
Facebook Overhauls Its Inmate Account Takedown Process - CapitalistCartr
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/facebook-reforms-inmate-account-takedown-process
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argklm
Facebook doesn't understand that humans who did errors are still humans and
need to be treated as such. The goal of prison is to rehabilitate the person
in order to make them come back to society. I wonder how eliminating their
basic rights and cutting them completely out of the world will improve their
situation. Maybe the desperate cases cannot be recovered but prisons are also
full of people that can be reeducated and one way to do so is to let them be
still a part of this world. Isolating them from Internet, stripping their
rights and physical isolation will do only more harm in the long run.

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cam_l
"The _USA_ doesn't understand that humans who did errors are still humans and
need to be treated as such."

Fixed it for you. The fact that the states strip prisoners (or even ex-
prisoners) of the right to vote is just fucking astounding.

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nightski
Care to elaborate? Seems like a legitimate deterrent for committing a crime.
Especially since it is "fucking astounding" as you say.

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click170
Voting is the corner stone of democracy. How is it fair to stop someone from
voting for a mistake they made that isn't necessarily violent or even have a
victim? A mistake they may have made early on in their lives, the lessons of
which they have learned.

And that's ignoring the disproportionately higher incarceration rate of black
men in america.

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jacobolus
It’s not supposed to be fair, or a crime deterrent, or even a punishment,
really. The clear reason for disenfranchising felons is to tilt elections in
the favor of the Republican party in a way that has some political cover. It’s
part of a range of efforts both official and unofficial to suppress the vote
among young people, poor people, and minority groups, including voter ID laws,
restrictions on voting by mail, improperly purging people from registered
voter rolls, intentional underfunding/understaffing of polling places so
people will give up in the face of long lines,
discouraging/threatening/misleading junk mail, etc., not to mention all the
absurd redistricting schemes.

All the tiny efforts taken to suppress voting end up making quite a dramatic
difference in close elections.

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ams6110
You got today's memo from the Clinton campaign?

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jacobolus
Hm? This has been going on for decades, and isn’t about Clinton per se
(personally I detest the Clintons), but affects every type of election from
local races on up.

For Republican politicians and operatives, it’s smart political strategy (at
least in a short-term zero-sum kind of way, assuming the only goal is to win
the next election rather than to govern effectively or build a stable
society). Likewise, it’s smart political strategy for Democratic party
politicians and operatives to make voter registration and voting easy and
convenient, because on the margins the additional votes tend to go to
Democrats.

On the bright side, voting rights for ex-felons have actually been improving
somewhat over the last 20 years, even if that improvement is patchy and has
regressed in some places. Unfortunately, many other types of voter suppression
have gotten worse.

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nostromo
I feel like Facebook for inmates is a social good, not something that should
be banned.

The last thing I want is for inmates to leave prison with no friends or family
left to turn to.

~~~
ryandrake
Think of it from the point of view of the (often for-profit) prison: The less
of a chance of re-integrating with society the inmate leaves with, the greater
chance he'll be back, which means more $$$ for the prison.

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mason240
>Think of it from the point of view of the (often for-profit) prison:

Less than 5% of prisoners in the US are in privately run prisons.

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AlexWest
"Broken down to prison type, 19.1% of the federal prison population in the
United States is housed in private prisons and 6.8% of the U.S. state prison
population is housed in private prisons." Source:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#In_the_United_St...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#In_the_United_States)

~~~
001sky
Currently 1/3 of the US incarcerated population is neither in State or Federal
custody.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b6/Ad...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b6/Adult_incarceration_statistics_for_the_USA._Timeline.gif/350px-
Adult_incarceration_statistics_for_the_USA._Timeline.gif)

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downandout
Why is Facebook involving itself in these kinds of issues at all? It is free
to enforce its own policies, which say nothing about inmates not being able to
use the service. It seems that no good can come out of this, but plenty of bad
things can.

While I have never run anything the size of Facebook, I have run a (small)
social network before. We blocked any IP resolving to a .gov address from
accessing the site at all, and had a policy that we would only respond to
actual court orders (or NSL's, but we never received one). Facebook would get
far fewer requests from local and state law enforcement agencies if their
employees couldn't browse the site from work.

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the8472
I think that's the wrong way of thinking about it.

Facebook is not a public service. They aren't required to give anyone a
platform and if they see any benefit in banning inmates then they'll just do
that.

The fundamental problem is that people treat facebook like a public/regulated
service such as the postal system, bank accounts or common carrier internet
providers that should provide service to everyone on an equal basis. Users are
entrusting way too much of their internet presence to a single commercial
entity.

Just another reason to put further thought into federated social networks. I'm
saying "further thought" since I'm aware that current solutions are not
practical.

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woah
Look into secure scuttlebutt

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clamprecht
I can't understand why Facebook (and companies in general) are so eager to do
whatever the government asks, even when they don't HAVE to. If they were
compelled by court order, that's one thing, but that isn't the case here.

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Zelphyr
I believe its because there is such a cozy relationship between corporations
and government now that its just a matter of back scratching at this point.

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oh_sigh
Why are inmates not allowed to use the internet? I can understand drug
kingpins or gang leaders being prevented from using it to stop them from
forming plans or whatever, but for your run of the mill inmate who does not
have a bunch of goons to do his bidding, what's the problem?

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knodi123
Because that run-of-the-mill inmate will undoubtedly be vulnerable to coercion
from kingpins and gang leaders?

And pretty soon it's "Send the following codewords to my goons on the outside,
or I'll break your knees."

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kbenson
I fail to see how this is different than payphones. Even if there was a
difference, I fail to see how the appropriate way to stop the behavior of a
small subset of people is to punish everyone when you can just punish those
individuals. Even if is _was_ the appropriate way, I fail to see why it would
apply to prisoners and not the public at large. Maybe we should just turn the
internet off for everyone because it's unfeasible to prevent it from being
used in a crime?

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sdmasj
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jqm
Given the amount of stupid intentions, boasts and confessions people put on
facebook, I'm surprised law enforcement doesn't allow and even facilitate
facebook posting by inmates.

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gertef
Indeed. LE routinely intercepts client<->attorney email and violates the
principle of client-privilege, under a nonsense non-consensual EULA.

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balls2you
Facebook cannot sells ads to inmates because they cannot purchase anything,
hence the takedowns. Isn't that obvious ?

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stephengillie
Why can't inmates purchase anything? It might be more difficult for them to
express demand for merchandise, but all of my tertiary and quaternary research
suggests markets thrive within inmate facilities.

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jerf
Well, it's probably fair to say inmates haven't got much purchasing power for
the things that would be advertised on Facebook. Yeah, non-zero, but hardly a
large segment of the market Facebook's going to go chasing down....

