff.
In Spain we don't have so many surnames prefixed with particles, but we do have some (e.g. "Del Río") and the capitalization also works as you describe for Dutch.
It makes sense: when you say Juan del Río it's obvious that it's a surname, but if you just said "del Río" without context, the "del" could be confused with the common word.
Works like that in French -- with subtle caveats depending on the length of the name and weather it starts with a vowel: "D'Alembert", "De Sèze", "De Gaulle"... but "La Rochefoucauld".
Are you really willing to assume someone spelled their own name wrong before you question your own knowledge about Dutch names? That seems a bit unreasonable. It's much more likely that your assumption is incorrect than someone wrote their name incorrectly.
This is the premise that should drive software as far as user input goes. The rule should simply be "Trust that the user entered their data correctly and don't try to 'fix' it programmatically." Validate it, sanitize it, but don't change it.
Are you chiding someone for knowing and communicating their confusion and assumptions? When someone is already communicating enough self-awareness to obviate that, either contribute clarifying information or say nothing.
I think the problem is that the OP did not stop at "I am confused, can someone explain this discrepancy to me?" They went on to make seemingly unconfused assumptions that the translator must have misspelled his own name in an article about misspelling names.
The reason for my assumption is the explicit statement:
> The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger ...
which seems to imply pretty unambiguously that using "D" is incorrect. Assuming that all the information I have is what is contained in the article, this is confusing.
The way it's used in the article is correct. His full name is "Hans de Zwart", but if you want to refer to him by just his last name, you always capitalize the tussenvoegsel: "De Zwart".
I did notice the juxtaposition in the paragraph there, but everything is correctly written here.
I was under the same impression, until I reached the end of the article and noticed first the return to "de", and second that the author is de Zwart himself
> This article was written by Reinier Kist and originally appeared in Dutch in NRC on August 3rd, 2020. It was translated into English by Hans de Zwart.
I have experienced this many times. It's unfortunately a sign of the times.
One morning, my bank account was frozen by the tax office. It took me two days and many calls to even understand what was going on. There was no warning, no apparent reason why direct debit would fail that one time, but it took me 7 days to get access to my account again. Meanwhile, I couldn't buy groceries. I got a few late payment fees and a mark on my credit score. No one apologised. No one even noticed.
This is not a tech problem. It's a scaling problem. An increasingly large part of your life is at the mercy of automated systems. If you don't fit on a flowchart designed by a white collar guy in California, you don't exist.
If one in a billion users has an issue, they must be really loud for one in twenty thousand employees to pay attention.
Back when I got my driver's license in the late 90s, Pennsylvania couldn't handle Scottish surnames, so my last name ended up "MC BETH" after I wrote it on the form as "McBeth" (which is ludicrous, there have been Scots people in Pennsylvania far longer than there have been licenses). When I moved to Virginia 7 years ago, Virginia could handle it, but my PA license showed a "MC BETH", so my VA license shows "MC BETH".
Before they issue the license, they give you a form to review. They warn you to check the form for errors, because errors are "serious business" with "serious consequences". So I point out the space on the form, that it is not the correct spelling of my name.
The clerk got quite surly with me. It didn't matter that all the other documentation I had to submit--including my birth certificate--along with my change of residency showed "McBeth". Apparently, the PA DMV of 1998 was infallible and I'm now trying to pull some sort of fraud fastball in VA in getting that space removed.
One can only wonder how much the economic damage is from such small annoyances.
I always have to check under the D for Dutch, N for Netherlands, and T for The when filling in my nationality or my postal address on an international form. Its a minor annoyance till you encounter very important forms without an easy way to scroll or some other broken UI making input hard.
People are commenting that the FB's bureaucratic system is idiotic and unsustainable.
I don't understand why: bureaucracies are a brilliant response by oversized institutions/businesses to force people to reveal how much they care about solving an issue.
Don't really need your website to be cleared? You won't make a fuss about it.
Is it unjust and inequitable? Yes. Is it unsustainable? Cannot see why.
A big part of this I think is due to "uncommon" TLDs. I had a joke "quiz" .website domain that was insta-blocked by Facebook for no reason and was impossible to get revoked. That was a complete waste of time when the main way I intended for it to get some traction was through Facebook shares.
I registered a .as domain for my last name (ending in 'as') and managed to set it as my primary email on Facebook shorty before they decided to block that domain for no apparent reason. For years (until I deleted my FB account), I had a message on the top of my feed asking me to confirm my email even though it was already confirmed but I could never do it because of the block. Tried many times to get it resolved but no success. And to this day, people cannot send posts or messages that contain my domain (website or email) anywhere on Facebook and Instagram.
He should go to small claims court (or the Dutch equivalent) to get his 5 euros back. There was actually a case in Germany where the largest ISPs continously ignored a customer whom they charged too much at some point (similar order as the 5 euros) . The story ended with a court bailiff (?) going into the main ISP office and seizing a printer I believe. Big PR disaster and much higher cost then the original amount.
These big companies do these things all the time calculating on people just giving up. We should take the advantage of the courts to teach some lessons as much as possible.
There is an episode on the simpsons, which I think illustrates the problem with the modern times.
Everyone overreacting to a snippet of information, without knowing what came before or after. The overreacting to the overreactions. Its two villages making up stories about what happens in the other village, and each turn, the story gets embellished.
The movie revolves around misunderstanding and incomplete information. There are people on facebook trying to cause such misunderstandings using selective clips, and quotes all the time.
Consider the BLM protests, most of the cases, are kind of grey area. People don't have the full information. There are much more clear cut cases around BLM could have focused on. Yet they chose these ones. Why? They pick the controversial ones, over witch people will argue endlessly.
People might be rioting right now over something that is not even True.
This is the result of monopolies.
The internet is meant for communication by defining protocols to connect all computers with each other. This allows everyone to participate and at the same time creates redundancy, which minimises failures.
Companies like FB are a perversion of this purpose, instead of using free protocols, communication is done by a few programs.
This creates the basis for censorship and forms a bottleneck or a predetermined breaking point.
I also had my website "reported" as suspicious in facebook. There is no official way to get more information or unblock your website. I see this as a darker pattern where facebook algorithms are tuned to block 3rd party external information content. In this way facebook is promoting sharing information only created within facebook platform.
HN has done some variant of this for a long time now with subdomains, but often you had to send an email to request sites with personal subdomains to be added to the list if they weren't already. It's because your rando personal blog is _not_ medium. It's just _on_ medium. Your rando personal github repository is _not_ github. It's just _on_ github.
Once, I had a message on WhatsApp not delivered to the recipient. I contacted WhatsApp support about this. I haven't received a response yet. I sent them the screenshots and all details they requested off me.
This was 2 years ago and I still have the request number with me.
IMHO: A private company, under a nation, shouldn’t be allowed to require PII, let alone forcing to publish it, unless it is absolutely necessary(not in the way Facebook works) or required by law(webshops, banks) to do so.
Facebook as it is isn’t compatible with society. It’s at least a decade past the point it had to be corrected.
This article screws around with de Zwart's name so much while complaining about another organization's screwing around of his last name is really something.
It doesn't, it uses correct contextual capitalisation. "De" is the definite article in Dutch, and in a full name the correct capitalisation is written using lowercase ("Hans de Zwart").
However, when used in isolation it needs to be capitalised so as to differentiate it from "an incorrectly capitalised noun/adjective following the definite article".
If English had surnames that started with "the ...", the same rule would be applied, where "Jason the Bouvier" would be the correct full name spelling, but in isolated context, such as "According to The Bouvier, this policy has [...]", capitalisation should be used to make it clear that this is expressly not the definite article.
Considering that the person referred to in the article, Hans de Zwart, is the one who translated the Dutch article into English, I'd say he knows how to write his own name.
The the name de Zwart appears inconsistently capitalized throughout the article.
If you do a matched-case search in the body text, de Zwart
appears 3 times, while De Zwart occurs 7 times outside of quotation marks, and other locations (like at the beginning of a sentence) where English rules will capitalize a name.
I believe to follow proper Dutch capitalization, it should be similar to, for example:
Being a digital rights activist, de Zwart knows this discussion very well, so he starts to meticulously log his attempts to get clarity.
However, I can't be sure if in Dutch, a lower case pre-surname is capitalized in circumstances when it's used in a sentence vs as a full name.
Without the clarification of rules governing the use of such lower case surnames, I can't be exactly sure whether the capitalization is on purpose or not.
How is it that fake news, misinformation, and conspiracy theories are allowed to run wild on the platform but then VERY SERIOUS things like this are taken care of?
I'd hope not, that would be a completely wrong-headed decision by them as "Zwarte" isn't an uncommon surname/surname part, just like "Black" isn't uncommon in English-speaking countries.
Which of course doesn't preclude Facebook from making a completely wrong-headed decision.
I think there is some difference between working as a guard in concentration camp and as a toilet cleaner or programmer in HSBC, although HSBC bank was laundering money for drug cartels that also murder people.
Can you explain (with links please) how Facebook is a "detriment to a stable society".
> If you work at Facebook, I despise you. (you in the general sense)
I think that is massive hyperbole. Do you despise all the people who work for oil companies also? What about everyone who works for Nestle (all the pushing of formula milk in Africa that led to the deaths of babies), I mean where does it all stop?
> The foundation of the company is a guy who thought it was OK to create website to rate women. Fucking degenerate people.
He was a 19 year old man at this point (and I'm not even sure that happened anywhere except The Social Network). I'm pretty sure lots of 19 year old males have done things similarly except no one cares, because they're not billionaires.
> if it's large and/or has been around for a long time
So why not work for a smaller company with values and a history that you can respect?
You make it sound like in a capitalist society we have to sell our souls to a big evil company. Software developers (especially ones have the skills to work for facebook) can work literally anywhere. Lots of them start their own companies. There's simply no excuse for contributing to the success of companies whose values and actions you can't personally endorse and stand behind.
Of course I'm not gonna resent some dude working at McDonalds for contributing to the obesity epidemic, but software developers just don't have any excuse.
Firstly, I'm arguing the general point. Secondly, I'm not a software developer (well maybe I'm slowly becoming one, but it's not my job title).
Thirdly, I have looked for ethical companies who'll pay me to analyse data, and I am yet to find any industries that don't have ethical issues. I'm not sure what makes Facebook special in this sense (do you feel the same way about Google, Snap, Twitter and TikTok?).
I've long viewed working for Facebook (or Twitter) as like working for a cigarette company. Your product makes the world a worse place and everything would be better if your company disappeared, but hey, something's gotta pay the rent I guess?
I'm amazed that in a global lockdown, where digital communication and connection are more important than ever, that you see only negative benefit to users in Facebook.
Facebook is, by far, the worst communication platform out of any that I use. Practically every aspect of the site is designed to be as impractical and user-hostile as possible. The only reason I use Facebook (which happens increasingly less often) is because it's my only way of contacting certain people. I'd LOVE to delete my account but I can't because I still need it for random little things occasionally. I'm not their user - I'm their hostage.
And that's without even getting into any of FB's terrible practices around data collection and privacy, none of which need to be repeated here.
Yes, because Facebook's actual value is trivial to recreate apart from the network effect, and they do their worst to make the site inhospitable. It is worse to use Facebook than abandon it for almost any alternative.
He was the director of Bits of Freedom, one of the founding organisations of EDRi[0] (think: European EFF). That being said, he left that spot a few years ago and this is just his side project, but saying that he's not a "real digital rights activist" is just ridiculous on so many levels.
Whatever he did in the past, this whining about FB not linking his database with copyrighted script -interlaced with non-issues like how a platform he does not use spells his name- doesn't help anyone much now. There are bigger digital rights fish to fry.
Happened with me many times. I run various amazon affiliate site. Some times I get expired brandable domain names which are available to buy. When I share any post on fb page from them I get same error and there is no way to fix it. I just have to stop working on those niche sites on fb promotion.
FB sucks sometimes. I can feel this guys frustration.
It seems the large tech companies just have a policy to automate as much as possible and if it impacts some folks unfairly, that's just how it works and they've no interest in dealing with it unless it gets PR. Otherwise screw those little people.
I had a domain through blogger that I registered ages ago on the blogger site. Google started emailing me that it was expiring and directed me to Gsuite.... but I don't have a Gsuite account and google didn't make one for me...
The domain didn't appear in my Google domains account.
Google had just pointed blogger domain users to Gsuite and called it a day.
Google was no help, I never got a response from the handful of ways (none of them good) trying to reach out to them.
Finally I found the old registrar google used behind the scenes and they let me renew the domain.
I never heard back from google other than all the spam about my domain expiring and asking me to login to Gsuite... repeatedly.. sent to an email without a Gusite account.. someone just flipped a switch and screw everyone I guess.