I remember when I first read about social media accounts being cancelled by “somebody out there” who understood that user’s online behavior — or content — was not aligned to community standards. In this case you’d assume another human being pushed the button — clicked the button, maybe — and turned your account off. The “IndieWeb” proponents were the first to document this problem publicly. I believe it was back in 2017.
Fast forward 6 years to today, things are different and way more complex, I think. Social media is now a huge institution that is unmanageable by humans. AI has been introduced into various layers to automate community management. “The algorithm cancelled my account!”, people say.
This is becoming part of our daily problems. All of the sudden we need to know a handful of things in order to at least understand what’s going on with our cancelled-for-whatever-reason accounts, like:
- ToS
- Community standards
- Account cancellation/suspension standard process
- Cancellation algorithm characteristics
- Algorithm “hacks”
- Social engineering
- User support channels
- User support channels that you can actually interact with
- Necessary actions you’d have to take in order to restore your account
I’ve got this email today which illustrates the scenario of a company’s account being cancelled from Discord without any previous notification, let alone justification.
Yes, “their automated systems”. I can only imagine where we all be at in 6 years’ time with advancements in ChatGPT and similar “systems”.
Well, in fact, let’s be honest and think positively. In the future, AI will be providing us a full report with all the evidence of our mistakes and reasons for account cancellation. We could even get a clear and up-to-date step by step tutorial on how to get the account back on again. That would help!
For now, it would be nice if social media and other AI driven online services could send us “We apologize on behalf of our bots” messages explaining what they have done to our accounts.