
Facebook has been granted patent on shadow banning - smsm42
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=10,356,024.PN.&OS=PN/10,356,024&RS=PN/10,356,024
======
mnehring
I looked at the USPTO's Public PAIR system
([https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair](https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair))
and this patent was rejected multiple times before finally being accepted.
(Non-final rejection 6/7/2016, final rejection 2/21/2017, non-final rejection
1/3/2018, final rejection 1/7/2019, patent issued 7/16/2019.) Seriously patent
office? You should have paid attention to your 4 previous rejections instead
of giving in to Facebook's lawyers and persistence.

If you see a patent in the application pipeline that you know is bogus
(obvious or prior art), you can do a preissuance submission:
[https://www.uspto.gov/patent/initiatives/third-party-
preissu...](https://www.uspto.gov/patent/initiatives/third-party-preissuance-
submissions)

I challenged a patent application and it was rejected. Now, I can't say if the
patent examiner already knew that the patent was both obvious and had prior
art, or if my application informed him of that, but it was rejected.

~~~
dctoedt
To quote the legendary Judge Learned Hand from nearly a century ago (on a
different but analogous subject): _" Courts have descanted upon the abuse
again and again, but the antlike persistency of_ [patent] _solicitors has
overcome, and I suppose will continue to overcome, the patience of_ [Patent
Office] _examiners, and there is apparently always but one outcome. "_

 _Lyon v. Boh_ , 1 F. 2d 48, 50 (S.D.N.Y. 1926),
[https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=969659756696519...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9696597566965196877)

~~~
phnofive
descant: to discuss at length

~~~
throwaway3627
Prolix

Garrulify

Enucleate

Perorate

Expatiate

~~~
Fjolsvith
Such a wasteful existence. To create brief and unremarkable identities and
experience rejection of expression.

~~~
inscionent
Performance art?

------
jedberg
This is ridiculous. We had shadow banning on reddit in 2007, four years before
this was ever filed. In fact, we met with Facebook and told them about it
before 2011, and they hadn't considered it before that. I'm pretty sure reddit
is where they got the idea...

To be fair, there was no public record of it until 2012 or so.

~~~
StefanKarpinski
Shadowbanning didn't originate at Reddit either, it's been a feature of online
forums since at least the 90s.

~~~
Skywing
This! We were shadowbanning people on IRC in like 2001. Unreal IRCd had a
shadowban plugin that literally did exactly what modern shadowban features do.

~~~
efdee
I remember /shun.

------
btilly
They filed for this in 2011.

According to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning)
there is precedent from the 1980s, and Fogbugz had this feature in 2006. I
don't know when Reddit implemented it, but by 2012 it was widely known that
they did, so they may have implemented it first as well.

How was this patent granted?

~~~
pmiller2
Prior art may go back further than the 1980s. I seem to recall that on some
old MUDs, you could be “toaded,” or maybe “frogged,” which would make you look
to others like a toad/frog, and anything you said would display as “ribbit” or
something.

See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD) and
[https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=kt367n...](https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=kt367nc6m1&chunk.id=ch03&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ch03&brand=ucpress)

~~~
zaroth
Wow, thanks for the trip down memory lane. I can’t remember if the effected
user would know it was happening on their end?

~~~
ShinTakuya
Usually they would know but there was a couple of MUDs that hid it. Of course
you found out pretty quickly because everyone would find the hyperactive toad
hilarious.

------
sarcasmatwork
Lots of entities do it. It's usually a feature in the software that runs the
admin interface. FB should not be granted this patent. This is crazy!

[https://gizmodo.com/facebook-patents-
shadowbanning-183641134...](https://gizmodo.com/facebook-patents-
shadowbanning-1836411346)

~~~
burkaman
This is obviously a dumb patent that should have been rejected, but it is at
least limited by the clause "wherein the specified connection type is a one-
to-one friend connection". Always ignore the abstract and description in a
patent and only look at the claims. Another extremely specific claim: "wherein
the proscribed content is stored as a trie data structure wherein each letter
of a proscribed word is a key."

~~~
buro9
But forums like vBulletin, XenForo, Microcosm and many others have the concept
of following someone, and of ignoring someone.

When ignored, it really is no different from a shadow ban.

~~~
sp332
And those implementations are probably not covered by the patent, so it's
fine.

~~~
mcny
> And those implementations are probably not covered by the patent, so it's
> fine.

I think what the grandparent is saying is that those implementations count as
prior art and this application should have been rejected. It is ridiculous to
even insinuate that the it is possible that thing that I cannot continue doing
the thing I have been doing for decades because someone patented it a decade
or two after I started doing it.

~~~
sp332
Did someone say they couldn't keep doing it? I don't see why they would count
as prior art, either. The implementations are _different_ from what was
patented.

~~~
zucker42
From my understanding, prior art doesn't haven't to be exactly the same as the
invention. The invention just has to be obvious in light of the prior art. In
this case, the point is that Facebook's use is obvious, given all the other
similar ideas used far before.

------
zaroth
I think it’s important to recognize, at least, that all forms of shadow
banning are not broadly covered by this patent.

I’m not a patent lawyer, but looking at the _claims_ , the way that forums
like HN, Reddit, IRC implement shadow banning do not appear to infringe on
this patent.

It seems likely to me that by the time the claims were done being narrowed
after the multiple rounds of rejections, they have managed to patent something
narrow enough that only they are actually doing it.

Specifically, any kind of shadow banning that occurs at the level of a
“channel” wide audience, and not a one-to-one connection, appears to not be
covered.

The way to read the claims, as I understand it, is everything within a single
claim is a logical AND in order to infringe the claim, and dependent claims
require everything in the parent claim as well as everything in the subsequent
one to hold true. If any one part of a single claim does not apply to your
system, then you do not infringe that particular claim.

Should Facebook be able to take a hyper-specialized application of a common
feature and patent that particular application? It comes down to whether their
implementation is unique and distinctive enough to be novel and non-obvious.

I do think in this case it’s totally dicey to say that shadow banning on a
friend-based feed versus a channel-based feed is really a novel and non-
obvious application of shadow banning. But at least it is a fairly narrow
application that they are claiming.

If you want to show prior art against _this_ patent, I assume it would have to
be on a friend-based feed and not a channel-based feed.

The first thing I would do if taking this to court would be to read “green
eggs and ham” to the jury. Facebook is trying to patent a particular _place_
where you can eat green eggs and ham. It’s nonsense and should be thrown out,
and they should be embarrassed to have pursued this. But it’s also not really
that worrisome.

~~~
AndriyKunitsyn
>Should Facebook be able to take a hyper-specialized application of a common
feature and patent that particular application? It comes down to whether their
implementation is unique and distinctive enough to be novel and non-obvious.

No, because in the context of current state of communication software it was
totally obvious to translate the idea of shadow banning to a “friend-based
feed”.

>But it’s also not really that worrisome.

A huge company shrinking the space of available programming techniques for no
good reason by abusing laws that were supposed to boost innovation is pretty
worrisome.

------
ransom1538
I am almost done with my "addslashes" patent. Given a string, my algorithm
will put a backslash in front of all quotes. It's been rejected 4 times and
cost $32k, but, this next time my lawyer informed me it's going in.

------
en4bz
Prior art exists. This is already invalid. Just needs to go to court first.

~~~
sova
Prior art that nobody with nearly as much clout is claiming. No antagonist? no
compromise

~~~
cm2187
Twitter and youtube like doing that.

~~~
sova
That's so messed up. Just because lady liberty doesn't have a wallet-full of
cash, we're going to ignore our better nature. Patents are meant to protect
the small-time inventor, not the giants who are already eating fat.

------
codewritinfool
No one will believe me, but I had this feature on a BBS I wrote back in about
1986 or 1987. I cannot prove it because the code no longer exists. I had a
problem user that kept posting junk to the forum. I deleted things for a while
and then thought of this as a solution. It seemed to work. The user never knew
that no one else could see those posts.

~~~
apotatopot
I believe you.

~~~
pipingdog
As a BBS user in the 80s I believe you. It was a common feature, usually
referred to as the twit bit.

------
michaelmrose
There ought to be a fine of 1/10 of 1% of annual profit for seeking and
granting a patent later deemed obvious.

The money from said fine ought to be granted to the party that brings evidence
to court that the patent has been granted in error.

Further the examiner who approved it ought to be terminated. Ample reason for
both parties to do a better job.

I hereby suggest that we petition the government to fire the individual who
granted this. Is the most appropriate venue for this farcical quest
change.org?

Alternatively we can just admit that the entire patent system is better off
scrapped.

------
Pywarrior
Someone else essentially patented data lineage, processing a dataset and
tracking which records passed/failed a set of validations and storing a code
for each validation that failed. Thanks Obama and your first to file change.

~~~
zifnab06
My favorite patent so far came out of Apple.

They received a patent on receiving data, recognizing it was a certain type of
data, and performing an action on it.

And what was this used for? A user clicks a phone number and it brings up the
phone app.

------
daodedickinson
Google started using recaptcha to shadowban me from posting on any site using
it yesterday. This evil must stop. I'm being censored for completely non-
violent beneficial posts that simply expose wrong doing by the otherwise
unaccountable "intelligence" "services".

------
holstvoogd
Lol, I've implemented shadow banning on a municipal website in 2009. We called
it the Mao-filter and that was a direct ripoff from a political party that had
that on their website. It was about as innovative as, I dunno, having comments
in the first place?

------
rolph
so i assume this means FB could demand $$ or cease and desist?

also :

>>thereby providing fewer incentives to the commenting user to spam the page
or attempt to circumvent the social networking system filters. <<

I would think its just the opposite and would encourage whack-a-mole antics,
as in many sockpuppets. just how many shadowban posts would a blog socmedia
etcetera see as acceptable overhead to further the illusion of transmitted
posts during a shadowban. i would think its a problem to carry a bunch of
content, to show to only one person. putting the grey hat on, it could make a
beautiful online scratch pad, or even a dead drop so a number of people could
use the shadow banned account to communicate exclusively with each other.

~~~
sova
"Quick! show me the top secret schematics of your new engine under the hood so
I can make sure you're not infringing on my patents"

------
ToFab123
This i made on my website in 1999. In my case it was an online poll, but the
principle was the same.

When people attempted to vote multiple times, the count would only increase
locally in the spammers browser. Only the first vote was saved in the
database. The spamming votes we stored in a cookie on client and added them to
the results before rendering the result so he believed he submitted multiple
votes.

We had some server side logging as well. Was funny to see in the logs, the
number of people that tried to submit multiple votes and to see a few user
submitting a lot before realizing the votes didn't get added to the db.

Was very effective and reduced the worst of the spamming significantly.

------
sdinsn
Failure/corruption of the patent office. There is so much prior art.

------
rdlecler1
Companies may patent something so they’re not later sued for it.

~~~
ppseafield
And also sometimes they sue, like with Amazon's 1 Click Checkout.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Barnes_&_Noble](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Barnes_&_Noble)

~~~
krferriter
The notion that clicking a button to buy something using the pre-entered
billing information on the account was able to be patented is absurd. It's not
an invention, it's just a feature of that particular website. Patenting the
notion of clicking once to do something so that competitors have to require
users to click 2 or more times... it's difficult for me to even describe how
ridiculous it is.

Imagine if other companies started patenting other numbers of clicks. Like B&N
patenting 2 click checkouts. Apple patenting 3 click checkouts... this is
clearly what patents were intended to be used for.

~~~
zaroth
Remember one-click is a patent which _expired_ in 2017. So back in 1997, the
technology was actually transformational at that time, and now it’s free for
anyone to use forever more.

You can argue the exclusivity period is too long, but Amazon absolutely trail-
blazed checkout technology, and the trade-off of the patent system is now
their exclusivity is over, and the technology is free for all.

At least one thing we don’t have to worry about in tech is “ever-greening”.

~~~
dmwallin
The whole point of offering patents is to encourage innovation. It’s extremely
doubtful that the offer of patent exclusivity played any part in their push to
develop this technology which makes this an obvious failure of the patent
system, this would still have been invented in a world without the ability to
patent it. Less money would have been burned through the legal system and
instead could have been put to more productive use. While we accept some
amount of failure in order to benefit from the theoretical upsides of the
patent system, it’s also important to call things as they are so we can
improve the average results for our economy.

~~~
ppseafield
Indeed, the only "benefit" we received is that everyone ordering merchandise
online had to use multiple clicks for 20 years, and Amazon probably received a
nice settlement from their competitor. The implementation is fairly obvious
and shouldn't have been patentable.

~~~
zaroth
So obvious that ~30 years after the first IP packets were sent, they were
still the first to ever do it.

Do you remember what the Amazon website looked like in 1997? Wayback Machine
doesn’t even have a snapshot that old.

And the collection of patents that Amazon has been issued, which affords them
protection of their published IP, are part of what enables them to spend those
Billions every year developing all the new technologies they continue to
create and publish today.

~~~
saint_abroad
No, Amazon weren't the first to have one-button buy. Filed in 1994 (the year
of the first WWW):

> the client computer will know which item is currently being offered for
> sale. In such a case, the viewer will be able to order it by Simply pressing
> one button on the TV remote

[https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/0a/99/bd/431ac01...](https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/0a/99/bd/431ac01bb9789a/US5819034.pdf)

They were the first do this "with a shopping cart", and needed a patent
examiner tell them how to get the patent claims approved. Genius(!)

> The Patent Owner is also advised that claims 1 and 11 would be considered to
> be patentable if they were amended to recite providing a shopping cart model

[http://homepages.uc.edu/~armstrty/AmazonReExam-20071009.pdf](http://homepages.uc.edu/~armstrty/AmazonReExam-20071009.pdf)

This is what is wrong with the US PTO: old inventions are patentable for new
applications as long as it is novel, without consideration for inventiveness.
Is it the "Guinness World Records" of invention, where you can be awarded for
using a saw "in a musical ensemble".

~~~
zaroth
From that first patent from 1994 that you reference;

> _" It is also possible that permanent information about the viewer (i.e. the
> name, address, method of payment and credit card number) may be preentered
> once by the viewer, so it is not necessary to solicit that information each
> time an order is placed. The information is stored in permanent memory in
> the client computer. In such a case, when an order is placed, that
> information is retrieved from the permanent memory, appended to the item
> number and transmitted to the central computer."_

Aha, but you see of course this isn’t at all how the Amazon 1-click system
works.

The most important thing about patents is you _cannot_ patent the overall
concept. You can only patent a specific implementation, and only that specific
implementation technique is covered by the patent.

Likewise, if we _didn’t_ let people patent distinctly different
implementations of the same overall concept—if Amazon’s unique implementation
of a one-click online purchase was not novel or non-obvious—that would imply
that this earlier patent somehow covered what Amazon was trying to do! So now
you’ve made the problem exponentially worse by making patents absurdly broad,
patenting the overall concept of buying an item with 1 click, versus a
specific method and apparatus for achieving the functionality.

The abstract notion of making purchases through a computer as simple and take
as few steps as possible is “obvious” but it’s also not patentable. But it you
invent a new way to make that feature possible you can patent that.

I go back to the Apple Pay example, which is the result of massive R&D effort
to find new ways to essentially make 1-click possible, but; orchestrated in a
very particular way between machines at the merchant, Apple, card processor,
and client in order to achieve better scale, across many merchants, with a
consistent UI that is manifestly simple to access and configure, and with a
heightened level of security.

~~~
saint_abroad
> The abstract notion of making purchases through a computer as simple and
> take as few steps as possible is “obvious” but it’s also not patentable.

The point was that the invention of 1-click buy _is_ patentable as applied to
"a shopping cart".

> After all, what did it take B&N; to work around the 1-click patent? They had
> to add a second click for the user to confirm the order.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20071218184903/http://www.oreill...](https://web.archive.org/web/20071218184903/http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2000/bezos_0300.html)

~~~
zaroth
In a web browser, identifying the user through a session cookie, associating a
session with a login, to which is attached a plurality of addresses and credit
cards, of which one has been selected as a default to be used with one-click,
then presenting a separate button next to the “Add to Cart” button which
allows a one click purchase, which upon clicking will...

 _That_ specific implementation, in 1997, was patentable. And now anyone can
freely do the same, if they went to, although we now know that isn’t really
the best way to do it.

------
scottydelta
is there a way for people to write a letter of reconsideration on this patent
to USPTO by general public or may be a petition backed by a group?

~~~
sova
Under the America Invents Act there are 3 ways to challenge patent validity.
By partes review (2nd option), with prior art, you must show it's either not
inventive, or not novel (violating sections 102 or 103 of 35 U.S.C.)

------
creaghpatr
Reddit hardest hit.

~~~
holler
hackernews shadow bans as well, and I'm sure many other sites do. Next they
will patent commenting on an online web page.

~~~
jrockway
Sort of? I browse with "showdead" on, so I can see these shadow-banned
comments. But maybe there is a second level?

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, you can. But the whole idea of the shadowbanning is that the one who is
shadowbanned does not. So you get this effect where someone is talking to
himself or the walls and they don't even know it, sometimes this goes on for
_years_.

~~~
HeavenBanned
Thank god I know I'm shadow-banned.

------
osswid
We had shadow banning in the Topix forums in 2005.

------
fortran77
Good! Maybe Hacker News will stop shadow banning me!

Our company, which has a number of "software" patents, also implements shadow
banning in a communications application, and we never even thought to patent
that. Despite the fact that we review all new features for patentability
before they're released.

------
madprops
I find shadow banning disgusting. Makes me angry to have legitimate thoughts
silenced through some simple switch just because of some temporary "undesired"
behavior caused by my nature of having a plethora of emotions that varies
depending on many factors.

~~~
jeltz
I do not like it either but the main use for it in forums I have been involved
in was to protect the forum from being destroyed by mentally ill users and the
people responding to their incoherent rants. Banning them never worked.

------
allana
Hasn't Reddit been issuing shadow bans for the last decade? I think shadow
banning people is really shitty.

In Reddit's case, they shadowbanned me immediately after I bought Reddit gold,
and an unpaid, unaffiliated subreddit moderator let me know that my account
was snowbanned.

Getting Reddit to reverse the ban took sending a message to an admin and
waiting a few weeks.

This shadow ban, the continuing degredation of old.reddit.com (its showing
incorrect URLs now), and people getting pissed off at me when I suggest
breaking up their wall of text into paragraphs (replying "this is just
Facebook!" or similar) have pushed me away.

I'm not on Facebook, and I don't want to interact with people who can't be
bothered to put in a modicum of effort to comply with subreddit stanfards and
rules. Sadly, Reddit has chosen to tailor itself to adopt this demographic
over the last few years :c

~~~
Raphmedia
Only administrators or automatic spam detection tools can shadowban. Regular
moderators cannot.

Reddit gold is not a subscription to Reddit. This is a donation function that
displays a badge. You didn't have a premium account and you weren't above the
rules.

Being picky, mean or downright unpleasant will get you banned you from certain
places. Unless done in a polite and educational manner, calling out people for
their lack of punctuation or grammatical errors is generally frowned upon and
considered toxic behaviour since it does not contribute to the conversation.

~~~
Deimorz
You're wrong about multiple things here.

Regular moderators can effectively shadowban inside their subreddits by using
AutoModerator and telling it to remove all posts made by certain users.

Reddit Gold has literally been renamed to Reddit Premium and is described
officially as both a "premium membership" and a "subscription":
[https://www.reddit.com/premium](https://www.reddit.com/premium)

~~~
txcwpalpha
>Regular moderators can effectively shadowban inside their subreddits by using
AutoModerator and telling it to remove all posts made by certain users.

While your comment makes it sound like AutoMod just removes comments, what I
think you're meaning to point out is that AutoMod can selectively hide all of
a user's comments to everyone except for the comment author, which is the
exact same as shadowbanning, and isn't just a simple comment removal.

A lot of subreddits use this feature now, too. Some automatically shadowban
any user that doesn't have above a certain amount of karma, while others auto
shadowban _everyone_ and then only maintain a whitelist of authorized posters.
If you've ever posted on a subreddit and gotten zero replies/votes, it's worth
going into incognito mode and trying to view your comment from there. Chances
are, your account is shadowbanned in that subreddit.

~~~
Deimorz
Yeah, that's how all comment removals on reddit work though (which, you're
right, many users don't realize).

Users can only know their comments are removed if they check from logged-out
or another account, or if the moderators notify them by posting a reply or
messaging (which some do, but not a lot of the time overall).

~~~
txcwpalpha
Ah, you're right. I imagine most users aren't aware of this because they
assume that if their comment was removed, they would see the "[removed]" tag
like they see for everyone else's removed comments.

And either many redditors have never had their comments removed, or more
likely, shadowbanning is apparently a _lot_ more effective than people
realized.

~~~
Deimorz
Yeah, it's not uncommon at all to see things like, "Edit: Wow, this whole
chain of comments was removed, except for mine!" because people don't realize
that the site actively hides whether your posts are removed.

Pretty much all of reddit's moderation tools were created 10+ years ago for
anti-spam purposes, and have hardly been changed since then. They don't work
very well for how they're actually used now.

~~~
allana
It is really sad to see Reddit stagnate on spam handling, but the dev
resources at Reddit seem to be laser focused on making the new UI & features
that ease the transition from Facebook to Reddit.

Most of the subreddits with active mods and communities have yet to stylize
and reimplement their custom CSS, sidebar and links on the new UI (or can't
due to limitations of the new UI), which means lots of people using the new UI
miss out on key features that differentiate a subreddit from the rest of
Reddit.

------
mung
On the upside, if Facebook was the only company that could shadow ban, that
would be a win for the rest of the internet, and a bit of an own goal for
Facebook since the practice is pretty despicable.

------
jiveturkey
The patent office actually received many challenges and claims of prior art
for this, however the submitters in question were shadow banned so were not
aware that their complaints were not received.

------
trhway
as an author of a small batch (~10, give or take some at various stages)
software patents, my experience has been so far that the strictest filter is
your company patent office - they usually pick the crappiest ideas dismissing
the better ones with long-winded explanations (which almost always can be
reduced to "too science-y") - and whatever crap they decide to throw on the
USPTO wall seems to be sticking there just fine. I'm really curious about
USPTO examiners brain inner workings :)

~~~
rolltiide
one thing I do after getting a 101 or 102 "not patentable" rejection is to
fire up the PR engine and get articles posted about the innovation and similar
patents or products released by companies with more clout

make sure to mention inventors names (link to them if you can)

sometimes the patent examiner magically does a 180, hope the PR is helping

another use of the PR is to find potential suitors and licensees of the patent

its always written as a "not advertisement". kind of like how a buzzfeed
listicle isn't an advertisement, but little do you know that the 3rd thing in
the list is the one that got the whole listicle written to begin with.

------
JTxt
Doesn't Hacker News shadow ban too? When did that start?

------
wyxuan
Is it possible that FB did this so they could block any potential patent
trolls? Correct me if I'm wrong, but FB isn't really known as a patent troll.

------
john4534243
Isn't this good for privacy. Now only facebook should be avoided because
legally no other company can claim end to end encryption and do shadow
banning.

------
ianamartin
Welp, this is going to get right the fuck challenged.

And my guess is that the people who challenge it are going to make sure it
ends up in Judge Alsup’s court, if possible.

------
JDiculous
How the hell does this possibly warrant a patent?

------
Fjolsvith
I am laughing myself silly over this. Now we have a 25 year moratorium on
shadow banning in Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, etc...

------
badmadrad
We need a new internet bill of rights.

I feel like it's more ethical to just outright ban someone than to shadow ban.
This is not only censorship but false advertising. When you interact on social
media you expect a certain level of fairness and visibility of your content.

This masquerades as providing that fairness when in fact you are screaming in
an empty room. Shady.

~~~
mikekchar
Why should a system provide fairness to a user who is banned? The purpose of
not informing them that they are banned is to slow down their attempts to work
around the ban. Shadow banning is what you do when you do not want to interact
with that user ever again. They are no longer a member of your services.

This does not masquerade as providing fairness at all. It's nothing to do with
fairness. It is removing that user in a way that makes it difficult for them
to come back. That is all.

~~~
asveikau
> Why should a system provide fairness to a user who is banned?

Firstly, not all shadow bannings are guaranteed to be fair and not due to some
judgement error by moderators or moderation algorithms.

Secondly, I would argue that sites like Facebook are uniquely positioned to
cause harm to users for whom its moderators or algorithms have failed. It has
been commented and studied that heavy facebook use is correlated to
depression. [1] It has also been commented that facebook feeds your dopamine
response cycle. [2] A user who has been unfairly targeted by FB moderation may
feel isolated from friends and family, may feel like they suddenly lost their
dopamine fix, and may therefore experience psychological distress and
isolation. It's not hard to imagine how a decision to shadow ban can have real
consequences on the banned, who may in truth be decent human beings not
deserving of such treatment.

Footnotes - Some random citations from google searches on this topic - by no
means exhaustive:

[1]
[https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/jscp.2014.33.8....](https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/jscp.2014.33.8.701)

[2] [http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-
smartphones-...](http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-
battle-time/)

~~~
wyqydsyq
While it's true that there are clear psychological effects to using social
media habitually, I don't think just because someone may be dependent on
something to be happy means the provider has any obligations to continue
service.

There is a similar dopamine response cycle with gambling addicts, but a casino
barring an addict for the safety of themselves and other customers is hardly
seen as "unfair" or unethical regardless of how the banned person feels,
because similar to with social media bans, it is generally seen as being for
the benefit of the community and even the banned members themselves.

A banned FB addict might spiral into depression just like a barred gambling
addict, but in both cases if anything the ban is helping the person face and
overcome their addiction rather than continued service which would be enabling
or perpetuating their addiction.

~~~
asveikau
Fair points and a fair perspective. I would still say that Facebook's near
monopoly status on 21st century social interaction (through it and its
subsidiaries) does give it a unique position here, and you don't even need it
to rise to the level of an addiction to see it.

Or: the gambling addict isn't typically nearly-forced into using a casino to
keep in touch with loved ones.

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joestr87
If they care about making the whole Internet a safer place to all, why would
they patent this?

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DesiLurker
this is how legal sector makes money off of tech sector & locks everything up.

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noncoml
They cannot shadow ban you if you don't have an account!

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tareqak
Can a patent be invalidated after it's been granted?

~~~
patentatt
Yes. Through the PTO (reexam, IPR, other PTAB proceedings) or through a
federal court. Happens every day.

~~~
saint_abroad
PTO invalidation happens every day but takes /years/ to process.

Until then, frivolous patent holders have free rein to coerce contracts that
licence claims they know won't stand re-examination.

[https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/02/17/federal-circuit-
affirm...](https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/02/17/federal-circuit-affirms-ptab-
invalidate-mphj-patent/)

------
saalweachter
I'm surprised no one has commented on this yet.

------
GrumpyNl
What if i can proof, we did that already in 2001?

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zwarag
What is this, a Software Patent?

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sroussey
I did this in 1999

------
cojxd
Nowadays shadowbanning is so widespread that I wonder if it's useful at all.

It's the kind of thing that blows your mind the first time it happens to you,
but then you learn to check for it everywhere.

------
dymk
The primary reason Facebook acquires so many patents is because every engineer
is incentivized by a $5,000 cash bonus to file for one, and so they shepherd
it through.

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jrcii
dang will be so disappointed he can’t shadow ban people that fail to conform
to his far-left political agenda

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sarcasmOrTears
Another gift from the State to a big corporation. Since basically only big
corps get advantages from patents I think it's time to abolish it

~~~
jMyles
Hear hear. This is a great time to experiment with reducing (or in some cases
eliminating) the protection offered by the state under the guise of
intellectual property.

If the US doesn't do it, others will, to their own distinct advantage.

------
moron4hire
I think this deserves a reminder that Facebook cancels all of your licenses to
all of their software (which includes such things as React) if you are in any
sort of patent dispute with them (whether they've filed it against you or you
against them).

~~~
miketery
If I recall they removed that restriction from the react license.

~~~
gnomewascool
(Further devolving into off-topic:) What I don't understand is why they moved
from BSD+Patents to MIT, and not to pure BSD, by just removing the Patents
file, which would be the obvious step?

