<story><title>Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]</title><url>https://shagunjhaver.com/files/research/jhaver-2019-transparency.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bchimp</author><text>The paper (and I only read the abstract) is interesting, but as others have noted, fairly obvious.&lt;p&gt;One thing that seems to be an assumption is that the &amp;quot;company&amp;quot; needs to provide the explanation. I think it is even better if the user provides the explanation. The assumption a user can&amp;#x27;t provide it is probably because we&amp;#x27;ve all seen Terms of Service agreements that are totally opaque.&lt;p&gt;Back in the day when I was doing a bit of admin work, I decided to simplify our TOS, and then when I had to block someone, I just kicked the ball back into their court: &amp;quot;If you would like your account restored, please point out in the TOS what rule you violated.&amp;quot; It worked better than expected. People that cared enough about their access to the system usually figured it out pretty quickly, and we got the knowledge that they actually read the TOS to some degree. They got their account restored and that was the end of it. Repeat offenders at that point were willfully causing problems, so we just left them blocked.&lt;p&gt;Obviously this only works if a human can understand your TOS. Another interesting line of questioning might be &amp;quot;at what complexity level is your TOS useful in shaping behavior and where does it just become a legal shield.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coreyp_1</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m going through a related situation right now, but I&amp;#x27;m the one who is the recipient of the negative action.&lt;p&gt;I posted a video of me playing the piano on YouTube.  I got a copyright notification, that I was playing the melody to a song that someone else held the copyright for.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s the problem?  Well, the melody was published in 1886 (133 years ago) under the exact name identified in the copyright claim.  The composer died in 1901 (118 years ago).  It is not under copyright protection in any jurisdiction!  Now, I&amp;#x27;m having to appeal the copyright claim... not to YouTube, but to ASCAP (the company who is claiming the copyright in the first place)!!!!  In fact, because it was MY arrangement and MY performance and MY production, &lt;i&gt;I&lt;/i&gt; own the copyright to that video in every way legally recognized!  In my mind, this is THEFT... from ME!&lt;p&gt;My point is, if YouTube had not at least told me what I&amp;#x27;m being accused of, there is no way that I would have figured this out!  I haven&amp;#x27;t done anything wrong!  Someone else (ASCAP, ICE_CS) is fraudulently claiming copyright!&lt;p&gt;Under your system, I would have to &amp;quot;invent&amp;quot; things to confess to.&lt;p&gt;Of course, now the problem is that I have no power in this situation.  ASCAP must agree that they don&amp;#x27;t want to monitize my video, and they have no incentive to do that.  I have no protection or recourse. :(&lt;p&gt;And, for anyone who&amp;#x27;s interested, this still isn&amp;#x27;t resolved.</text></comment>
<story><title>Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]</title><url>https://shagunjhaver.com/files/research/jhaver-2019-transparency.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bchimp</author><text>The paper (and I only read the abstract) is interesting, but as others have noted, fairly obvious.&lt;p&gt;One thing that seems to be an assumption is that the &amp;quot;company&amp;quot; needs to provide the explanation. I think it is even better if the user provides the explanation. The assumption a user can&amp;#x27;t provide it is probably because we&amp;#x27;ve all seen Terms of Service agreements that are totally opaque.&lt;p&gt;Back in the day when I was doing a bit of admin work, I decided to simplify our TOS, and then when I had to block someone, I just kicked the ball back into their court: &amp;quot;If you would like your account restored, please point out in the TOS what rule you violated.&amp;quot; It worked better than expected. People that cared enough about their access to the system usually figured it out pretty quickly, and we got the knowledge that they actually read the TOS to some degree. They got their account restored and that was the end of it. Repeat offenders at that point were willfully causing problems, so we just left them blocked.&lt;p&gt;Obviously this only works if a human can understand your TOS. Another interesting line of questioning might be &amp;quot;at what complexity level is your TOS useful in shaping behavior and where does it just become a legal shield.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JimboOmega</author><text>I assume most TOS are just a blob of legalese, and not a &amp;quot;this is what it means to behave on this server&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;It feels like the trend has been in the other direction. In most services I&amp;#x27;ve interacted with recently, the service often doesn&amp;#x27;t even tell you that the content has been removed, let alone why. One example is Discord - if a mod removes a comment you made, it just disappears. You might try to repost it, thinking it failed to send.  Similarly if you are removed from a server, it simply disappears from your list. This kind of thing is very frustrating&amp;#x2F;confusing - not that I expect a mod to necessarily provide explanation (though, that&amp;#x27;s nice) but at least the service saying &amp;quot;hey, that got removed&amp;quot; prevents me from trying to repost it.&lt;p&gt;The usual explanation involves spammers&amp;#x2F;scammers. Something like, if they know they got removed for violating some rule or the other, they can use that information to work around it in their next attempt. But for actual human users it can be very frustrating.</text></comment>