Barred From Facebook, and Wondering Why
MICHAEL
LETWIN, a lawyer living in Brooklyn, went to sign into his Facebook
account, as he does almost daily, and received a surprising — and
unpleasant — message.
“Your
account has been disabled,” it said. “If you have any questions
or concerns, you can visit our F.A.Q. page.” Mr. Letwin, who
besides his personal page also helps administer a Facebook page for
the group Jews for Palestinian Right of Return, clicked onto the
F.A.Q. page and found a reference to Facebook’s community
standards, none of which he felt he violated, along with the option
to appeal.
He
did. And then he waited. And waited.
Mr.
Letwin’s situation is not unusual, or new. The question of what
role social media companies should play — a hands-off observer that
steps in only in extreme circumstances, or a curator that decides
what goes up and what comes down — has long been debated.
Recently,
Twitter refused
to allow
posts
with links to videos of the beheading of the American journalist
James Foley. Facebook is involved in a battle with
drag queens
whose accounts were disabled because they used their stage names in
their profiles. Using anything but your real name is a violation of
the
company’s rules.
The furor led this week to a meeting with Facebook representatives
and a news conference
called by a San Francisco supervisor.
“We
don’t realize how ingrained Facebook is in our everyday lives,” a
drag queen named Heklina told KNTV in San Jose, Calif. “I was shut
out of Facebook for 24 hours and felt like I had a limb chopped off.”
But
few users, until they are faced with a similar situation, are aware
of how little control they actually have over something they view as
their own — their pages, their posts, their photos.
“When
Facebook makes a termination decision, it’s potentially
life-altering for some people,” said Eric Goldman, a professor of
law at Santa Clara University in California and co-director of the
High Tech Law Institute there. “They’re cut off to access to
their communities” and possibly to their clients.
That
is not to say that Professor Goldman thinks social media platforms
should be completely unregulated. And, he said, Facebook and other
social media companies largely do a good job of monitoring so many
users and posts.
His
and others’ main criticism focuses on transparency.
“The
average person’s soapbox is now digital, and we’re now in a world
where the large social media companies have a governmentlike ability
to set social norms,” said Lee Rowland, a staff lawyer with the
American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s a massive power and it
comes with a responsibility.”
These
questions arise with all social media, but the relationship users
have with Facebook is particularly passionate, Professor Goldman
said. Even as some say its impact is waning, it still provides 1.3
billion people — compared, say, to Twitter’s 271 million active
monthly users — with access to news about their friends and to
community groups.
“Our
goal has always been to strike an appropriate balance between the
interests of people who want to express themselves and the interests
of others who may not want to see certain kinds of content,” Monika
Bickert, head of Facebook’s global policy management, wrote in an
email.
Social
media companies have every legal right to take down content or kick
someone off, said Danielle Citron, a professor of law at the
University of Maryland School of Law.
Facebook,
like other social media companies, has a list
of standards
that
users agree to abide by when they set up their accounts, even if they
never read the standards.
Among
other things, they prohibit posting of hate speech (which means
individuals or groups cannot attack others based on race, ethnicity,
national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation,
disability or medical condition), encouragements of self-harm,
graphic content or threats of violence. And the user’s real name
must be used.
Anyone
can easily file
a
report
against a user. And
Facebook has hundreds of people working globally, around the clock
and in 30 languages, reading and responding to reports of violations.
Obviously,
many of these categories are open to interpretation. Breast-feeding,
for example, is something Facebook has
grappled with
in
the past — essentially, how much of the breast can you show before
it becomes graphic?
If
Facebook decides to remove content, it sends a warning to the user
about the action. People can also be locked out temporarily for a few
days or a week. Grounds for immediately disabling an account include
using a fake name or promoting child exploitation.
But
Heather Dorsey, who lives in Milwaukee, had not done any of those
things when she found
herself barred
from
logging onto Facebook three years ago.
“My
profile didn’t break any rules. I hadn’t done anything out of the
ordinary prior to getting temporarily kicked off,” she wrote in an
email. “It was frustrating not knowing how long it was going to
take to get the issue resolved, as I do use Facebook to stay
connected, particularly with friends and relatives who live out of
town. I am a freelance writer and social media consultant, so it was
also an issue for my work.”
She
tried to call, but ended up in an endless circle of recordings. She
found an email address for advertisers and contacted it, asking what
she had done wrong. And as suddenly as she was taken off, she was
allowed back on.
In
2012, the website Gawker
published
a far more detailed list of Facebook’s Abuse Standards Violations
used by the company’s regulators. Facebook refused to confirm that
the list was valid.
For
example, visually or verbally insulting Turkey’s first president,
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, is illegal in Turkey. If Facebook is notified
of such a post, it limits the visibility of that post in Turkey. The
same with Holocaust denial in countries where that is against the
law.
cebook
would not release the number of reports it receives nor how much
content it takes down. But it does not take more than a quick search
on the Internet to see that many users are confounded when they try
to log in and find they cannot.
That includes the
American Civil Liberties Union. The organization last year posted a
photo of a bare-chested bronze female statue in an article on its
Facebook page about controversial public art in Kansas.
Facebook
took the post down, telling the organization that it had violated
Facebook’s community standards. It then bloced the ACLU from
posting for 24 hours, contending it had posted again, which it had
not.
Once the A.C.L.U.
contacted Facebook’s public policy manager, apologies were given
and the post was allowed back up. But as Ms. Rowland said, “Our
ultimate success is cold comfort for anyone who has a harder time
getting their emails returned than does the A.C.L.U.”
Professor
Citron, author of
Hate
Crimes in Cyberspace,”
said
of Facebook, “I think it’s a positive thing that they’re
allowed to set community norms.” The problem is a lack of
“technological due process,” she said.
Ms. Bickert of
Facebook acknowledged that “one area where we’re focusing is
improving the information we share with people about our community
standards and when we take action on reported content.”
For Mr. Letwin,
that can’t come soon enough. A month after his account was
disabled, he received an email apologizing, saying it had all been a
mistake on Facebook’s part.
A Facebook
spokesman said a report was filed against Mr. Letwin for using a fake
name, which he had not done, and a reviewer looking at his account
then mistakenly thought it violated Facebook’s standards regarding
promotion of violence and terrorism. But the process took far longer
than it should have, he acknowledged, saying that typically, an
appeal should be responded to within a few days.
“It
was a Kafkaesque thing,” Mr. Letwin said. “You don’t know if
you did too many posts, too many likes. The rules are constantly
changing.”
ny
times 140920
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