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Ask HN: Hacker claimed ownership and then deleted my Facebook Page of 50k users
617 points by metalised on Jan 27, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 222 comments
As an update to [0] and [1], the scammers have now completely deleted my page of 50k subscribers.

I am devastated. 10+ years of building a heavy metal community, gone like a puff of smoke, just like that. And Facebook still hasn't replied to a single message. I hate to imagine what would have happened if I was an actual business...

I am reaching out to the HN community one last time. If anyone has any advice or can help me talk to an actual human being at Facebook and restore my page and ownership, please get in touch!

(or if not, at least vote / comment your own frustrations or horror stories below, to help get my story be seen by such a person, if you think this post deserves it...)

  [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29706571
  [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29876423



Sometimes company legal teams can be the most accessible way to draw attention to something like this, and I don't mean in a combative way. They're very risk conscious, they see a '10+ years of building a heavy metal community, gone like a puff of smoke' in terms of risks, both of bad publicity but also if you were to somehow litigate because of the damage to your business or project. Often they have an email address that is manned because they have to respond to legal requests of various types.

You can potentially request all your data (and data about the hack) and let them know why, maybe reach out asking how you can get law enforcement involved and who you should contact after you've made a police report. It's not a threat, but it get it on somebodies radar. If you express how devastated you are there is potential for them to help. They also have a lot more latitude than any kind of helpdesk (especially at the scale of Facebook, and the users/customers facebook has).

They're also well connected with-in an organization because they have to sign-off on all kinds of projects and risks.

I think `patio11` has amazing advice is a similar vein[1].

[1]: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1162561822248992768?lang=... (I think he has a longer version/reference, but I can't find it)


The patio11 blog post you're looking for is https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-r...


He's too easy on them (depending on jurisdiction, I suppose). That's an awful lot of work they put you through, and you deserve compensation for it. Not just breaking even either. Get a consumer protection lawyer. They'll not only zero the debt, but get you a settlement for the hassle. Of course, this requires playing a bit dim, so they are comfortable enough to think they're getting away with the illegal harassment bits.


Not terribly important but there are a few paragraphs there that contain a number of factual assertions completely contrary to my experience with the training we all received at a major regional US bank. I wasn't a CS rep (I'm an engineer) but everyone received a lot of training on this stuff (our customer service tenets were treated with the same seriousness as anti-money laundering, know your customer, and all the other stuff every person in the bank received training on, because failures in these areas can all lead to very bad places) regardless of their position.

Mean words cannot hurt a bank. Threats cannot hurt a bank. Paper trails, though, are terrifying to regulated institutions. Your bank’s customer support representatives are taught to evaluate whether someone looks like they’re competent and collecting a paper trail. If they are, the CS rep is supposed to stop touching the case immediately and instead escalate them to a supervisor or to the legal department.

At a first approximation everything in that paragraph is wrong. Banks care a lot about reputational damage (i.e. you can make them look horrible on twitter or in a news article) and will immediately begin taking you more seriously if you mention you might contact a lawyer, are already in touch with a lawyer, etc. It's true that communication is better and things work more smoothly if you have all your ducks in a row, but I think a respectful customer service rep is just going to assume that a paper trail exists or can be produced. They aren't going to try to take advantage of a situation where a person does not have every last document at hand during the call in order to provide worse service.

Perhaps interestingly, "legal department" is a phrase I do not recall anyone using at any bank or credit union where I've worked. I mean, they've got lawyers, and I suppose most of them are organized into one or more departments... nevertheless.

If you're feeling contrary, especially on the topic of reputational damage, you would be right to point out that banks like Wells Fargo continue to exist. I am in awe of the fact that anyone continues to bank with them.


This is fascinating. It certainly makes sense; in a way, I came to this conclusion on my own without having been formally schooled. I guess it comes from observations.

Wouldn't mind a few extra tips and perspectives though, so definitely going on my reading list for the weekend! Thanks for mentioning it.


Thank you!


> You can potentially request all your data (and data about the hack)

It is impossible to backup the existing page using Facebook Download Page tool for a page with large number of users, I've been trying that for months[1] to delete my Facebook account. Perhaps if initiated by their end it might be possible but then again does requesting user data using personal account include page data as well?

There's now a 'How can I reach a human at Facebook' post making to the top of HN every month in vain. I think that Facebook employees in HN don't want to reveal themselves for obvious reasons, But what I would really like to understand is what reasoning a company has to remove all support systems?

Closest I can come up with is "We can control all user actions on our platform to X% accuracy that we don't need any support system for the eyes and just maintain it for the wallets".

[1] https://abishekmuthian.com/meta-is-holding-my-facebook-page-...


In the OPs case it would be less about getting an actual copy of the data, and more about the asking from the legal team (or some other human). The data I was thinking about was logs to help catch the hacker and a record of all the actions taken on the page (event history), as opposed to the 57k users. Like in the above linked article from patio11 (Dangerous Professional), it's a papertrail.

I agree that it's irritating that a lot of the big companies make it almost impossible to speak to a human, but I understand why. I've been on the other side of support enough times to know that they have to wade through an enormous volume of stupid questions for every one legitimate problem. It just doesn't scale.

There does need to be an escalation path somewhere for items like this, but how do you differentiate between this and the million people that claim their page was hacked when in reality they just forgot the password or accidentally deleted it.

That doesn't make it appropriate, but it does make it easier to understand. Everything is systems at a certain level. Capitalism is one part of that, but also just the sheer scale of it. Facebook has 2.6 billion monthly active users[1].

Lets say that every year 5% will think they need help, it's an arbitary figure, because I just don't know. They may or may not need help but they come across a problem they can't solve and want to reach out for support. Note: It's not necessarily the same 2.6 billion users each month, but let's ignore that.

    mau = 2.6 billion
    needing_help_yearly = mau * 0.05                   // 130,000,000
    needing_help_each_day = needing_help_yearly / 365  // 356,164
The average time to resolve a ticket is hard to know but I found one example that suggests 8.6 minutes[2]. I have no idea how accurate that is, or whether it's applicable to social networks.

    average_time_in_mins = 8.6 minutes
    support_mins_per_day = average_time_in_mins * needing_help_each_day     // 3,063,013 min 42 s
    support_hours_per_day = support_mins_per_day in hours                   // 51,050 h 13 min 42 s
    humans_needed_for_support = support_hours_per_day / 8                   // 6,381
This is a gross simplification, and you could play with a lot of variables to change these numbers, but it gives an idea of the scale.

Compound this with an attitude that they don't NEED a human in the mix, and the complexities and costs of managing a a support team and it starts to make sense why they don't offer support (even if they should).

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-... [2]: https://www.thinkhdi.com/library/supportworld/2019/metric-of...


Large number of users is not an excuse as several businesses use Messenger bots to handle common customer queries and handover to humans for escalation.

Heck, I myself have developed Messenger bots with over 100M conversations through them.

So actual `humans_needed_for_support` would be much lesser if Facebook used their own product.


I agree that there are many tools including bots that can cut that number down. Every time you're prompted with a bunch of articles before you submit a ticket to any help desk, it's part of that (given your bot reference I'm fairly sure you know this).

The numbers are a fantasy scenario anyway, even 10% of that (600 support staff) is not small, and it's not a cost Facebook wants to bear.

They should do support, but then, they should do a lot of things that they don't do.


I can't see the legal teem being too concerned about litigation:

https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

Accordingly, our liability shall be limited to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, and under no circumstances will we be liable to you for any lost profits, revenues, information or data, or consequential, special, indirect, exemplary, punitive or incidental damages arising out of or related to these Terms or the Facebook Products, even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages. Our aggregate liability arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Facebook Products will not exceed the greater of USD 100 or the amount you have paid us in the past twelve months.


Ah, but when apple ask the follow the rules wrt privacy policy, they’re like ThiNk abOut The smAlL BusIneSS.


Surely involving the legal team would mean the regular support team could no longer be involved?


The OP indicated he hadn't been able to get any sort of response from Facebook at all. I wouldn't consider this as first line of enquiry, it's more for if you can't get any help through regular channels.

I think it's worth pointing out that I'm not suggesting legal threats, which probably wouldn't work anyway with Facebooks size and terms of use. Just talking to their legal team won't necessarily invoke the "no-one else can now talk to them".

That's why asking questions like how law enforcement could engage to catch the hacker might be useful. It's not combative, it speaks more to anger at the hacker than at Facebook, but at the same time a human becomes aware of the problem.

The corporate lawyers that I've worked with spend a lot of time thinking about how things can go badly for a company. That means they're keen to mitigate risks, and they have latitude to actually do things. They have KPIs/OKRs that align with the current problem.

At the end of the day they potentially get to feel good about sorting this problem out as well.


What regular support team?


Only if the regular support team was involved to begin with.


> regular support team

Sorry, what do you mean?? The non existing team??


Probably not the advice you're looking for, but looks like you have a blog also and am assuming that some/many of your subscribers also look at your blog. So, you may want to use your blog to spread the word about losing your page so that your subscribers know what's happening and you don't lose many of them.

In addition, while you should keep looking at ways to recover your FB page, but you may want to take this opportunity to create a more traditional forum of your own.

You may want to look at AVSForum.com, Home-Barista.com and others for ideas on how to structure very successful traditional review/forum sites and while it may be more effort initially as you'll have to build it yourself, in the long run it may be more fruitful for you.

Either ways, Good Luck!!


Thank you for the advice!

The problem with this is that, even though the Facebook Page was simply mirroring the content on the blog, most of the interactions with actual bands and fans was via the Facebook page, not the blog. I don't really know if the blogpage itself has the same readership; if anything it's the other way round: I'm worried that with the Facebook page gone, people won't know to find the blog. And with the page deleted, I have no visible way of informing my subscribers either.

I did create a 'backup' page on Facebook (here: https://www.facebook.com/Metalised-Life-112985154608128) and announced the hack to people on the 'main' page, but the main page was taken down before people subscribed to the backup. Annoyingly, this announcement was part of the same post announcing the 'best of 2021 metal albums', which got many upvotes and replies from the bands and fans involved, but it's almost as if nobody noticed the part about the hack and the 'backup' page in the post...


Reach out to bands who know you personally and ask them if they'll help spread the word about the new community. You can coordinate to do so on a particular date.

Reddit has a couple of popular metal subreddits, etc.


If there's a community that's going to hunt you down until they find the info they need in your ultraspecific, obscure, niche blog, it's metalheads.

Open a quick forum and work on it, build SEO articles, ask people to share articles on other pages, and grow your community double the one you had on FB instead of despairing and worrying about stupid upvotes. Best of luck


What ideas would you take from something like home-barista? From a quick browse, it looked like a typical forum, plus sponsors and a donation option (which I can't imagine would be lucrative?).


Update: I updated my blog to reflect the discussion taking place here: https://metalised.wordpress.com/2022/01/27/metalised-faceboo...

Thank you everyone for your support and vivid discussion. I hope this manages to reach the right eyeballs eventually!

----

Further update: I can't edit the post itself anymore, but someone from Meta reached out! Thank you so much, kind stranger, and thank you HN! You rock!


> but someone from Meta reached out

I hate that justice is a PR battle.


As someone who works in reputation management, it was observed that there's very little incentive/value for the business to follow up on individual complaints with limited exposure - At best, resources will be spent with little return of value, at worst, the business may be dragged into a legal battle.


Does that stand for "Popularity Ratio"?


Public Relations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_relations


Consider putting it on Telegram, as you may know Telegram is growing faster than ever before.


And does it look like they'll be able to restore it? :)


Universally necessary services like communication, healthcare, and social media (the digital plaza) can never be justly managed by private companies. It is an inherent structural contradiction that has failed and will continue to fail our society until we are willing to organize resistance beyond the realm of consumer choice.


I'd like to point out something my sibling commenters seem to be missing; nopenopenopeno never suggested that the _government_ run these services instead. They said that private companies were incapable of doing this, and that competition was not a suitable mechanism for achieving the necessary outcomes.

It is quite possible that neither the state nor private industry can do this, and that we need _something else_. I don't know what this is, it seems apparent to me that Mastodon-style, self hosted solutions are not tenable either, or perhaps their time has simply not come yet. But let us not limit our imagination to two broken options.


Absolutely.

As engineers, we don't reduce the world to a choice between two mechanisms, to be battled over with no hope of improvement. We are not divided into mongoites and postgresists, we are interested in new solutions and improvements.

We should think of institutional design in the same way. How do institutions work? What are the options and how do they fit together? How do they affect the affordances and limitations of each?

Politics should be limited to goals, it is a crap way to decide about methods.


Yes! But analyzing private companies is little use because ultimately they are authoritarian. That will somehow have to change.


I appreciate your comment and I don’t mind putting my cards on the table: I am a Marxist. I believe in democratic institutions by the people and for the people. Capitalist states will never suffice. Social democracy is good, but unsustainable. Soviet Communism was a failure, but a single failure. Capitalism is a necessary step in human progress, but it cannot last. Libertarian solutions, as you propose, are no more idealistic than mine, but I don’t put my faith in them because ultimately we are social beings. We all live in a society, and we must attend to it as such. We need institutions by the people and for the people, and the great leaps in technological developments made by capitalist state funded programs in the past century (private companies did very little in comparison) give us a chance to reimagine a new future, but that can only happen by acknowledging the old one is dying, and already dead for for an increasing proportion of the working class.

My only issue with Mastadon is that regular busy working people with families to raise on depressingly low wages cannot justify the effort to participate. If if can’t work for all of our society, it can’t work for our society. Period. So, if we can figure out how to make it work for everybody, then it sounds like the answer to me. I suggest we start by fighting for a national universal healthcare program to undermine the first of the private interests that control our public goods. It will also incentivize development of democratic institutions of the working class and save millions of lives.


> My only issue with Mastadon is that regular busy working people with families to raise on depressingly low wages cannot justify the effort to participate. If if can’t work for all of our society, it can’t work for our society. Period.

That's assuming it doesn't get simpler and cheaper over time. I don't think being hard to use is inherent rather it is because the technology is not yet mature.


I’m not necessarily assuming that! But I guess IRC still isn’t simple and cheap enough, and how long has that been around?


Irc is controlled by greybeards that love it just the way it is. They love their setups with bouncers and bots and scripts and how it can run in a terminal. Irc isn't getting better because they don't want it to.

New kid on the block Matrix might become eventually become a good choice for regular people.


We disagree a lot but I really like your post.

Capitalism is a natural behaviour which emerge in human interactions. As you say, we're social animals and we interact with one another.

The problem lies with the "capitalist" states which are not capitalism but crony capitalism, aka just socialism with extra steps. When a state with regulatory monopoly and a monopoly of violence exists, you can't have pure capitalism. Big businesses will just corrupt the government and you'll end up in a system where the top dogs can keep everyone else poor and under control - while still believing their democratic vote is worth anything.

I don't think Marxism is a solution, for the simple reason that human beings are not perfect: they are corruptible and as soon as you end up having an institution with the power to do something for a large number of people, you'll have power and corruption. Marxism is great in theory, but in practice it just devolves to the same system we live in where top dogs eat small dogs.

The shift we really need is decentralisation. No centralised governments. People trading with people and exchanging services and goods with no third parties stealing a part. Healthcare and protection (and private protection agencies offering different sets of laws) being sold and insured like any other services. Voluntary charity to help those in needs instead of mandatory taxes.

We need to have the smallest entities possible so that there won't be someone far away deciding what you can and cannot do. In a world without taxes, big companies won't have ways of avoiding taxes and shift them to the upper middle class, they won't have someone to corrupt to prevent innovation.

The answer for social networks is, again, decentralisation. The systems we have now (eg. mastodon) are still immature but, unless Facebook pay some government to introduce even more laws to comply with (GDPR comes to mind), a good decentralised competitors is going to come up, eventually.

Everyone should have their own server with their own data and communicate with other users on their own servers.


> as soon as you end up having an institution with the power to do something for a large number of people, you'll have power and corruption

Honest question: What would lead you to this conclusion?

I hear this sentiment often, but I've never understood how anyone could think so little of other people and (evidently) themselves.

It sounds like you're saying you can't even trust yourself to resist corruption in a position of power, which strikes me as pure cynicism.

Moreover, you seem to have made the assumption that factoring corruption out of government at a structural level is impossible. If that's the case, I think you're being unimaginative.


> Honest question: What would lead you to this conclusion?

A person's incentive to pay attention to something is proportional to their ability to do something about it. If you have an organization meant to represent hundreds of millions of people, each individual has effectively ~zero control over it, and so pays little attention.

Meanwhile, the larger the organization it is, the more resources it can extract from its base, the larger it can become. With size comes complexity. Complexity means there are more things for people to pay attention to.

In combination the little attention people pay is spread thin over a large number of things. This makes corruption unlikely to be noticed and punished, which attracts corrupt people.

> Moreover, you seem to have made the assumption that factoring corruption out of government at a structural level is impossible. If that's the case, I think you're being unimaginative.

Which existing large government is free of corruption?

Note that states with lower corruption scores like Denmark and Singapore are less than 5% of the size of the United States and have less corruption, not none.


>>>> as soon as you end up having an institution with the power to do something for a large number of people, you'll have power and corruption Honest question: What would lead you to this conclusion?

Honest answer : With respect, because that's real-life works. Look around you. A senatorial campaigns will always amass millions in campaign contributions. The local comptroller candidate will be lucky to raise 100K. The more people are impacted by a single individual, the more power that single individual has. The more power is as stake, the more corrupt attempts to usurp that power.

>>>>It sounds like you're saying you can't even trust yourself to resist corruption in a position of power,

No. It means that money will color all your decisions and edge cases will tend to resolve in a particular way because a decision favored by your moneyed supporters will be easier to justify.

Take for example a doctor treating a heart attack patients with prior has cold-like symptoms . The doctor is marking the cause of death. The doctor has seen many doctors get laid off due to pandemic. Waiting rooms are overcrowded with patients dying due to lack of doctors & COVID. There's no money coming in - the state has suspended the traditional hospital cash cow: elective surgery. The hospital medical director looks like a ghost, and has been urging staff to not forget to label patients with COVID-like symptoms as COVID-positive, to obtain government fund support.

The doctor is sure the patient didn't die of COVID. The doctor is not even sure the patient had COVID. But there's no time to check. There are no tests, ICU is packed, and he's worried about other patients needing medical attention, plus the doctor knows his assessment could be wrong. So he puts down cause of death: COVID.

Is the doctor corrupt ? No. The doctor is human.

So are politicians. (particularly unvirtuous humans at that, unlike doctors)


"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

How do you create a self-reinforcing decentralized system that actively prevents centralization, to the point where no individual nor stand-alone complex can rise up?

We have so much fiction produced talking about the capacity for life to find a way around limitations, artificial or natural. I cannot imagine anything other than utopian fantasy where full decentralization succeeds long term.


I don't think it can work, it seems to naturally devolve into feudalism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTN64g9lA2g


Are you an anarchist? That sounds a lot like the ancap proposal, and I think this was one of the best pitches I've read for it. Respectful but also pretty convincing.


> Libertarian solutions, as you propose, are no more idealistic than mine, but I don’t put my faith in them because ultimately we are social beings.

Libertarianism is not opposed to organizations, it's opposed to coercion. If you want to get together with ten million of your closest friends and create your own not for profit Facebook to be run in the public interest, libertarians would not stand in your way unless you try to force everyone to use it or pay for it etc.

That means if you want to build something you have to convince people to support it, and not everyone will. But that stands in the way of what you want to do no more than saying that the US can't fund development of the internet without people in China paying US taxes.

You don't need everyone, you just need enough people to exceed the price of doing what you want to do. If you can convince the majority of Americans (<5% of world population) to raise their taxes by $5 to fund something, how is it any different than convincing any other arbitrary ~5% of the world population to bring it into existence voluntarily by contributing the same amount? You were already doing it using a small minority of everyone. It doesn't always have to be the same set of people.

> My only issue with Mastadon is that regular busy working people with families to raise on depressingly low wages cannot justify the effort to participate.

This is the fundamental problem with all of it. It's the same reason they can't self-beneficially participate in the political process -- no time to become informed, so too easy to make self-harming decisions. And then you get heuristics like "always vote for X party instead of Z party" that most certainly do not actually fix it.

Maybe the solution is greater specialization. Instead of everyone funding everything and then having neither meaningful control nor understanding of any of it, have different people choose what they care about. A million people decide they want to support cancer research, and so they spend real time figuring out who is doing the best work and then give all of what would've been their tax dollars to that. A different million people decide they want to support development of communications technology, so they take the time to understand how communications technology works, and they're the ones to support that with their time or money.

In principle the amount of funding that goes to each thing is the same as it would be if everyone is funding everything, but instead of 100M people each paying $1 to a hundred things, you have a million people each paying $100 to one thing and a different million people each paying $100 for another and so on. And then it becomes self-balancing, because if a problem gets worse, more people start paying attention to and caring about solving it.

And don't say nobody would do it, or explain why a government would fund research instead of letting some other government do it. People do it because they want to live in the world where it happens. Or they don't, but then why would they vote for it either?


Non profit organisations could fill that gap. If proper financed directly by its users, otherwise they will go down the same path, if they get their money directly or indirectly from advertisement.


It's not about private companies. I have an account at a private bank and am not afraid of something like this happening at all. Because to the bank I'm not just an abstract "username and password": the account is tied to my real world identity, so in the last resort I'll prove to the bank that I'm me using state provided means. I'm getting more and more convinced that online accounts important to people's livelihood (like gmail where you have tons of important stuff) should work the same way, as a contract tied to your real world identity, and in doubt resolve things by webcam call or personal appointment.


I see you haven't been a victim of identity theft yet.

It doesn't take much to hijack a bank account and eventually you will regain access, but it isn't as simple as you might imagine and a fair amount of damage can be done in a short period of time.


Most banks/CUs/payment processors automatically have insurance for these types of bad actors, even if it takes months to claw back your identity. Credit reporting typically takes much longer to fix but GP was referring to their bank.


I mean... banks are the worst in this case.

Banks are known to irreversibly close accounts if they think you triggered some random algorithm, you have the same name as a terrorist, you have the wrong job, they don't like how you're using your account, or any other completely random reason. The decision is final they'll usually even refuse to tell you why they closed your accounts.

I had a bank (BMO Harris) close an account because the only transactions I had for about a year or so was "received directly deposited paycheck -> transfer entire amount to other bank account." At least they actually told me the reason.


Banks have to report accounts with low balances after a certain number of days (45 IIRC). That reporting costs them money unless they’ve gotten it 100% automated.


That is until the bank happens to be 100% online.. they can’t verify your identity so they close your account and you can’t access your account nor contact the bank because you don’t have an account so you try to create an account to inquiry about your other account and they tell you you already have an account so they can’t open you an account and now you’re stuck with no way to contact the bank and no funds and noone able to help you. This is an extremely common scenario with banks in Germany.


This only works if you fit that stereotypical definition of what a "normal" person looks like or does. As soon as you deviate even a little from the norm, suddenly you got problems.

I had to do two interviews with a bank to open an account in UK because their automated systems were giving them "errors", apparently, when they're trying to check me. Normal people have to complete an online form (5 minutes) and will receive everything through post.

A year later I had to phone paypal support four times as it wouldn't accept neither of my two cards. On my 4th try I finally managed to get an actual English guy to answer my phone, who finally managed to understand every word I was saying without having me to spell anything letter by letter..

Last week I wanted to buy a plane ticket. I had no problems doing that until now (I had an old laptop with windows 7). Now, since running Linux, I open the website, as soon as I click search to find a flight, suddenly captcha! Every 3-5 minutes a new captcha...

This is a nightmare!


All of these things work well for the rich, but the number of unbanked working Americans is astronomical. They cash their checks for fees. Try visiting the customer service counter at a rural Walmart in the U.S. on a Friday and you will see what I mean. The line snakes back to the rear of the store.


Exactly how does commerce happen without banks at any scale? Banking has been around a lot longer than social media.


The unbanked Americans are people who either are unable to open an account, or have been denied opening accounts. To cash their checks, keep their income, etc..., they have to pay much more in fees.

Historically (in the U.S.) it was rooted in racism post-U.S. civil war. Now, less so. The history is still there, and the inability of poor people to obtain an account still exist. It excludes people from getting mortgages, loans, investing, etc. Cash App has become a digital bank for many of the unbanked. Before Cash App, decades ago, we had the U.S. Postal Service providing some banking services to Americans. (No, the USPS attempting to help Americans in this manner is not new, we've done it before)


I know a few "unbanked" people.

Some know don't have a bank account because they simply don't trust banks. They want to have access to 100% of their money 100% of the time.

Some don't have a bank account because they don't have income (adult dependents)

One didn't have a bank account because she was a minor and there was no adult around willing or able to open one for her to use.

When I was a kid I knew of a few adults who had bank accounts closed on them for check kiting, including my parents - I know of this because I overheard people talking about it quite a lot. I don't know what ended up happening after that, if they were able to open a new account or what. I know you probably wouldn't be able to open a new account nowadays with Chexsystem and the like. Of course, check kiting also isn't a thing anymore either.


I don’t blame them, places like Citibank and Chase exist to dip into your account as frequently as possible. Do you think it really costs $45 to handle a bounced check? It’s a completely automated process, costs them a fraction of a cent if you agreed to electronic documents, the rest is pure gravy.

However if your in the US and having trouble with the banks I’d recommend looking for “millennial” banking which is usually zero fee, but you can’t write paper checks and they are remote only.

My wife was paying almost a thousand a month in fees at a regular bank, after I moved her to one of the millennial banks she really prospered. She can’t overdraw the account anymore - and it’s not really an issue since the bank is no longer taking half her paycheck.


I call BS. Anyone with proper ID and payroll income can open a bank account. Most big employers (e.g. mine) will even require it -- payroll is made by direct deposit.

There may be minimum balance requirements and/or fees but if you shop around a bit (look especially at local credit unions) they are not onerous and are almost certainly lower than what check-cashing services will charge. They do demand a bit more management and responsibility compared to a wad of cash in one's pocket, but that's the way life is.


By "proper ID" you mean the right kind of country ID, I assume?

Cause I've been denied by two banks, the third bank even had two countries blacklisted.. that's right, on their official website they wrote: "we are currently unable to accept government issued IDs from X and Y" or something along those lines.


That's the history, but you're missing the context of today. Many "unbanked" americans are immigrants voluntarily trying to avoid reporting and stay off the grid.

The solution lay in busting bias and fixing immigration laws though, not banking.


I take it you didn’t go to the rural Walmart on a Friday. Otherwise you’d know that isn’t anywhere near true.


This is prejudicial. Help me understand - how exactly do you know all the people at WalMart on Fridays are illegal immigrants?

I grew up in rural america and worked part-time alongside illegal immigrants, so yeah, it is true even if we're using anecdotal evidence. Your Walmart anecdote is an example of survivor bias.


I’m saying that most unbanked Americans aren’t immigrants. You’re the one who said they were mostly illegal immigrants.


>You’re the one who said they were mostly illegal immigrants.

Please point out where I said this.


The bank doesn’t do that for you. The bank does that because regulators require them to as a condition of being in the banking business.


Banks would have ceased to exist centuries ago if they couldn't be trusted to do this in general. Regulations have very little to do with it.


To be fair, until comparatively recently, bank runs were a real and problematic thing.


You're assuming that public organizations would run a more secure responsive network. My interactions with public institutions makes me doubt this assumption, especially for something as vast and complicated as facebook's network.


I will point out that in Canada, many of our telecoms were run by privately operated, publicly owned organizations (Crown Corporations) that operated at arms length. Until they were sold for pennies on the dollar by governments looking to score a quick win for "fiscal responsibility" and "small government", these organizations operated with a high degree of public scrutiny, and had the goal of offering low cost, reliable services.

By most accounts the quality of service in relation to the price has been awful in most places in Canada, and the few places that still have Crown Corp delivered telecoms are among the happiest customers in that sector.

This same scenario has played out across multiple sectors including oil & gas, electricity and hydroelectric services, and here in BC, transportation services (BC Ferries).

Everyone likes to take a dump on public run services, but practically speaking, they have more oversight and accountability than privately run services.


FYI, corps like Bell Canada, Telus, BCttel were not government owned, department or crown corp.

They were just highly protected by government regulation. The only ones allowed to do certain things, along with mandated Canadian ownership requirements. They had a defacto monopoly.


Yeah, I am talking about Crown Corporations like MTS, Petro-Canada, BC Ferries, and such that were taken private, not the telecoms protectionism that is currently screwing over consumers in Canada, they are quite different.

I don't object to open markets, but I also think there is a space for crown corporations with a mandate to operate competitively (which strong oversight) for the benefit of Canadians (or citizens of $your_nation)


There is. I found Petro Canada to be a fascinating use case too.

Inject yourself into an absurd market, with price fixing, to force competition.

And in the long term, it profited us quite well, including as we sold it off.


So just imagine what happens when the government controls the communications. What happens when “they” get into power and start censoring and controlling communications that you don’t agree with?

In this case “they” are the party with policies that you don’t agree with. There was a study in the US that the government fails to pass policies that 80%+ of the population agrees with.

One easy example is making cannabis legal federally. People who vote Republican and Democrat both support it by an overwhelming majority. But it couldn’t pass.


Some of us still live in functioning democracies. Also, it's worth pointing out that relying on privately owned or publicly traded corporations is not an effective strategy for preserving freedom; those businesses will only do that as long as they can justify it to their shareholders (private or public), and are subject to whatever laws apply in the jurisdictions they reside in (kind of the reason alot of 'western' companies prefer to either not do business, or conduct business via arms length entities in countries like Russia, China, and other places).


So the US has the highest incarceration rate of any western country. The police routinely stop and harass minorities for no other reason than the color of their skin, the judicial system routinely hands out harsher punishment for the same crime when the defendant is minority, etc.

Even when you take race out of the equation, when you look at the congressional make up in the US and compare it to the party more people actually voted for, it’s just the opposite. The last president didn’t win the popular vote.

Private corporations don’t have the power of the state to coerce me to do anything. The government does. Why would I want to give the government more power? We see both dudes trying to control communications.

Apple is definitely not working with China at arms length. Neither is Microsoft. Google still makes the little hardware it does in China.

As far as functioning government you mean Europe where laws were passed like the GDPR that only led to cookie warnings on every web page?


I don't know what to tell you. The people of the United States have continuously ceded power to their government, and the corporations that wield influence over it, while being spoonfed lies about what freedom actually means by government and media.

The right to bear arms supercedes the right to live in safe communities (and as a former infantry man, I can assert that more weapons in the hands of untrained civilians does not make communities more safe).

The right to an health care (abortion) is superceded by so called "religious freedoms".

The right to vote is superceded by politicians who rewrite election laws and electoral districts to choose their constituents.

Freedom to discriminate is beginning to supercede the right to freedom from discrimination.

These problems aren't unique to the United States, and in Canada we have our own issues.

> Private corporations don’t have the power of the state to coerce me to do anything.

* blinks in private law enforcement, the radical expansion of surveillance by private corporations, and lack of accountability of tech companies *

Uh, yeah, that's by design, but on a global basis, the design is breaking. There are more and more exceptionally wealthy individuals and corporations that are wielding power and working in domains that have typically been the purview of states and governments.

We need stronger regulation of corporations globally, and strong treaties that unify global regulation and information sharing of how that regulation occurs, or we will continue to cede freedom and governance to the whims of corporations that will wield significant influence over elected officials. One thing going for unelected government, they generally DGAF about the whims of corporations, and we have seen what some countries are willing to do in order to preserve influence over corporations (I would love to hear an honest, unbiased tell all from Jack Ma for example).


And this is my point. Because of the makeup of the US government - by the constitution - the red states have more influence on the government than their populations should allow. You add on gerrymandering, it gets worse.

It’s a structural issue. The majority of people in the US are for universal healthcare, freedom of choice, more gun control, etc. The majority of states oppose those things.

We already have to deal with tyranny of the minority in our own country, why would we want other countries involved too?

None of the issues you raised have anything to do with private companies.

No one is forcing me to use any of the Big Tech companies’ services. They can’t force me not to state my opinion like the federal government can - there are laws in some states where abortion providers must tell their patients things that are untrue. Other states have laws forbidding doctors from asking patients about whether they have guns in their house.

As far as myself, I have a lot greater chance being treated fairly in tech (where I have been working for 25 years) than if I as minority get pulled over by the police (the government).


@ygjb a few points:

> The right to bear arms supercedes the right to live in safe communities (and as a former infantry man, I can assert that more weapons in the hands of untrained civilians does not make communities more safe).

True, they need training. In 1966 the city of Orlando trained women to shot and the number of rape incidents dropped 90%.

> The right to an health care (abortion) is superceded by so called "religious freedoms".

That's not health care, that's killing another human being. Your freedom ends where the life of another human being begins.

> The right to vote is superceded by politicians who rewrite election laws and electoral districts to choose their constituents.

Are you referring to forbidding criminals to vote and democrats paying what's due for them so they can vote (presumably left)? I can't say I feel too strongly about that because voting is pretty useless. Rich people will anyway buy the government whether that's right or left.

> Freedom to discriminate is beginning to supercede the right to freedom from discrimination.

This is a massive problem, I agree. Positive discrimination and allowing companies to favor women and minorities (excluding asians, they're doing good enough on their own) is pure racism / sexism.


I’m going to avoid the political side of abortion. But does that also mean that fathers should be forced to pay child support from conception? Should they be counted in the census? But do you really think these same politicians care about life that are “pro life”. But who are opposed to any government policies that protect life after they are born like - universal healthcare, police reform, paid parental leave, etc?

The “War on Crime” and the “War on Drugs” made people criminals as they targeted minorities until the opioid epidemic started affecting “rural America” and then drugs became a “disease”.

But he is also referring to gerrymandering and having two ballot boxes in cities like Houston to make it harder to vote. In GA they wanted to cut out early voting on Sundays because Black churches would encourage people to vote after they left church and transport them there in church busses.


> Some of us still live in functioning democracies.

Where I am now I need to show a QR code to buy food and there is a curfew at 10pm. None of these measures had been discussed in the latest elections and they even violate existing laws.

I don't know how you can call most of the world a functioning democracy.


Yep, vaccine passports suck, and I say that as a supporter of them. I am not going to argue the merits or flaws of them with a throwaway account, but they have not been found to violate laws, and no jurisdiction in Canada that I am aware of has had to use exception powers (not withstanding clause, or reasonable limits under Section 1 of the Charter).

As for not being discussed in the latest elections, "if we are elected, we will implement vaccine passports" was largely the premise for the last Federal election in Canada, and while they didn't win in a landslide, Canadians voted in a government to implement them.

I don't think "most of the world" is a functioning democracy, but in Canada, our democracy is functioning, if continuing to be undermined by our political parties. Democracy around the world is at risk, and spreading misinformation about actual election outcomes and unpopular, but legal policies doesn't really help.


> I don't know how you can call most of the world a functioning democracy.

At lest where I live the (sometimes silent) majority supports such actions. We are having elections in few months and its not a big issue because most but few fringe parties and people support such actions.

That's the democracy for you. And most of the time it works, except when it doesn't :) (As far as I know nobody came with a better system jet.)


But I can go to a desk and, talk to someone, and, eventually, possibly after a very long time, someone will act. With canned response AI private corps I don’t have this. Also, at least where I live, if you make more of a stink at the office of the public org in question, you get helped faster and often better.


Case in point:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30053549


> But I can go to a desk and, talk to someone, and, eventually, possibly after a very long time, someone will act.

Ever tried to get a pothole filled?


Yearly, after the winter rains. That is actually not very hard here.


Exactly. Imagine your DMV experiences but applied to this. Then again, based on stories like this, private seems to be even worse. Even the DMV has human interaction possible after demoralizing wait times unlike shouting into blackholes that is FAANG support


Missouri resident here. DOR (Department of Revenue is also the DMV in Missouri) wait times while long recently, haven't been anywhere as terrible as everyone makes it out to be. Appointments are available (can truly only speak for my local office, which is in the largest city in the state) and my wait time never exceeded fifteen minutes. Additionally, to process said paperwork only took five minutes when I was at the counter.

Each of the people at the DMV have been helpful for me when I got custom plates, titled a car, renewed my license, etc. Only one time did I have to make a trip home to get missing documentation due to extenuating circumstances.


I love to doodoo on dmv / dot experience out of habit and cultural inertia, but in reality, my local Service Ontario is GREAT. Most of the time line ups are manageable; but most importantly, I get to talk to somebody who is obligated and typically willing to help me out and point me in right direction. Worst case scenario, I can come again and talk to another person.

It is THAT final resort that's not even an option with so many large companies. Sure there are people who will t fall through cracks, legitimate horror stories, but at least there's an option and obligation and intent.


I never said the human interaction part of the experience was bad. I specifically stated the wait times. Since everyone wants to share personal anecdotes, then in my neck of the woods in Texas, the state has moved from small regionally located DMV offices in favor of centralized extremely large megastore types of places that they push people to visit. Even when making an appointment online, you still wait an incredibly long amount of time in this massive incubator of a holding area. The last time I visited was before COVID, and I was already concerned about the petri dish level of experiment that was the waiting area.

The DMV trope exists for reasons. Sadly, you may not be able to relate, but it doesn't diminish the validity for those that do. (sadly, here, being used ironically)


Tangent, but using the DMV as a horror-cliche anchor is very state-specific.

I have experience with DMVs in six states. Five of those have always been perfectly fine, nothing to complain about. If I'm competent enough to get my paperwork right, it is just a 15 minute process. New York and California even take appointments, no waiting.

I got my license way back when in Tennessee, and they were incompetent jerks, and that's because Tennessee's entrenched political class goes out of its way to make sure government services suck.


The Massachusetts RMV used to be horrendous, but they've cleaned themselves up a lot. I've had little issue getting things done over the past decade or so. Now that they've instituted appointments because of covid, it's even quicker. I hope they never go back. The only thing that is still really broken is their phone system. It's so hard to get anybody on the phone, it's really not worth even trying.


> Tangent, but using the DMV as a horror-cliche anchor is very state-specific.

And very America-focused. Never had any issues at all with our local equivalent.


assuming "our" is non-American, but non-American is a really large place. ;-) care to narrow it down?


California used to be bad, but the appointments have really helped.

Also, the people who actually work at the DMV are pretty helpful, but they are way overworked. Once again, this is in California.


The United States government, as well as the provincial state governments within it, are governed more by corporate boards than by the citizens who think they are participating in a democracy. This is not a secret. There is no such thing as a public institution in the United States.


Nothing is secure, so it’s not about that. It’s about accountability .


Public institutions governed by a democratic state not bought by private companies would absolutely do a better job. Realize we don’t have any public institutions in the United States. Our entire government works for multinational corporations, not the people living here.


There is nothing “democratic” about the US government. Between gerrymandering and the Constitutionally architected 2 Senators per state, the US is very much ruled by the minority.


And yet when you need free money for elder or disabled care, you get to call my girlfriend and she has to personally walk you through managing the right documents and getting all the info you need to get literally thousands of tax funded dollars a month until you die.

Where the fuck is facebook's phone number?


Now try the same thing in a state that opposed the ACA or during the prior administration when it tried to purposefully cripple people accessing it.

We saw the same thing with the consumer protection bureau when it was run by someone who supported payday loans during the last administration.

I’m not trying to get overly political. But whether government “works” is completely dependent on which party is in charge and whether they champion parts of government that you need.

Just to be fair, government didn’t work too well under the Democratic administration during the eviction moratorium for landlords.

How much easier do you think it is to get a gun license in a red state or register to vote in a blue state?


That was my point. Was that not clear?


You are attributing to the multinational corporations. I am saying because of the makeup of the government - mandated by the Constitution - the government will statistically not be representative of the people. That being said, why would I want the government to have more power?

Has government control of communications ever ended up working out well?


You have legal recourse at least to file a FOIA request and force them to respond.


Until it gets held up by an administration that doesn’t want you to have the information and supported by judges appointed by the administration.


I would say it's another one of those things like private health insurance and no public option. It's not failing, it's working exactly as intended for our domestic oligarchy.

Much like having two parties that are mostly the same on major foreign and economic policy, having the digital plaza be managed by mostly a few big companies that are all politically aligned, and cozy with the government is a great way to pretend to have free and open discourse when the reality is we have no idea what's happening behind the scenes and it's all a-okay according to some because they're "private businesses".

While it's true that the first amendment only applies to the US government, the concept of free speech predates the US constitution by about 2200 years and is still important.


The problem is the expectation that these services are gratis to users. If users are prepared to pay, this metal community for example would be on its own domain with a PHPBB or similar. Many people do this by the way. Even for non technical topics.

People pay a lot for internet access both through mobile and land connections but are less willing to pay for things on the internet or maybe its the hassle of setting up a site (comparable to the hassle of say buying a car: a hassle but not insurmountable for anyone).


The "digital plaza" ownership and total control on one's own community is a literal 2.99 euro/month VPS running mastodon away.

Shitposting one's thoughts by arranging pixels on a public forum is NOT a necessity, it's a luxury. If you value it as a necessity consider funding your own for yourself and others you care about, it would end up costing about 7 euro/year if you find even just 4 other like-minded persons.


Social media is in no way on the same level as healthcare, are you kidding me?

You do not need Facebook to survive, nor do you need Facebook to participate in your community.

Unreal. Just… unreal.


Facebook pages are no more important today than the yellow pages were yesterday, or classified ads, or newspapers. Very little of which was publicly operated.

If your local newspaper blockaded you out of their advertising section 50 years ago (eg they dislike you), it could have been devastating too. There are a lot of scenarios like that. You can't get around those potential problems by saying everything should be run under National Socialism; instead of dealing with Verizon you'll be dealing with a board of vicious bureaucrats with direct political power - they can have you shot or imprisoned at will in a more developed Socialist system - that will eventually want bribed to let you continue to exist.


The yellow pages were absolutely run by state-owned telecom operators, less than 25 years ago, all over Europe.


Only because of the communist past. Most states privatized these operators and the yellow pages continued to be published by them as private companies without any need for regulation.


Ah, yes, the famously communist France. (Pages Jaunes are operated by Orange, previously state monopoly France Telecom.)

Just as you say, these monopolies are all deregulated and sold off. But they were all developed and operated by monopolies for many decades, successfully.

Your attempt to call non-communist things communist is a bit annoying. You could benefit from using the same terminology as the rest of the world when you discuss politics. It would help your arguments.

Anyway, I was pointing out that the paragraph I responded to was a falsehood: “Facebook pages are no more important today than the yellow pages were yesterday, or classified ads, or newspapers. Very little of which was publicly operated.”


You picked one example where it doesn't fit while there are at least 8 EU countries that did exactly what I said. BTW yes here in Central/Eastern EU we deem France very very leftist, just few small steps away from full-on socialism.


Famously communist UK as well. BT (British Telecom) was the state owned telecom provider that also ran the phone books.

And famously communist Germany with Deutsche Telekom (Formerly part of the national post system, privatised in 1995) that also made telephone books. Also worth noting that the German government still has a significant stake in Deutsche Telekom.

Oh and famously communist Netherlands with KPN the state run post and telecoms provider.

And famously communist Spain with Telefonica being previously majority owned by the state (under Franco no less).

I mean most of European telecoms seem to have been state owned until the early 90s.


I never said only communist states could own/owned telecoms. A lot of these changes - even in the west - came to be after communism in Europe has fallen.


The original quote was:

> The yellow pages were absolutely run by state-owned telecom operators, less than 25 years ago, all over Europe.

You then said

> Only because of the communist past

How is that not saying that it is only due to a communist past that there were state run telcos that were producing yellow pages?

Tbf I didn’t mention each and every name of the yellow pages equivalent (because time) but I think the assumption that the state owned telcos ran their respective yellow pages is fairly safe. Happy to be proven wrong though!


What I meant was that it was "all over Europe" only because a half of it was communist, not that only communist states had public telecoms and/or the entire Europe was communist. I'm very sure at least the eastern part would have been mostly private-run if it wasn't taken over by the communists.


> I'm very sure at least the eastern part would have been mostly private-run if it wasn't taken over by the communists.

What do you base that on? Pretty much every western European country had state owned telcos. As far as I am aware, prior to the 90s, private telcos seem to the exception rather than the rule across the world. It seems mainly to be a specifically north American thing to have private telcos prior to that. Looking at the countries surrounding the former soviet states going from north to south:

Finland (originally a cooperative now owned by Norwegian state telco): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_Oyj

Sweden (originally state-owned): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Televerket_(Sweden)

Germany (originally state-owned): link above

Austria (originally state-owned): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1_Telekom_Austria_Group

Italy (originally state-owned): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruppo_TIM

Turkey (originally state-owned): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%BCrk_Telekom

Looking east:

Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nippon_Telegraph_and_Telephone

Malaysia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telekom_Malaysia

South Korea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KT_Corporation

Australia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstra

India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat_Sanchar_Nigam_Limited#H...

Indonesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telkom_Indonesia#Early_years

And a couple of others:

Switzerland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swisscom

South Africa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telkom_(South_Africa)

Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telebr%C3%A1s

I mean that's pretty much every major economy on the planet (with north America being the exception).


Construction is private and buildings don't fall down and are incredibly safe. Food production is private and people don't get spoiled or poisonous products. I think this is reductive.


Both have regulations written in blood, though. Lives have been lost which is why rules exist in these fields.


The argument by the parent is clearly not against regulations in a market economy, they didn't say anything implying that. The argument is against the necessity of government ownership and operation.


Yeah that's a fair point.


Construction and food are great examples of how the government keeps us safe. Building codes and food regulations are wonderful things.


> People don't get spoiled or poisoned products.

I'm quite sure that this still happens only to lesser extents. Compare European food regulations to U.S. food regulations. American food while not explicitly killing people outright still has some ghosts in its past that are present in today's foods. See the Coca-Cola, Sugar companies, and 'fat-free' corporate lobbying of the FDA, as well as the huge advertising for terrible food has affected Americans.

The U.S. has food deserts, where fresh produce and food is either too expensive or impossible to find with substitutes being boxed goods laden with sugar and grains from the whale of corporations like General Mills and Kellogs.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_collapse


Social media is not a “necessity”. He could have used his Facebook page to steer his community to his own hosted site and forum.

Do you really trust giving more power to the government?


Plenty of absolutely horrible kafkaesque experiences with the state. This is definitely not exclusively a “private company” problem.


I think it's a 'large bureaucracies in general' problem, there seems to be a critical mass in any kind of organisation beyond which dealing with them in any capacity becomes like pulling teeth. I don't think public services are necessarily flawed because it's the state providing them, I think it's more that the state is also an enormous bureaucratic organisation and subject to the same issues. When the state creates groups that are enpowered to cut through the internal politicking it can be very effective, for example the gov.uk site that's been praised a lot on HN.

Just look at rail in the UK, it was the butt of contemporary comedy when it was nationalised and it's still a dog's breakfast thirty years after privatisation. It's not the ownership that's the problem, it's the nature of the organisations responsible for providing that particular service. I think the public/private dichotomy is a bit of a false one when it comes to quality of service a lot of the time.


Facebook page is not necessary communication. That's telephone and mobile networks. Healthcare is successfully managed by private companies all around the world - even in Europe (the funding is organized by law but still the hospitals are private companies and half of EU countries have private health insurance companies). The horrors of publicly managed social media were already tested here in Europe too and we never want to go back.


Social media is just a basic telecom utility service. Most of societal communication takes place on it. It’s fundamental enough that most individuals, businesses, celebrities, and government officials participate in it. I don’t understand the distinction you’re making - to me it seems fairly fundamental and it also seems like social media depends on network effects, which justifies regulating the biggest ones.


> Social media is just a basic telecom utility service.

No it's not, not even close. Facebook is very different from TikTok, Pinterest, Twitter, Reddit and Snapchat. They're quite obviously not some manner of the equivalent of an universal pipe or utility.

If your premise were correct, you'd be able to swap them out for eachother; you'd be able to just run TikTok on Facebook and nobody would care about the difference. Instead, none of them fulfills that premise of basic utility, none of them makes all of the other social media platforms possible or irrelevant (Facebook can't do what Pinterest does; Facebook can't actually do what TikTok does, even if it would like to; and everybody would notice if all the other social networks vanished, precisely because Facebook can't do what they do).

Facebook is less important thank people have been hyping it to be (for their own ideological agenda reasons). TikTok has more than demonstrated that, and the thriving nature of all the rest of the social media landscape has also nicely demonstrated that. In fact the only real problem is that Facebook owns Instagram, otherwise it'd be out there as another separate mega platform. Facebook also can't do what Instagram does, which is why they had to buy them and are terrified of having to spin it off (another case where Facebook is clearly not a utility).

Just because Facebook can potentially store the same bits that Instagram does, doesn't mean it can provide the same service (first of all, you can't get users to go along with that for all sorts of reasons). Those are two very different things. Otherwise Google would have successfully built a juggernaut social platform, instead of failing repeatedly at it.


Most individuals and celebrities also eat sushi, but that doesn't make sushi a "fundamental right".


You can do this on Reddit. No matter how successful and busy a subreddit may be without the presence of moderators, you can request ownership of a subreddit if the moderators have not been active in some time.

I found this out when someone did it to me. I had an account that I only used for moderation duties. I didn’t need to post on it. My community was doing just fine.

Well, Reddit transferred it to someone else and they turned it into an SEO spam generator.


The reverse can also happen with people hoarding subreddits and refuse to hand them over to more eager people. Even when it is clear their interest have moved on, reddit admins will refuse usurpation requests because "the moderator is active".


The downside to that is that you have to be on reddit.


Not at all the same, and only a minor annoyance but a new twitter account i made a few days ago just disappeared completely with no notice or reason. I think it maybe got flagged as a bot not sure. I made it, added my real name, a picture, and followed a bunch of people I knew. Then "account not found" like two days latter but I was able to remake the same exact account. Feel a bit gaslighted. did I just imagine making it lol?


They're very insistent on you adding a phone number.


It's basically required. I've had them shut down two accounts with zero activity on them and refuse to let me back in without a phone number


Ask for your money back?


I requested a refund of my tax money as well because of the pot holes in the road.


I've heard that Facebook doesn't actually hard-delete any information, so odds are that when support gets back to you sometime this year, they'll have admin tools that will allow them to reactivate the group.


I hope so!

(both what you say, and that Facebook support actually gets back to me sometime this year!)


I don't think this is an ability Facebook support has. Engineering could probably do it, but I doubt you're going to be able to get this issue on their radar.


Keeping the data for European users after deletion would be in breach of GDPR, so Facebook does delete data after some grace period. It doesn't necessarily mean physically removing files, but you can do other things like storing data at rest encrypted with with an account unique key and then removing the key when account is deleted.


I went through something similar and this brings up some very bad memories. Facebook is way too lenient about taking away control of pages. Saddens me to know years later that things still have not changed.

You're going to have to reach someone who works at Facebook. Going through official channels can be an exercise in extreme frustration. It shouldn't be that way at all but it hasn't been a priority for them to do better.


Your best bet is to get ahold of actual Facebook engineers, and this is a good place to do it. Take this issue to Twitter as well. It looks like your previous posts didn't make it to the front page, but with any luck this time you'll get some real traction.

The suggestion in a previous thread about buying an Oculus to get priority customer support is also not a bad one.

Do you have any snapshots of your membership base? Maybe you can reach out and start anew. Check your email, as it'll typically have a lot of names and accounts. Also see if archive.org and archive.is have snapshots.

If and when you do get your community back, I'd highly suggest starting an internet forum and directing some or all of your community there.


Facebook engineers wouldn't be able to help unless they can personally vouch for the person affected for privacy and security reasons.


Didn't Facebook had an internal employees only support system that was quick to respond a was encouraged to be used on friend and family issues?


Yes, but limited to family or friends that you could personally vouch for.


I had an issue with Cash App recently and support just put me in a death-spiral so I looked up the phone numbers of some execs and texted them. At first they were helpful in escalating the issue, but then they terminated my account for contacting their employees outside the online support channel lol.


>Your best bet is to get ahold of actual Facebook engineers,

Isn't this exactly what the OP is asking HN to help them do? It's not like they asked "what do I do?", they specifically asked for help doing what you've not helfpully posted they do.


I'm sorry this happened to you. I can't imagine what you are going through.

Obviously keep trying to reach Facebook. Whether you are successful or not, you need to get your community off of Facebook and onto something you can control, whether that is a forum or chat community.

Start trying to get in contact with other major members. Start giving out a URL to track community updates. Setup Discord[1] or Matrix or something for two way communication.

If you need some hosting or a domain, drop me a line and I'll see if I can help get you sorted.

[1] - Discord is only marginally better than Facebook and you risk the same problem here. Treat it like a temporary fix, not a solution.


So sorry metalised, not much you can do and no legal recourse/appeal as you have agreed to the TOS. FB will not help much either.

The a lesson to be learned here. Zinga learned that with Farmville in other circumstances. If you can, don't build on the top of some other companies, a FB, an Instagram, Pinterest, or a Gmail/Maps. Rug pulls do not happen solely in crypto.

There are exceptions of course: build something good on the top of salesforce and if you get traction (=paying customers) they will buy you.

More and more posts on HN are written to show how evil those companies are (Amazon to their third party merchants, Google or Facebook to their users), but you have choices in life, simply build a different model. The lesson is: don't build your whole business with faceless companies, even worse if you don't pay for the services. What do you expect in return?


Actually pretty much everywhere you place it can have issues.

Even with a domain, you can lose discoverability from search engines. Nobody will find you except exact domain in url bar.

So basically you still depend on one of the big companies. If it's not Facebook, is Google. Still bad.


These big companies don't much care about people who don't fit into their plans.

At one point I was 4 years into a Blogger blog when someone decided to create Google+, insisting that everyone needed to supply their real name. When I signed up for G+ with my blogger alias, they shut down access to the blog until I complied. Since I was (miracle!) 'free to export' 4 years of blogposts, I did ... and each and every one of the exported posts had a Google link embedded in it.

In short: to 'free' automated services - despite any cozy feelings of 'belonging' we feel - we are insects. 'Community' isn't in their vocabulary.


Too late now, but it's a good idea to keep your own backups of all your FB data. There is a well-hidden option under the settings to make and download a zip file with all your posts, comments, photos, everything. Worst case this can be used to rebuild your community elsewhere.


I am sure it would be nice to have but a backup of a community isn't worth much if you can't re-establish it with a "restore" function.


How would you rebuild a community - start a new Page on Facebook and re-invite all you previous followers?


Probably difficult as FB used to allow a lot more leeway on how FB groups and their posts were shared. The road to xx,xxx group members is a lot harder than it once was.


This won't help you but Facebook seems to have zero interest in such things. After spending thousands in ads my account got finally blocked early 2021 appearantly for advertising the masks my grandmum was selling on Etsy. Appeals were commentless ignored. I lost access to several big groups and pages.

The same happened a few years before with my last real name account, first they asked for my passport, pictures, identifying friends and then still commentless blocked me, removed my pages and groups as well as my semi popular apps.

The reality is Facebook doesn't care.

And if you build any kind of dependency or business around it you are playing with fire.


How did they hack you? Did you click on a link in a message which installed some keylogger on your computer? Or did you have an easy to guess password? Did you have two factor authentication?


Hi dmortin, I have no way of knowing for sure, but I think it was none of that.

I think they simply 'claimed' the page, and because it's was a community page with no 'business' associated with it in the account, they managed to use Facebook's automated 'claim this page for your business' processes to their advantage. Which obviously is a scam, but a hard one to contest when there's no human you can get hold of at Facebook to point it out.

My previous posts (see the older HN links on my post above) have some more details about the chronology of the "hack" (if that's even the right word for it) and how the scammers tried to capitalise on it.

Obviously I've changed all my passwords just in case though...


if it was done through your account id imagine you'd be able to see it in your activity log? the distinction is critical


While interesting to know, for a curious observer, it’s not exactly relevant to solving the OP’s problem.


Yikes! Clearly this is post of a bigger scam with that “Verification“ message. Wild that they do nothing about it.

There must be some Facebook engineers on here, so hopefully this gets some visibility.


I'm fairly sure the way they managed to claim ownership in the first place was by 'claiming the page for their business', because no business account was associated with the page.

In my case there was no 'business manager' associated with the page because it was a community page. But it's not a stretch of the imagination to imagine there are many 'business' pages out there, which are still managed via a personal account only, and can be 'plucked away' from their owners by a scammer the same way!

I would have thought Facebook would at least have some sort of semi-automated "dispute" process for when someone claims your page at the very least!


Not a response as a solution to Op: is there any recommended open-source project that can be used to self-host a comminity server?

I would expect that as a host I just need to focus on configuring and maintaining instead of learning to build a website, for example, it sounds like hosting vpn using Wireguard.

On the other hand, I wonder if that really makes it better off than to use fb/discord, since if fb/discord is vulnerable to hack, so is my own hosted one.


Yeah, a bunch of options.

Mastodon is a safe bet

There is also Pleroma, GNU social and Diaspora

https://alternativeto.net/category/social/social-network/?pl...


Someone once took control of a personal Facebook account for a friend of mine, which was connected to his Business Manager and all the campaigns he was running.

We still have no idea how that guy took control since the account had the 2FA setup, but still. No way to contact FB, no help at all, we ended up nuking the cards connected to the BM and restart his profile from scratch.

Facebook won't help you in any way.


That's a smart security model. No idea how they got in (maybe session stealing in a public WiFi?) But just doing the same problematic thing again.


Did you have 2FA? If yes, contact https://krebsonsecurity.com/


This is yet another many postings on HN recently that used term hacker as the culprit for what essentially a potential crime committed by cracker or intruder. You won't call a robber, an entrepreneur would you?

Using the word hacker for those doing illegal activities just undermine the hackers community. Please use the correct terminology for the benefit of the relevant societies and communities.


If we want to talk about proper use of terminology, the word "hacker" was adopted by web 2.0 startup scene and became a bullshit buzzword. The original definition has nothing to do with entrepreneurship or malicious intent (as advertised by media and pop culture).


Perhaps you've got a point where HN was originally started by PG for VC related news, if I'm not mistaken.

Personally I cannot recall a single article that misused and abused the term 'hacker' for 'entrepreneur' in HN postings. But if you can point out even one single title in HN posts that replaced the word 'entrepreneur' with 'hacker' it will be helpful. I probably can show you several misused and abused the term 'hacker' or 'hacking' inside HN post titles for the past week alone. Seriously the misuse and abuse of the term need to stop, period.


Do you know how you got hacked? I mean did you have 2FA? phone number? Did they manage to get around a plain old password that was weak enough to brute force? I'm surprised that facebook wouldn't be like "you tried 10 times, go away and try again in 24 hours".


I’ve forwarded to a friend at FB. Will let you know if he’s able (or willing) to do anything :)


Consider putting it on Telegram, as you may know Telegram is growing faster than ever before.


Same thing happened to a friend of mine with an anime page. She never got it back.


Any chance you can share the topic of the FB group? I'm curious to know if it was politically motivated (even non-political topics can have their own, internal politics, too). Maybe someone is trying to silence you?


It is the facebook page for my blog, https://metalised.wordpress.com which largely exists for the end-of-year best metal album reviews these days.

These reviews get cross-posted on the facebook page, and tend to be very popular, both by fans and featured bands alike.


it was about Heavy Metal


Is it possible that, after you finish grieving for this loss, you'll come to see deleting your facebook as the best thing that has ever happened to you?

You just got your life back. Congratulations!


sorry dude, its gone. It is not deleted though, it is merged with larger page they are building. I know because something similar happened to me ( I allowed it to happen out of curiosity. )


what exactly happened to yours then, if I may ask?


scammer PM'ed me, asking if I would sell, asked to get low level access to check audience, I know it was a scam but got really curious, because it was really low role access so I thought "what kind of damage can he do really" to myself.

It was small page so I went with it, granted role (I will not go into specifics for obvious reasons) and waited... as soon as he got the role, he (or maybe someone helping him) claimed my page from another account and confirmed with this newly granted role by me, quickly removed me and merged it into bigger page.

As I was looking at it I actually managed to click "Cancel" button several times when he was sending claims and made it as troublesome as possible but eh.

It is a loophole that Facebook has not closed yet, I tried to inform them but tools are really rare for that.


I had similar experience with my facebook page of 200k+ likes but facebook didn't even care to reply


Just a few likes, but it happened the same to me, It was important for me, though.


Plot twist: OP is the hacker trying to get control over a recently deleted community :)

Just kidding


You joke, but this is a real concern for me ... even if I do get a person replying here, presumably the hacker used dodgy means of getting access in the first place! how can I definitively prove what I'm saying is true?

My main hope is that it will be clear from the page's history that I've been involved from the very start, and the new "owner's" actions will look as suspicious to a real human as they do to me!

In the meantime, I've updated my blog to mention this discussion, proving at least the blog part of my ownership :)

https://metalised.wordpress.com/2022/01/27/metalised-faceboo...

(hopefully, this, and the fact that the now deleted page used to point to this page for the last 10 years should be enough!)


I'd assume Facebook has been tracking IP addresses and other computer fingerprint info from the machine(s) you have been using to upload content.

The person who has taken ownership would have different machine fingerprint info.

So Facebook should be able to confirm you have been the main uploader for quite some time.


I thought something among the lines. This would be a very good publicity stunt. I did not know about that metalised.wordpress.com wordpress page and I am an avid Heavy Metal listener. My first thought is, shit, I'm going to help this guy buy re-promoting his page. But then it landed on me... how good of a PR tactic this would be.


Hi my metal brother,

I have nothing to gain from a PR stunt. As you can see from my website, it's a small blog, not a mainstream professional website. But it means a lot to me sentimentally, because it's something I have been working on for 11 years, and a small (well, 56k small) community of metalheads was built around it. The last few years the only content was the end of year lists, but this was very popular on Facebook.

I think the main reason it became valued among metalheads is because it's not a "mainstream" list, of the kind promoted by the music industry, every year the same people... I go to great lengths to find out great music. Often enough, a band which I think deserves to be on the top 20 list may be relatively unknown in mainstream media, and both the bands and fans seem to find value in this and thank me for it.

Check out the end-of-year list for 2021. You may find something you like. I particularly recommend the top ranked album on that list, Thy Catafalque!


Someone usurped your voluntary serfdom of facebooks property by displacing you in favor of them.

Facebook may say you "own" your page on their service. They are lying.


I'm sorry that this happened to you. What i am about to propose is not a solution for you for now unfortunately. But maybe something to help for the future...Have you considered starting a new presence for yourself and your community on the fediverse (e.g. mastodon, pleroma, diaspora, friendica, etc.)?? This will take work and time of course and maybe not all members will follow you over, but if you start a new community on one of the existing fediverse instances - or even better and more resilient, start your own instance - then facebook or other entities will not be able to let this happen to you/your community again. (Granted you can of course get hacked in your new world, encounter negativity, etc...But you will likely be in better position to do something more for yourself than what FB is/isn't doing.)

Step 1: Research the topic of the fediverse, and specifically find options for you to sign up for accounts...Yes, plural acounts...so you can get a flavor for the differnce in apps, instances, existing communities and so on. "Try" before you "buy". See also site like: https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse

During this step, if you can still access the legacy FB community/page as a participant, inform your peers that you're trying this fediverse thing out, and if they're interested in experimenting with you. The more that can go along for the ride, the merrier!

Step 2: Sign up for a couple of different accounts, join some existing communities. No need to be shady nor too secretive, be honest with folks that you're testing the waters...and of course be respectful; that helps new members. Get familiar with using the tech (since there are nuances and differences to how conventional social media typically operates, new vocabularies, etiquette)... Do not research about setting up your own instance...just get comfy being a regular user, and understanding the rhythms of the fediverse. And, if some members from the legacy FB page did in fact join you in this experiment, ask them what they think so far.

Step 3: Decide which community to stay with in the fediverse (maybe re-create your "true"/"final" account), and then start inviting community members from legacy FB page. I should clarify that like FB, you are not restricted to only 1 community...you can join as many places as you wish.

Optional Step 4: After some time, if you're really into the fediverse, want more freedom, etc...Research setting up your instance/community...or look for providers that you pay for managing the infrastructure for you. Nothing is free - you either invest time/money managing system yourself or pay someone else to do it for you.

Good luck, and again, sorry that this happened to you in the first place!


I think you have too high hopes for the possibility to get non tech-geek users to try the Fediverse. If Heavy Metal Community A on Facebook disappears overnight, I think the users will simply join Heavy Metal Community B (on Facebook).


You might be correct. I do not know the community in question nor the desire of the community leader here nor their background for interest in what i suggested. But i figured, i just provide a proposal, that's all.

And, separately, while the fediverse is vastly dwarfed in participation numbers by convenional social media...at last count there are several millions of users engaged within the fediverse...Now, that number fluctuate wildly depending on sources from single digit millions of users to double digit millions of users, etc...But there are still quite a large number of people nowadays on the fediverse. I happen to know many users (that i ineract with constantly) on the fediverse who are most definitely not tech-geeks. I win nothing if this community leader listens to me or not...again, i was just proposing a suggestion.


There is no "legacy FB page" to join as a participant. That's the problem. The hackers deleted the page.

I mentioned it to another poster here, but essentially I tried to inform my subscribers about the hack before the page was deleted, as part of a high-profile post (the end of year best metal albums post, which is the yearly highlight of the page, and always gets a lot of visibility).

Unfortunately, not many people seemed to notice or act on the 'hack' stuff in the post, even though the post itself did actually get a lot of votes and 'thank you' replies from bands. But only a handful of people subscribed to the 'backup' page that I mentioned in that post.

Unless I manage to get the page restored somehow, the best I can hope for is that next year, anyone who "actively" looks for the end of year list and notices the page is gone, might decide to google 'metalised', end up on my blog, see what happened, and subscribe to the backup page ... but that already feels like it would be too much effort for the average facebook user, even if they did get value from that community. To be honest, it's more like the commenter below says. If my Heavy Metal community A disappears overnight, chances are people will simply jump over to Heavy Metal community B rather than start looking for 'fediverse' stuff (I don't even know what that is, to be honest, and I doubt many of my subscribers would either).


> There is no "legacy FB page" to join as a participant. That's the problem. The hackers deleted the page...

Yeah, the lack of the page does hamper things greatly. I'm sorry again that this happened.

> ...To be honest, it's more like the commenter below says. If my Heavy Metal community A disappears overnight, chances are people will simply jump over to Heavy Metal community B rather than start looking for 'fediverse' stuff (I don't even know what that is, to be honest, and I doubt many of my subscribers would either)...

My hope for you is that you and your fellow community members can in fact continue - whether it is on something like Heavy Metal community B, etc. Obviously, your call if you are or not interested in researching other options like the fediverse...Although, you (and other community members) should start thinking of plans for what to do if another hacking incident happens. (I sincerely hope that this kind of thing does not happen to you and your community ever again.)


How would a distributed system help? Being on a distributed system wouldn't keep hackers from taking control of your self hosted page and hosing it.


You're correct that by itself distributed systems - like the fediverse - do not automatically prevent hacks/security events. Although diversity of nodes (and decentralization of nodes too) does help because if one node is struck, then others can still operate; not foolproof but does offer some level of resilience. Also, to clarify, my proposal was more about sovereignty and added control of one's comunity and by extension content/voice. Certainly, if the relevant community lived on the fediverse, perhaps there could have been more that might have been done to continue even after some hack...maybe.


Hm I see - but in the case of bad actors hacking accounts, being on the fediverse seems neutral (relative to being on facebook) to worse? At least with (some) centralized systems there is an authority that can be appealed to (not FB obviously).

> Certainly, if the relevant community lived on the fediverse, perhaps there could have been more that might have been done to continue even after some hack...maybe.

As far as I can tell, the community members of this page still exists, the page itself is just gone? Not sure there is an advantage either way.


> ...At least with (some) centralized systems there is an authority that can be appealed to (not FB obviously)...

Yes, but...and, mind you, this gets a bit philosophical and scenario-specific...but, if we trace the incentives all the way through, some central authorities will only help if your/your community's goals are aligned, right? FB has a goal of creating just enough of a community to get paid by someone, and sadly not by community members but by ad buyers. In the fediverse - which let me clarify is far from perfect - it really is as close to you/someone setting up their own stuff and yelling into the void just because they want to...and it happens that others might want to join in without a similar agenda to FB, etc.

> ...the community members of this page still exists, the page itself is just gone...

Agreed...but in a scenario where such a meeting place ("This page") is not centrally controlled, access to it or its existence or its members can not so easily be controlled by a single entity - be they benevalent or indifferent or malevalent. The fediverse is not perfect, and may not be perfect for the relevant community or its members or even the OP here...i merely offered it as a possible suggestion...my proposal may not be suited to everyone; and that's ok.


Facebook is a cancer, take this as a sign to start your own social network. There's lots of 'off-the-shelf' scripts you can use (see codecanyon.net)

You can rebuild your community in no time and make it better than it was.


Very HN response. "My FB community got destroyed. Can anyone else?" "FB bad. Build your own."

Sorry OP. I don't know anyone who can help. It seems to me like FB would be able to reactivate the group if you can get a hold of someone. I don't think they purged their DB of your group.


It's not very empathetic that's right but it's still true. People have to stop building their livelihoods or passion projects on these platforms, if they want to have any control over them at least.


Sure. If you want to make sure some big company doesnt control your group then you should build your own platform. But could this person do that? Maybe. Does this person have the capability to do that? Maybe. Most people wouldnt. I'm a swe and I wouldnt really know how to start my own website, get traction, and grow a community. But I know how to make a facebook group.

I guess its the right advice if you want to ensure nothing bad can happen but the likelihood of someone actually doing that for a project they do in their spare time is tiny. It's like saying, "You should only communicate with these people via telegraph because thats the only way you can be sure that no one can prevent you from doing so."

It's a solution. It's not incorrect. But it isnt a good solution for the vast majority of individuals.


I'm not saying people should build their own platforms. There are plenty of managed forums, shops etc out there for people to use. We should help our friends and family by steering them towards those instead of relying solely on FB and IG for instance.


Building your own carries it's own set of risks. I can't afford the infosec, IT, devops, etc. that a large tech company has. Sure if I build my own and get hacked, I may have more ability to directly effect the situation, but I will likely have to spend much more of my time wrangling tech and may end up being more likely to be hacked overall.


As I said in other places, I was more thinking of managed forums, shops, etc.


those carry their own risks.

I once created a pretty basic phpBB forum for my college.

Spammed by russian hackers within minutes.


If you want a society where people do those kinds of things, maybe you should build your own society that fits your criteria.

I know it's not very empathetic to say but it's still true.


I rather try to educate the people I know about the consequences of relying on companies like Meta for things like that hoping it doesn't happen to them. That's all we can do. And I guess contributing to the technology that enables alternatives.


But saying build it yourself isnt educating. It's akin to saying, "You should have known better". Sure. They should have. They probably did. But when someone is asking for help and you say you should have made a different decision 10 years ago to prevent this you are not educating.


There are plenty of alternatives out there to build a community, sell things, etc. The bit about contributing was aimed at people like us who work in software.


This is good advice if you're technically savvy enough to be able to set up and maintain a website. If you're in the tech bubble long enough, though, it's easy to forget that most people aren't and don't want to be. You send them to a link to a bunch of scripts they can use to build a website and either their eyes will glaze over or they'll ask you to do it for them (or both).

I'm no fan of Facebook, and I absolutely believe that more people should make their own websites and communities on the Internet, but I'm realistic enough to know that most people just won't bother.


Best communities right now are old fashion, self-hosted forums.


Do you think there could be a universal social database that companies could build their platforms on?

People could control what they share based on a parent dashboard and changes would automatically cascade to platforms you added.


Thousands of years later, we’re still realizing impermanence is a thing, yet keep on keeping on trying to ignore that fact.


The OP's community didn't die by itself, it was killed. Impermanence is a very real thing, but when somebody goes and explicitly terminates something, focusing on the impermanence is wrong on all accounts.


This isn't a very kind response




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