[HN Gopher] Facebook Censored Me For Mentioning Open-Source Soci...
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Facebook Censored Me For Mentioning Open-Source Social Network
Mastodon
Author : joeyh
Score : 555 points
Date : 2021-09-11 17:25 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (changelog.complete.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (changelog.complete.org)
| kevincox wrote:
| This was the final straw that lead me to start moving away from
| Facebook Messenger. They were preventing me from sending
| seemingly random links in 1:1 chats. That was enough reason to
| start moving friends to a solution with E2EE.
|
| This example my have not been malicious, but it is a start
| reminder that you are allowing them to see, and control, your
| communication. That is something that I would prefer not to
| occur.
| vmception wrote:
| This seems like an anticompetitive practice
|
| Even if its toward an open source federated network that has no
| head and can host marginalized content
|
| The implementation here seems to be an anticompetitive practice,
| which is sanctionable by governments in the US
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| "practice" assumes a lot here.
| vmception wrote:
| okay, replace the word with "action".
| b0tzzzzzzman wrote:
| One can dream. That's still free.
| pope_meat wrote:
| I'm looking forward to dreams as a service, with personalized
| ads sprinkled in. Only 9.99 a month!
| perihelions wrote:
| Related:
|
| https://dxe.pubpub.org/pub/dreamadvertising/release/1 ( _"
| Advertising in Dreams is Coming: Now What?"_)
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| Ech. I understand the general point OP is making but I don't mind
| admitting I see things differently. I am free to enter Joe's Cafe
| and do 99.9% of normal things one might do in any similar
| setting. But if I enter Joe's cafe and solicit my friends there
| that if they don't like the way Joe runs his cafe they should be
| aware of Lenny's Cafe, I feel that Joe has every right to stop me
| from doing that. To pedants: Yes, I know the analogy isn't
| perfect. But please don't pretent it isn't relevant.
|
| This said, I remember when many MAGA friends announced they were
| leaving for Parler or MeWe or Gab and I never heard any of them
| claim their posts were removed (the ones who didn't leave right
| away).
| CrazyCatDog wrote:
| Mastodon Ivory is illegal to sell--my money is on anti-poaching
| filters and dumb coincidence.
|
| FB I'm for hire! Plenty of experience spin-doctoring/downplaying
| incidences for PR.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Interesting how "because COVID" has become the thinly veiled
| excuse here. A similar manifestation of the _" think of the
| children"_ trope that can be used to manipulate emotions and shut
| down dissent.
| [deleted]
| dredmorbius wrote:
| This seems to be a wildly incongrous conclusion based on a
| clear indication that a global pandemic is impacting
| operational efficacy and staffing levels. Not that it's an
| excuse or justification for blanket censorship.
| [deleted]
| breakingcups wrote:
| If there's one job that doesn't exactly depend on what location
| you're working from...
| deltree7 wrote:
| It is more nuanced.
|
| FB team can be overwhelmed with Covid related misinformation.
|
| A lot of content moderation is outsourced to countries like
| India where productivity, availability may have degraded due
| to covid that ravaged through the country.
|
| Many firms still have backlogs from Covid disruption.
|
| If you have worked at / started any half-decent sized company
| you'd have known
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I disagree with the notion that anyone anywhere can do the
| job. These moderators don't just moderate the rants your
| grandma posts about shopping malls. There's a documentary
| about what the content moderation people do, and they end up
| seeing horrific stuff like (sexual) child abuse, gore, and
| all the other worst thing humanity has to offer. Many of
| these people end up depressed or in therapy.
|
| I don't know if Facebook has their stuff together, but I
| think it's unethical to have people review random user
| uploaded content without close access to a mental health
| specialist.
|
| You can have several degrees of intensity a reviewer might be
| able to see (to not expose all reviewers to the very worst on
| a regular basis), but no algorithm can clearly identify the
| nastiest of the nasty content. The algorithm sees "government
| pedo club", flags it as fake news, and who knows what the
| shared content actually contains. It could be a conspiracy
| nut, it could just as well be actual child porn. The
| probability is low, but you need someone standing by just as
| well, in my opinion.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Isn't it a bit silly that these Big Brother companies (e.g.
| Facebook, Twitter) are so afraid of global communication
| being taken over by small, yet persuasive groups, that they
| set about to take over global communication by
| their...small, yet persuasive company?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > If there's one job that doesn't exactly depend on what
| location you're working from...
|
| No, the opposite is true: Any job that requires reviewing
| potentially private content must be done in a controlled
| environment.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if content reviewers weren't even
| allowed to have cameraphones at their desks.
|
| Can't risk having someone snap photos of the screen while
| reviewing content flagged as sensitive. Doing this job from
| home is not an option.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| ...then it's not content moderation, which AFAIK companies
| like Facebook and Google require to take place on-site, in a
| controlled environment with no electronic devices, due to the
| potential data security issues involved.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| That seems like a much more complex line of thinking than "a
| combination of lots of ongoing misinformation campaigns
| combined with global staffing and availability issues means
| content moderation teams are less responsive".
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Interesting how "because COVID" has become the thinly veiled
| excuse here.
|
| The message says it triggered spam filters. It's not related to
| COVID misinformation.
|
| The only place COVID appears is in the warning that their
| manual review queues are longer than normal due to COVID.
| exporectomy wrote:
| Yes, that's the excuse. It's equivalent to "because we don't
| want to pay for it."
| Igelau wrote:
| I'd be willing to bet that the phrase "corporate-controlled
| network" is what set off the censor, and not Mastodon. That more
| often appears next to links to fake news sites.
|
| On the other hand, the opaque/nonexistent review and appeal
| process is sleazy and YouTubesque.
| strenholme wrote:
| Yep. Facebook censored me for linking to an entry about COVID-19
| growth on my personal webpage -- https://samiam.org/COVID-19 for
| the record -- saying the post violated Facebook's community
| standards, falsely claiming it was spam (no, I do not have a
| single ad over on my personal website).
|
| Also, interviewing for a job at Facebook has been one of the
| worst job interview experiences I have ever had.
| nayuki wrote:
| Tell me more about what happened at your Facebook interview
| strenholme wrote:
| They asked a lot of really senior-level questions about
| B-trees. Since I tend to use hashes instead of B-trees for my
| data structures, I was caught completely flat footed.
|
| To interview for Facebook, study B-trees like crazy (no, the
| recruiters did not warn me about this).
|
| Also, after the interview, the recruiters at Facebook I was
| in contact with completely ghosted me. Very rude.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| A recruiter explicitly told me to study trees and related
| algorithms and even offered an FB study guide. However this
| happened after I told them I didn't do game show style
| interviews. YMMV.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| This has happened to me lots of times, for innocuous posts. Like,
| for example, copying a screenshot of a graph from the CDC, along-
| side with a link pointing to the CDC website I obtained it from.
| Or copying a inflation graph from a blog, and then linking to
| that blog in the same comment or post.
|
| Not some conspiracy, just incompetence on FB's part. Of course
| some people would prefer to believe something nefarious.
| calibas wrote:
| Wouldn't be the first time they've done something like this:
| https://heavy.com/tech/2018/10/facebook-block-minds-com-unse...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'm no fan at all of Facebook. Don't have it, never have. Think
| it should be destroyed utterly. You can find me on Mastodon.[0]
|
| That said: the company sees 2--3 _billion_ MAU,[1] and sees on
| the order of 5 billion pieces of content submitted _per day_.
|
| The best I understand, their measure of exposure is not _items_
| but "prevelance _, that is, the number of total_ presentations*
| of a particular content.[2] Long-standing empirical media
| evidence suggests that this follows a power curve, where the
| number of _impressions_ is inverse to the number of items. So,
| say, 1 might see 1 million impressions, 10: 100k, 100: 10k,
| 1,000: 1k, etc.
|
| This means that a service can budget and staff for _either_ the
| minimum prevalence threshold before manual review, _or_ the total
| number of items granted more than some _maximum_ unreviewed
| threshold. Machine-assisted filtering can help. In either case,
| though, mistakes will happen, and at _5 billion items /day_, the
| number of misclassifications _even at very high accuracy_ is
| _large_ :
|
| - 1%: 50m/dy
|
| - 0.1%: 5m/dy
|
| - 0.01%: 500k/dy
|
| - 0.001%: 50k/dy
|
| ... which necessitates secondary review and additional costs, as
| well as, of course, malicious appeals by bad-faith actors. If the
| filtering system is fed by user reports (flags and the like),
| then malicious or simply disagreement-based flags may well
| trigger moderation. (Crowdsourcing has its own profound limits.)
|
| Another element is that, _especially with AI-based filtering
| systems_ , what results is _determination without explanation_.
| We know _that_ a specific item was rejected, but not _why_. And
| _in all likelihood, FB and its engineers cannot determine the
| specific reason either._
|
| (I've encountered this situation more often from Google, again,
| as I don't use FB, but the underlying mechanics of AI-based
| decision systems are the same between such systems.)
|
| The upshot though is:
|
| - Moderation _is_ necessary.
|
| - It's ultimately capricious and error-prone. There are
| initiatives and proposals for greater transparency and appeals.
|
| - Cause-determination is ... usually ... poorly founded.
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 0. https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius Also Diaspora (see below).
|
| 1. Monthly active users. https://investor.fb.com/investor-
| news/press-release-details/...
|
| 2. See Guy Rosen, VP of Integrity for both content and prevalence
| references:
| https://nitter.kavin.rocks/guyro/status/1337493574246535168?...
| I've written more on the topic here:
| https://joindiaspora.com/posts/f3617c90793101396840002590d8e...
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| try it again with pleroma and see what happens!
| natural219 wrote:
| The fact that people buy into any of these excuses (Russian
| manipulation, Covid misinformation) as anything but an excuse to
| shut down competition and consolidate control is utterly beyond
| me.
|
| Read literally a single history book, people.
| ergocoder wrote:
| FB can ban whoever they want as long as it is not a protected
| class.
|
| FB can ban you because you like to eat broccoli or for whatever
| any reason.
|
| Many people support this idea during trump's ban. So you will
| just need to suck it up.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Political affiliation is a protected class where FB and TWTR
| are headquartered. Considering the overwhelming majority of
| Republicans remain on the platform, it seems the removal had
| nothing to do with class.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| Weird take. People's concern here is that this sort of behavior
| is anti-competitive, enforcing rules that applied to everyone
| re: inciting violence is pretty different.
|
| Seems odd to think that folk have to support a generic action
| rather than how that action is done. Like, there are people who
| like baseball but would probably be a bit upset if you randomly
| threw a ball at them at 90mph in the middle of the street
| despite them being really supportive of it in a different
| context.
| chmod600 wrote:
| Censorship is always abused. Maybe this time or maybe not. But
| it's always abused.
|
| And yes, it's worse than misinformation.
| justbored123 wrote:
| Buddy Buddy WAKE UP, Facebook is not a public service, it's not
| there to serve a nobody like you, it's a private company that
| exist to make money. You can't use their service to trash them
| and promote their competition, that is not a reasonable
| business model for them. To finance you by giving you a free
| platform to promote their competition and trash them is not a
| good trade for them. DO YOU UNDERSTAND???
| inkblotuniverse wrote:
| If it serves the public, it's a public service. Utility
| companies were private companies until people decided they
| weren't.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| What companies would not be public services under that
| definition?
| bashinator wrote:
| Censorship being "worse than misinformation" seems like
| whataboutism, given that FB has serious problems with both.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| It's not a whataboutism, it's pointing out that with one of
| the most popular proposed solutions to misinformation,
| censorship, the cure is worse than the disease.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I like the quote the from the Supreme court on the topic:
|
| _" If there be time to expose through discussion, the
| falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the
| processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more
| speech, not enforced silence"_
|
| However, I think it's also important to recognize that in
| today's algorithmically driven content presentation, "more
| speech" is often comically ineffective because it is never
| consumed in the emergent content bubbles that silo people
| from contradictory information. Not to mention the fact
| that misinformation that confirms your preconceptions is a
| much more powerful influence than actual information that
| contradicts them. Given this, an important caveat embedded
| in the above quote is: _" If there be time"_. A recognition
| of the fact that, in some circumstances, there will not be
| an opportunity for more speech to prevail.
|
| I don't have a solution to this. There may be no good
| solution to this, except lesser degrees of bad solutions.
| wussboy wrote:
| If my kids were late coming home from school, and I asked you
| if you know what has happened, and you either:
|
| 1. Don't say anything because my neighbour tapes your mouth
| shut
|
| 2. Lie and say, "They were brutally murdered by your
| neighbour", resulting in a dead neighbour followed by my kids
| showing up unharmed from school
|
| ...can you explain in this scenario how censorship is worse
| than misinformation.
|
| I'm not trying do be a jerk. I hear your argument a lot
| (especially on tech-heavy web sites) and I want to understand
| it.
| rglullis wrote:
| I think there is a _tiny little bit_ of a jump if you are
| acting this quickly and this harshly on information without
| verifying.
|
| Concretely to your hypothetical: don't attribute to
| misinformation the issue that is most like your barbaric
| reaction. Not to say that the liar should not be punished, it
| should bear a big responsibility in the consequences of the
| actions. But at the end of day it was not the liar the one
| that killed your neighbor, you were.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| It would be, but also you showed him pictures to prove it,
| he just didn't know they were photoshopped. And linked him
| to a news article on thebostontribune.com that was
| reporting that his kids were dead. And his family and
| friends were sharing their condolences.
|
| It's not as if folk AREN'T acting on misinformation or
| showing that they aren't really capable of distinguishing
| between the two. Tons can. And tons won't realize that The
| Boston Tribune isn't real.
|
| We're having to deal with almost literally shouting "fire!"
| in a crowded theater when there's no fire, only there's
| special effects and major campaigns to convince people
| there's fire, not just taking some guy at their word and
| stampeding because of it.
| rglullis wrote:
| This seems like really stretching the analogy just to
| remove personal responsibility.
|
| If I am the father of the missing children and I see the
| "family and friends" sharing their condolences, I would
| go talk to them first. If someone comes with pictures
| trying to accuse someone of something, no matter how
| shocking the accusations, there would still be the
| question of (a) why is someone bothering with taking
| pictures and not taking to the authorities beforehand and
| (b) what are the consequences _for me_ if I went on a
| rampage attack based on bogus evidence.
|
| To get a little bit on topic: the reason that censorship
| is worse than misinformation is that we _should always
| operate on the premise that our information is
| incomplete, inaccurate or distorted by those controlling
| the information channels._
|
| Without censorship, I can listen to different sources (no
| matter how crazy or unsound they are) and I can try to
| discern what makes sense and does not. With censorship,
| any dissent is silenced, so we get _one_ source of
| information - who can never get questioned - or worse we
| get to see many sources of information but only the ones
| that are aligned with the censors and gives us a false
| consensus and the _illusion_ of quality in information.
|
| Only idiots can walk around in the world of today and
| confidently repeat whatever they hear from "official"
| sources as unquestionable truths.
| wussboy wrote:
| Thanks for your reply, rlgullis.
|
| The extremes of my example were only to show that there
| could be real and serious consequences from
| misinformation rather than silence. If we dial it back
| from "killing my neighbour" to "lost my job" or even
| "missed my bus", I believe my point still stands. In many
| scenarios that we experience every day, we would be
| better served by accepting censure over misinformation.
|
| You claim "we should always operate on the premise that
| our information is incomplete, inaccurate or distorted by
| those controlling the information channels" and I agree
| with you in theory. But in practice this is impossible.
| The human brain is physically unable to work everything
| through from first principles. This makes sense
| conceptually and has been verified in research.
|
| And this to me is the fundamental issue of our time:
|
| In theory, social media and unrestrained free speech are
| a boon for all society.
|
| In practice they have turned people against each other
| with very real and serious consequences.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I'm not sure it's worse than misinformation. In my field, bad
| data often has a more damaging impact than _no data_.
|
| But I suppose it will depend on the circumstances, and I'd
| honestly be interested to hear your thoughts on why censorship
| is worse.
|
| As for the inevitability of abuse? When it comes to corporate
| interests, that seems to be nearly axiomatic. The Verge's list
| of fascinating & horrifying exchange at Apple about app
| approvals & secret deals makes for a great case-study in this.
| [0]
|
| [0] https://www.theverge.com/22611236/epic-v-apple-emails-
| projec...
| lamontcg wrote:
| It looks like we're going to get a massive test of largely
| misinformation (US) vs. largely censorship (China) writ large
| in the coming decades. Place your bets on the outcome.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| From my understanding, China's model of media control
| focuses more on dillution and distraction than on overt
| censorship.
|
| Both exist. But the _larger_ effort is put into
| distraction.
|
| The recent Russian model is more on bullshit and subverting
| notions of trust entirely.
|
| American propaganda seems largely based on a) what sells
| and b) promoting platitudes, wishful thinking, and c) (at
| least historically) heart-warming (rather than overtly
| divisive) notions of nationalism.
|
| The c) case is now trending more toward divisive and heat-
| worming.
| jjcon wrote:
| This isn't 'some bad data' vs 'no data'
|
| This is 'some bad data' vs 'systemically biased data' and the
| latter is much worse. Most datasets will contain some bad
| data but it can be worked around because the errors are
| random.
| chmod600 wrote:
| Censorship _is_ bad data, because it is selectively excluded
| data.
|
| If gamma rays randomly excluded one post in a thousand, that
| would be mussing data. Censors excluding one post in ten
| thousand is worrying because they have motivations of their
| own, which gamma rays do not.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Bad data vs no data at all? I would think no data would put
| you out of a job while bad data would require more hires to
| filter the data.
| klyrs wrote:
| I prefer employees who say "I don't know" over confident
| bullshitters.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Bad data is often taken as good data, because sifting
| through it incurs 100x more friction than taking it at face
| value. When you ultimately get bad results you can just
| blame the bad data, and you still end up with a paycheck
| for the month(s) you wasted.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Authoritarian countries collapse because everyone is lying
| about reality. Same thing happens with metric driven
| management.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| No data clearly indicates that there is no data.
|
| A statement of "I don't know' clearly indicates a lack of
| knowledge.
|
| A statemnt of "I have no opinion" clearly indicates that
| the speaker has not formed an opinion.
|
| In each case, a spurious generated response:
|
| 1. Is generally accepted as _prima facie_ evidence of what
| it purports.
|
| 2. Must be specifically analysed and assessed.
|
| 3. Is itself subject to repetition and/or amplification.
| With empirical evidence suggesting that falsehoods
| outcompete truths, particularly on large networks operating
| at flows which overload rational assessment.
|
| 4. Competes for attention with other information,
| _including the no-signal case specifically_ , which does
| _very_ poorly against false claims as it is literally
| _nothing_ competing against an often very loud _something_.
|
| Yes: bad data is much, much, much, much worse than no data.
| inkblotuniverse wrote:
| Data that's had data censored from it _is_ bad data.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| False.
|
| Outlier exclusion is standard practice.
|
| It's useful to note _what_ is excluded. _But you exclude
| bad data from the analysis._
|
| Remember that what you're interested in is not _the data_
| but _the ground truth that the data represent_. This
| means that the full transmission chain must be reliable
| and its integrity assured: phenomenon, generated signal,
| transmission channel, receiver, sensor, interpretation,
| and recording.
|
| Noise may enter at any point. And that noise has ...
| exceedingly little value.
|
| _Deliberately inserted noise_ is one of the most
| effective ways to thwart an accurate assessment of ground
| truths.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| As a metaphor, you can imagine a blind person in the
| wilderness who has no idea what is in front of him. He will
| proceed cautiously, perhaps probing the ground with a stick
| or his foot. You could also imagine a delusional man in the
| same wilderness incorrectly believing he's in the middle of
| a foot race. The delusional man just run forward at full
| speed. If the pair are in front of a cliff...
|
| As the saying goes, it's not what you don't know that gets
| you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just
| ain't so.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Any platform where people can speak to an audience needs some
| kind of 'censorship', otherwise you'll quickly find it's a
| platform solely for trolls and the like.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Censorship is the sloppiest possible solution to the
| epistemological crisis. I thought we figured this out during
| the Enlightenment.
| chmod600 wrote:
| The question is: do we want to learn the lessons of history
| the easy way, or the hard way?
| whatshisface wrote:
| New people are being born every day who weren't around for
| the steps forward made in the past. If only there was an
| institution that could step up to the task of teaching them.
| Instead there are institutions for getting them to buy toys
| and making them do algebra drills.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| It's a really hard problem to solve. History has shown time
| and again how easy it is to coopt institutions as well.
| titzer wrote:
| Censorship, meet Filter Bubble. Filter Bubble, Censorship.
| And this little tike you've got with you, what's his name?
| Engagement Metric? Oh, how cute. Nice to meet you. You look
| innocent. I'm guessing you couldn't do any major societal
| damage at all. You're certainly not a little problem child.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| Filter bubble is not a real problem:
|
| https://twitter.com/degenrolf/status/1261164727486615559?la
| n...
|
| https://twitter.com/degenrolf/status/1067780924014772224
|
| Whereas censorship is lindy among things that have bad
| effects on society.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
|
| So give the most caution against the proven bad thing and
| not the one you're in a trendy moral panic about.
| titzer wrote:
| So Rolf Degen argues that filter bubbles aren't a
| problem, and if you think they are, then it's because
| you're a "political junkie" trapped in one. That's some
| pretty twisted logic mixed with a nice helping of
| poisoning the well. I guess political junkies would never
| do anything crazy like assault the capital building to
| prevent certification of an election result. Yep, nothing
| to see here.
|
| I'm going to adopt this style of argument from now on.
|
| "Oh, you think that X is a big problem? Well, it isn't,
| because _you_ have problem X, and only think that way
| because of it! It 's _your_ cognitive distortions
| talking! Zing! "
| inkblotuniverse wrote:
| A couple of boomers went on an unguided tour, unarmed. I
| didn't know insurrectionists tended to leave their guns
| at home
| ribosometronome wrote:
| Almost every photo I've seen of the event has not been "a
| couple of" anyone nor largely "boomers".
|
| On a similar note, I somehow doubt if people broke
| through the doors to enter your home, assaulted people
| trying to protect it, yelled about how they want you
| dead, and then took some of your stuff you'd be calling
| it an "unguided tour".
| tommymachine wrote:
| There's actually no such thing as "misinformation". It's a
| completely made up concept. There's just information. a la:
| "Look, this person said this. Here's another person, who said
| something else." All of this is just regular old information.
|
| In publishing, editorial makes some amount of sense because the
| brand of the publisher is staked behind the claims being made.
| But in social media, it's the personal(/account) brand that is
| staked behind the claim, not that of the social media company.
| For example, ISIS doesn't get an editorial column in the NYT.
| But they can have their own page on FB & Twitter.
|
| These companies are existing in a magical reality where they
| are able to exercise complete control over what can and can't
| be said, and garner no liability for when they use that power
| to promote falsehoods and stifle the truth.
| otterley wrote:
| Publishing provably false statements or reports with intent
| to deceive (or even just gross negligence) falls pretty
| squarely under the definition of misinformation. This isn't
| very controversial, except among nut cases.
| tommymachine wrote:
| Oh. I see. So when a computer system sends signals over a
| wire, if it represents "provably false statements", it's
| actually misinformation, and not information. All those 1s
| and 0s instantly switch from information to misinformation,
| the minute their final representative form embodies a
| "provably false statement".
|
| Who decides what's provably false, by the way?
|
| Are the novels of Tolkien "misinformation", since it could
| presumably be easily proved that the events described in
| them didn't actually happen?
|
| And what is the burden of proof for "intent to deceive"?
| And in which court is this all decided?
|
| Who decides? Just people in your group right? What ever
| your group happens to be. Sure hope we all worship your god
| then, because the other gods are all "Misinformation".
| tommymachine wrote:
| There's a lot of "misinformation" in your comment here.
| tommymachine wrote:
| What's the burden of proof for calling someone a nut case?
| [deleted]
| tayo42 wrote:
| Probably just a bug, I work in different social media, but see
| these kinds of posts pop up about it when something happens by
| accident. The comment threads are filled with people throwing out
| unfounded accusations, "obvious" conspiracy theories. The mob is
| riled up.
|
| One of the most amusing things about actually working in one of
| these companies is just seeing how confidently wrong some
| internet commenters are about what is actually happening when an
| article or outage happens.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Well maybe the big powerful corporation should be up front
| about what it moderates and what it doesn't, and changes in
| policy as it learns. Then abide by and reference that.
|
| That way people can understand why their post was removed
| without having to speculate.
|
| Maybe filtering changes should be rolled out slowly at first,
| with every customer complaint analyzed, to catch these bugs you
| speak of before they are widespread, frustrating and look
| obviously suspicious.
|
| Maybe the big powerful corporation should hire staff in
| proportion to their mistakes, instead of blaming a pandemic for
| its record profits, er ..., I mean lack of interest in finding
| ethical solutions to problems.
|
| Maybe if the company made good faith explanations of mistakes,
| and actually fixed them, instead of letting them fester, or
| continually playing hide and seek with information, speculation
| would not be necessity.
|
| Your attitude about your company's customers is equally
| disappointing.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Your making excuses for being confidently uninformed.
| Nevermark wrote:
| I have not bothered to speculate why the took action in the
| case being discussed here.
|
| Not informing customers, then being amused that they are
| uninformed (and some invariably speculate), is not a
| solution to anything.
| srcreigh wrote:
| Try linking to pushbullet.com in FB messenger
| edoceo wrote:
| I don't have either, could you just tell us what happens?
| srcreigh wrote:
| It doesn't send the message. "Could not send the message. Tap
| for details."
|
| When you tap, then tap Learn More, it just sends you to to
| this page
|
| https://m.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/1723537124537415
| danShumway wrote:
| I think this is highly unlikely to be a targeted attempt to
| censor Mastodon. The simpler explanation (and the explanation
| with most historical evidence behind it) is just that Facebook's
| AI algorithms are kind of bad and nobody in the company
| understands how they work or what associations they build.
|
| However, the underlying idea that Facebook would block links to
| competitors is historically valid. As recently as 2016, Facebook
| blocked links to competing networks from Instagram
| (https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/3/11157124/instagram-
| blocks-...), and leaked internal emails from Facebook have shown
| that the company has an extremely broad view of what does and
| doesn't count as a competitor (https://panatimes.com/facebook-
| bought-instagram-to-neutraliz...). The company is extremely anti-
| competitive, it's not shy about this, and internal emails show
| that this anti-competitive attitude is entrenched very deeply and
| very consciously within upper management.
|
| I think taking down this post in specific is very unlikely to be
| deliberate because:
|
| A) Mastodon is likely not a large enough service to warrant it,
| and because
|
| B) The explanation based on Facebook's AI being weird, opaque,
| and generally untested is a much cleaner, simpler explanation
| that requires fewer jumps in logic.
|
| But it would be completely in character for Facebook to target a
| real competitor in this way. The reason it's unlikely to be
| deliberate is _not_ because Facebook would never do something
| like this, and it 's _not_ because Facebook would be too
| frightened of regulators to do it so openly. Facebook has very
| openly done stuff like this in the past. It 's just that there
| are other explanations that are more likely, and it's that if
| Facebook was going to start doing this, Mastodon probably
| wouldn't be among the first competitors they would target. I need
| a lot more evidence to show that this is deliberate before I jump
| off of the (extremely compelling) explanation that automated
| moderation is really buggy across the board and regularly does
| unexpected things.
|
| The article comes off as a little uncurious to me, I feel like
| the author is jumping too quickly to a specific conclusion
| without a lot of critical thought. But part of why Facebook has
| these problems with people jumping to conclusions about how it
| tracks and moderates is because Facebook has a very real history
| of being openly corrupt in these areas, and Facebook has a real
| history of being deceptive about their motivations behind
| decision-making processes. The reputation hasn't come out of
| nowhere.
| erehweb wrote:
| Definitely agree that the first assumption you should jump to
| re FB is that the algorithm is bad, or something broke. Of
| course FB knows this, so their lack of investment in people who
| could clean up after these repeated errors is damning.
| danShumway wrote:
| I'm sure someone could link here to the Mozilla thread about
| Google being slow to fix "convenient" mistakes that broke
| Firefox, regardless of whether or not those mistakes were
| intentional or not. Sometimes even accidents can be revealing
| about where a company's priorities lie and what things they
| actually think are important.
|
| But that's probably a much deeper, longer conversation to
| have. I do believe that Facebook regularly uses the poor
| performance of its moderation algorithms at scale as a shield
| against public scrutiny, and as a way to occasionally
| influence public policy.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| They block https://joinmastodon.org but not, say,
| https://mastodon.social - so probably it's not a part of a
| strategy.
| IronWolve wrote:
| Facebook has a blacklist on competitors, facebook wants to
| control the narrative, there is a reason your feed isnt by
| timeline, its artificially controlled.
|
| Same thing happens on youtube, twitter, etc.
|
| I've been using addons and rss feeds to go back to time/date
| ordered feeds, so I don't miss things I want to follow.
|
| You can use RSS feeds to go around soft censorship, using apps
| like IFTTT, etc. Pockettube addon for youtube. etc.
| trident5000 wrote:
| The naivety in here is astonishing. "The AI just messed up".
| Facebook's entire existence is 1) identifying the smallest
| details in information 2) buying up small competitors before
| they are an issue.
| IronWolve wrote:
| Exactly, don't accept "blame the algorithm" excuses.
| Facebook/Google/Twitter has entire departments working on
| tricking and controlling people with psychology. If they can
| bend you to their narrative, it's great for Advertising,
| voting, etc.
|
| The whole hacker/programmer community is/was freeing
| information, never trusting governments or mopolies. Culture
| sure has changed.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| ...
| tankenmate wrote:
| That's what he was doing?!??! (And yes, promotion is a big part
| of making a product)
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| If the article is correct, that's what they are doing and
| Facebook is using their market and financial dominance to stop
| it.
|
| How is _"they're a private company, make your own"_ still being
| used as an argument when situation is obviously beyond that? We
| have conclusive evidence from FAANG and Governments that they
| work together.
|
| You practically CAN'T make your own Facebook. Facebook will
| stop you one way or another. Google who has a dollar or two,
| tried and failed spectacularly. Do you know how much better an
| organic startup would need to be to rival Google's Day1
| investment in Plus?
| ipaddr wrote:
| "You practically CAN'T make your own. Facebook will stop you
| one way or another. Google who has a dollar or two"
|
| Google+ was successful and Google shut it down for Google
| reasons. If they gave away Google+ instead I can't think of
| anyone who wouldn't gladly take it off of their hands.
|
| You can make your own facebook and facebook will not stop
| you. But people don't want another facebook, many are
| realizing they probably want off of facebook, replacing it
| with something similiar isn't helpful. What facebook offers
| (network effect) is the main value of the platform and
| replicating that is virtually impossible; nevermind in the
| same form as facebook.
|
| Having Google+'s code day one would mean little without the
| users.
| Imnimo wrote:
| I doubt anyone at Facebook is freaking out about Mastodon and
| setting out to censor all mention of it. It's probably just a
| keyword or link that tends to co-appear with other, actually
| rule-breaking content, and some automated system has learned to
| block it.
|
| Still, it does seem like the sort of thing that could get
| Facebook in trouble with a regulator if you squint at it.
| theknocker wrote:
| >I either have no idea how the world works or I want you to
| have no idea how the world works
| 5faulker wrote:
| It's probably an AI thing. When these things occur it's a good
| idea not to presumptively jumping to attributing to human
| interference until more evidence surface.
| shkkmo wrote:
| I would argue the opposite. We should not allow companies to
| use "AI" as an excuse to avoid responsibility. I think it is
| perfectly reasonable to hold Facebook directly responsible
| for this.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Exactly. Delegating decisions does not reduce
| responsibility.
| type0 wrote:
| > could get Facebook in trouble with a regulator if you squint
| at it.
|
| How could it?
| jdavis703 wrote:
| I think congressional Republicans might hold a hearing about
| this... But I don't think this runs afoul of mainstream
| interpretations of current regulations. Happy to stand
| corrected if someone has a plausible explanation for what
| agency would bring what kind of action on this.
| ThrowAway145 wrote:
| Congressional Republicans? Lina Khan from the FTC who is
| personally taking up targeting FB as her claim to fame is a
| Democrat. Rep. Mike Doyle, chair of the House subcommittee
| on Communications and Technology, who grilled FB in 2020 on
| mis-information and Section 230 is also a Democrat.
|
| Make no mistake, this is bi-partisan. Both sides have their
| own agendas against Big Tech.
| zeruch wrote:
| " it does seem like the sort of thing that could get Facebook
| in trouble with a regulator if you squint at it."
|
| Oh, I hope so...
| swayvil wrote:
| And if you believe that then I have a nice bridge I'd like to
| sell you.
|
| ---
|
| Look at those downvotes. You people are so protective of your
| little social media nipple.
| evgen wrote:
| If you think that Mastadon is in any way a 'competitor' to FB
| or anyone at FB gives a shit about Mastadon I think that the
| bridge you are trying to sell only exists in your mind.
| Programmers are lazy and almost always breaking shit; the
| probability that this is anything more than some sloppy code
| somewhere pruning an offending URL in a way that blocks more
| than it should is so remote as to be laughable.
| swayvil wrote:
| Amazon will delete a review if it mentions alternative-to-
| amazon ways to acquire the product. It's a known tactic
| among our cybernetic overlords.
|
| Because they feel threatened by your neighbor's garage
| sale? Of course not.
|
| I imagine it's like squashing the ants in your kitchen. We
| aren't really afraid that one of them is gonna make off
| with the milk jug. But all the same we don't like them
| touching our stuff. So we implement that policy. Almost
| unconsciously.
| thinkloop wrote:
| I have personally never heard of, or seen, any scams or malware
| related to mastadon - aren't you giving too much benefit of the
| doubt?
|
| My best guess is that their lists of competitors to keep an eye
| on got mixed up with other stuff. Or, of course, that they
| simply don't want to promote competitors on their platform,
| which would be normal for any non-monopoly.
| takeda wrote:
| The explanation is much simpler, look at the date, text of
| the post and that it was removed with a delay. His friends
| who disagreed with him politically must reported it as a
| spam. Since FB accounts are tied to real names, FB unlike
| other social sites can trust reports more and start blocking
| automatically.
| chucky_z wrote:
| There are a number of extremely poorly moderated Mastodon
| instances with a large amount of hateful and hurtful content.
| I'd imagine they're automatically blocking a lot of these
| sites.
|
| Source: I used and helped maintain one of the "don't federate
| with these instances" list.
| uselesscynicism wrote:
| Oh, Fediblock! The list of based instances. It's amazing to
| me that the people who maintain these lists don't seem to
| realize that they're maintaining a useful directory for all
| the people they don't like to help them find places to
| congregate, meanwhile isolating them from more moderate
| influences.
| ma2rten wrote:
| I could imagine that the wording regarding corporate control
| could have erroneously triggered a filter because that phrase
| appears for example in anti-wax and conspiracy theory posts.
|
| It would be interesting to do some experiments here: post the
| same text to see if it gets removed again, and then repost it
| and remove sentences to see which one triggered the filter.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >aren't you giving too benefit of the doubt
|
| the largest mastodon instance has 500k users. Facebook has
| two billion users. If you can post twitter and tiktok and
| tumblr links on facebook, do you seriously think there's
| someone sitting at facebook taking names and making lists
| about a social network that practically nobody even uses
|
| there are competitors a hundred times as large you can link
| too. My first guess is it probably tripped some NSFW filter
| because on some mastodon instances there's quite a lot of
| porn.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| > do you seriously think there's someone sitting at
| facebook taking names and making lists about a social
| network that practically nobody even uses
|
| Yes, when I worked at a 500-person startup there was an
| employee who's sole task was to stay aware of our
| established competitors and nimbler startups. It was
| jokingly nicknamed the "office of paranoia."
|
| That said, I highly doubt FB is using their list of
| competitors to block posts mentioning them.
| baby wrote:
| But... it makes for great publicity for Mastodon.
| ssivark wrote:
| Well, Facebook bought the Israeli startup Onavo explicitly so
| they could track which new social apps are starting to become
| popular on user phones, so they could quickly acquire those or
| copy their features and kill the competition.
| takeda wrote:
| Given the date of the post, the content and that it happened
| with delay, I am quite sure his friends who disagreed with him
| politically reported it as a spam.
|
| Perhaps after certain number of people report it, it
| automatically will be marked as one (such logic would be more
| reliable on FB, than for example reddit or HN, since most FB
| users have a single profile tied using their real name)
| stncls wrote:
| Yes, Facebook's upper management is definitely not _freaking
| out_ about Mastodon. However, from my own experience working at
| a large, somewhat ethically-challenged organisation (not fb),
| it would not surprise me in the least if they gently yet
| actively pushed down a competitor, provided it can be done
| discreetly.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Mastodon is a "competitor" to Facebook the way a grandma
| doing middle school tutoring in her backyard is a competitor
| to Harvard.
| noptd wrote:
| ... and Instagram was just a photo sharing app - how could
| it ever compete with Facebook?
| rvz wrote:
| Yes. It doesn't cost them anything to censor simply
| mentioning the word 'Mastodon' since they can do it anyway
| and it sounds like a weak version of anti-competition.
|
| What you're really looking for is what happened to Parler
| which looked like a serious act of anti-competitive
| behaviour which showed the true brutish nature of these
| large companies destroying an alternative social network.
|
| That was a much worse form of 'anti-competitive behaviour'
| than this.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Grandmas don't tend to undergo exponential growth.
|
| Networks can.
|
| Whether or not Mastodon _will_ is another question. (I 've
| been on it since ~2016.) But in FB's position, paranoia
| pays, and is worth throwing billions at, if deemed a
| sufficient threat.
| smolder wrote:
| Yes, of course, at least now. Yet, it does present a non-
| negligible risk, in the same way that some startups can
| become unicorns, or some college kids web project can
| become a global giant.
| rkk3 wrote:
| > Yet, it does present a non-negligible risk,
|
| Negligible: so small or unimportant as to be not worth
| considering; insignificant.
|
| The first page of search Mastodon results for me are all
| about a heavy metal band from Atlanta. Sounds like a
| negligible risk to me.
| jrm4 wrote:
| But when you have near-infinity resources, everything is
| technically "non-negligible," and that's the case here.
| Let's say there's a 0.01% chance that Mastodon beats
| Facebook. Okay, what's 0.01% of however much Facebook
| makes? That's how much they should spend on it, and I'd
| bet that amount of money is nothing to scoff at.
| Lio wrote:
| If that were so, why censor mentions of it?
| mhh__ wrote:
| Same reason the above comment mentions. It's a wild west,
| and while that brings freedom it also brings cowboys
| (i.e. people using it to post dangerous links or whatever
| - is the reasoning).
| tayo42 wrote:
| you dont know that theyre censoring mentions of it. You
| have one post that got removed that happened to have it
| in it. And an article trying to be a victim and jump on
| the facebook is evil bandwagon. Do you have proof of a
| trend?
| minoru wrote:
| The post was now updated; it mentions that at least three
| more FB posts with links to joinmastodon.org were marked
| as spam:
| https://octodon.social/@yhancik/106897948169079191
|
| Four data points ain't a lot, but you can no longer claim
| it's a one-off event either.
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| There are far more discreet approaches than marking these
| messages as spam and notifying users. My guess is that an
| actual person reported this as spam and Facebook
| automatically accepted the report.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| Spam is an easy plausible deniability
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Re: discreet, how true.. since their news feed
| prioritization algorithm is a black box they can just rank
| posts about Mastodon very low, so low they'd probably show
| your American contacts ads about monkey-proofing your house
| (something relevant for India) before showing that post...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Doubt it, not worth the liabillity risk.
| flatline wrote:
| What liability? A few million dollar fine? Look at what
| Microsoft did to numerous competitors over decades:
| Borland, Mozilla, etc. FB squelching Mastodon is minor
| league.
| yaacov wrote:
| Yes, Microsoft has famously never had any major issues
| with antitrust
| DamnYuppie wrote:
| While they have run afoul of the government a few times
| the penalties and "negative press" ever amounted to
| anything that slowed down their growth or revenue. So to
| the OP's point if you can afford the fine it doesn't
| really matter?
| [deleted]
| jrm4 wrote:
| I would love to live in the world in which there were some
| actual liability risk to facebook on this (or for that
| matter, on anything important to it.)
|
| I genuinely am curious, in Facebook's world today, how do
| you see this playing out in a way that actually hurts
| Facebook. I legit want to know so I can actively work
| toward making it happen.
| jhasse wrote:
| https://techcrunch.com/2015/12/01/whatsapp-is-blocking-
| links...
| rapnie wrote:
| There may be more reasons to see Mastodon as a potential
| threat. There's something of a different paradigm to it.
| First of all it is decentralized (federated), and anyone can
| spin up servers for themself or a community of users, set
| their own topic and rules (CoC, ToS) and connect with the
| larger social network (the Fediverse). Second of all this
| fediverse is based on open-standards and anyone can develop
| their own social apps and integrate them with others.
| Mastodon just happens to be the most popular / well-known.
| Other apps, such as Pixelfed and Peertube offer nice, ad-
| free, and 'calmer' experiences to their large-scale social
| media alternatives (Instagram and Youtube). See
| https://fediverse.party/
|
| Also note that Twitter has taken an interest in decentralized
| protocols with Bluesky project.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| What happened to Bluesky? They made a bunch of promises and
| it sort of... disappeared after that.
| rictic wrote:
| Current hypothesis is that they're just moving slowly,
| there are signs of life
| rapnie wrote:
| They recently hired Jay Graber as project lead:
| https://twitter.com/arcalinea/status/1427314482154414080
| dragonelite wrote:
| uuhm going back to a time before the algos took over my
| timeline would be awesome.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| For those innocent days of Usenet k00ks, crapfloods,
| MAKEMONEYFAST, sockpuppets, crossposts, GREEN CARD, spam,
| warez, pr0n, Serdar Argic, and Hasan Mutlu.
|
| And the ~100,000 or so people who actually used that
| network.
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| What is the violation? I'm serious. If I post a link to a
| target product page on walmart it will be taken down. I'm sure
| amazon does the same. Do business have to allow you to promote
| their competitors?
|
| Such a weird thing for regulators to be chasing - there seems
| to be so many more obvious issues than this. Is this a
| political winner - in other words, does the average person
| think I can put of Burger King flyers in a McDonalds store?
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| I remember reading an article about censorship in China,
| someone talking to his friend on the phone mentioned a
| particular term that the government didn't like, and the line
| got disconnected a second later. Was it a coincidence, or was
| someone listening, or was it computers?
|
| Nowadays most of our communication channels are owned by
| corporations. Are you okay that they get to decide what we're
| allowed to talk about? Zoom for example banned meetings
| talking about the Tiananmen Square massacre; You can't post
| links to The Pirate Bay in private chats on Facebook... on
| private chat!
|
| And this coming from me who's quite okay with Twitter banning
| Trump and other idiots off their platform.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Walmart is not a site devoted to helping users created and
| share their content, and they are open about their moderation
| rules, a good ethical standard.
|
| Walmart's legalese:
|
| > C. Prohibited Content
|
| > * contains advertisements, solicitations, or spam links to
| other web sites or individuals, without prior written
| permission from Walmart;
|
| https://www.walmart.com/help/article/walmart-com-terms-of-
| us...
|
| Facebook on the other hand, promotes itself for creating and
| sharing user content. If it then moderates in ways that are
| not disclosed, opaque, and with little recourse, their
| deceptive behavior is neither ethic or in line with how they
| promote themselves as a service.
| mrpf1ster wrote:
| Facebook is an entirely different kind of business than
| Walmart or Amazon.
|
| Facebook (and social media in general) is essentially a
| public forum and comes with the expectations of such since
| these companies control such a large part of internet
| discourse.
|
| If all of them said "we won't allow anyone to talk about any
| of our competitors on our site" then it strikes me as a
| company using their dominance to silence other players in the
| market, i.e. anti competitive behavior.
| Eighth wrote:
| Sounds anti-competitive in the UK. Using dominant market
| power to censor.
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| That is a weird UK rule then. In the US the common issues
| are things like tying, predatory pricing, exclusive
| dealing, loyalty discounts, bundling etc. Allowing
| competitors onto your own platform is an unusual
| requirement in UK I think - I haven't seen a case like that
| in US but don't follow closely.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Communication platforms are a bit different. Nobody would
| be okay with Comcast blocking the signup page or mentions
| of Google Fiber or your municipal broadbrand network, or
| Verizon disconnecting your call if you mention AT&T.
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| I think folks really do not understand the difference
| between Verizon calls (regulated under common carrier
| rules) and Facebook (a social network).
|
| Facebook claims to be a social network. Those types of
| networks normally DO NOT allow you to promote other
| social networks.
|
| Even review platforms which are a bit more communication
| in nature block posting other sites reviews.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Facebook claims to be a social network. Those types of
| networks normally DO NOT allow you to promote other
| social networks.
|
| I don't see how that makes it legal.
|
| Herey other examples of potential actions that would also
| clearly qualify as illegal anti-competive behavior:
|
| Microsoft could decide to block the download pages for
| Chrome and Firefoz from being shown in IE.
|
| Google could block results related to Bing in their
| search engine or browser.
|
| I don't see how this behavior by Facebook is any
| different. If it can be shown that this was done
| deliberately by Facebook, I have little doubt that it
| would also qualify as anti-competive behavior.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's always worth remembering that the European and
| American legal philosophy on anticompetitive markets are
| different, and lead to different conclusions.
|
| European law tends to favor maximizing competitors.
| American law tends to favor maximizing consumer value. At
| first glance, these can be considered equivalent, but
| they differ at the margins (which is why, for example,
| Amazon keeps getting hit with antitrust in France but not
| in the US).
| loeg wrote:
| I doubt Facebook even thinks of Mastodon as a competitor.
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| No doubt - but there was also a big move of Gab and some
| other more right wing communities to Mastodon I think at
| one point - be curious to know if the Mastodon links are
| all showing as high scoring in whatever generic facebook
| system is being used. Could easily imagine some involve
| links to stuff facebook isn't interested in pushing.
| playguardin wrote:
| Gab and Torba are awesome. Crusaders against the tech
| hegemony
| rvz wrote:
| Well they already realised that early and so they built
| their own social networks and they are still up and
| running today. This 'censoring' should be unsurprising to
| everyone here.
|
| I thought what happened to alternative social networks
| was a warning to show that not only they can do it to
| anyone but it shows how anti-competitive they really are.
|
| What happened here to this person mentioning Mastodon is
| no different but was like 1% of what Facebook and many
| other private platforms can really do.
| seventytwo wrote:
| Seems pretty lucrative right now to be crying censorship.
| pope_meat wrote:
| I'm fighting Facebook by not participating. I implore the rest of
| you to do the same. As we leave, the folks remaining will have
| less reasons to stay. A trickle can turn in to a torrent. Don't
| worry about an alternative even, we'll find something new when we
| do, until then, a bit of a detox from the feed will do us good.
| dustymcp wrote:
| Did that a long time ago cant recommend it enough, you have a
| calendar to keep up with birthdays..
| Ekaros wrote:
| Haven't used Facebook in years. Only reason I ever access it is
| to see some business info. As for some stupid reason they don't
| have proper internet presence with up to date information.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I used Marketplace for a minute before becoming permanently
| banned beyond appeal for selling a computer and making a
| Bitcoin joke in the listing. So I'm done there.
| swayvil wrote:
| I went to joinmastadon.org
|
| Please disable your ad blocker and reload the page.
|
| I disable adblock and reload.
|
| Please disable your ad blocker and reload the page.
|
| Yknow
| gargron wrote:
| It's joinmastOdon.org, not joinmastAdon.org. We don't own the
| misspelled domain. I wonder how many people fall prey to it
| though.
| swayvil wrote:
| Ugh. I made the mistake of trying to join the art mastadon.
| Now I can't do anything until my invite gets processed.
| opan wrote:
| A shocking amount of people in the comments are misspelling
| it despite it being written in the headline.
| swayvil wrote:
| thanks
| squarefoot wrote:
| So they are at it again.
|
| In late 2015 Whatsapp, which was acquired by Facebook in 2014,
| was caught with the pants down _intentionally_ crippling
| functionality when detecting links to Telegram.
|
| https://www.androidpolice.com/2016/09/09/whatsapp-is-blockin...
| tyingq wrote:
| This part is interesting...
|
| _" We have fewer reviewers available right now because of the
| coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak..."_
|
| That smells fishy. Seems like a job that would be a really good
| fit for work-from-home. Wouldn't you then have more reviewers
| available?
|
| Or maybe the exposure to graphic content means they do this in
| the office?
| NoblePublius wrote:
| The biggest unreported scandal in big tech is the 100s of 1000s
| of contractors that work exclusively for these companies.
| Accenture provides thousands of content moderators to FB, none
| of whom have any recourse to FB HR or rights to pursue union
| status at FB. Google is the same.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Why should they have right to pursue union status at FB? They
| should do that with whatever company is employing them and if
| there is that many it might even be realistic.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| It's actually outsourced to Accenture.
| gpm wrote:
| It seems perfectly plausible that the reviewers they do have
| are busier right now, because more people are using and abusing
| facebook, so they have "fewer _available_ ".
| grishka wrote:
| There was a long article about how they have to do it in an
| office, and how you can't bring any electronics with you, and
| how you have to click a special button when you go to pee, and
| there's a daily limit on how much you can use it.
|
| edit: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-
| facebo... it was probably this one
| david_allison wrote:
| I believe that using the line 'our lines are busy right now'
| cuts down on complaints. I assume this was A/B tested and found
| that it has the same effect.
|
| Until very recently, Google Play also had a similar notice
| without mentioning COVID when an app was in for review.
| lrem wrote:
| Frankly: Google is only now-ish regaining the balance from
| the hiring slowdown COVID brought. It isn't far-fetched that
| some team went short-staffed until recently. And then,
| updating notices was not their top priority.
| [deleted]
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Covid is just a convenient excuse that people somehow still
| keep swallowing. If 2 years on covid is still a problem for
| you, that's less the fault of covid and more that you are
| incompetent at running your business.
|
| Surprisingly enough I've had more "our response to covid-19"
| and similar crap from tech companies that would be near-immune
| to it than from companies that would legitimately be impacted
| by it (those whose business requires on-site staff, etc).
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Perhaps tech companies care about their employees more than
| say food processors.
| invokestatic wrote:
| I know someone who works in content moderation at Google and
| they said the company requires them to come in to the office
| for data security reasons. They even have to put their phone in
| a locker while they are actually reviewing content. I think it
| makes sense considering the kind of content they review
| (including CSAM).
| [deleted]
| efitz wrote:
| The tech oligarchs are out of control. We need to classify them
| as common carriers now.
| [deleted]
| fortran77 wrote:
| Where did he post this? My guess it wasn't just to his "wall."
|
| If he posted it to a group (i.e., his college alumni group, or a
| sports fan forum, or a gamers group), no doubt several people
| tagged it as spam--which it may have been--and the algorithm
| kicked in.
|
| There's no Big Conspiracy at Facebook to keep Mastodon down.
| imchillyb wrote:
| A social media platform refused to let you advertise a competing
| social media platform.
|
| Is this really news? Isn't this just business as usual in
| corporate America?
| trident5000 wrote:
| If this is the case its actually anti-competitive and supposed
| to be against the law. Obviously there is a difference between
| braking the law and getting caught though.
| gverrilla wrote:
| supposedly* breaking the law. /s
| amelius wrote:
| Here's an idea. If everybody who dislikes Facebook removed their
| profile picture, then it would quickly become a dull place and
| people would flee the platform.
|
| Alternatively, instead of removing one's profile picture, one
| could replace it by the Mastodon logo to make a statement.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Remember private platform and only governments can censor. Also
| first amendment. Free speech only applies to government not
| private companies. They can show you door if you try to use their
| platform to market your competing product...
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| How does that work when the government admits to directly
| working with that private company to ask for specific posts and
| people to be censored? Is that still not a violation of 1A?
| rvz wrote:
| This is not surprising as there is no such thing as 'free
| speech' on private platforms like Facebook.
|
| I thought that the author of this post knew this given the mass
| de-platforming going on throughout the years.
|
| This shows once again that it can happen to anyone. Facebook
| and the rest of them will never change.
| utunga wrote:
| I've been censored in the exact same way for linking a friend to
| relevant government legislation. I think it's a combination of
| the tone / wording coupled with something about my posting
| behavior (I took a break for a while then came back). I dunno but
| it was annoying as heck (though somewhat understandable) that
| there was no way to appeal.
| mikeytown2 wrote:
| https://joinmastodon.org/ Might as well see what FB is scared
| about
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Or maybe, OP wanted a whole bunch of people here to post
| joinmastadon.org to their FB pages. I bet it worked too.
| silisili wrote:
| So, seems mastodon is fragmented or segmented into many
| independent networks. Do those interact with each other in any
| way? I'd hate to join one and miss truly interesting content on
| another...is it possible to distill multiple into one on the
| user end? Just asking, as I've never tried it before and the
| concept seems a little confusing.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Yes, on mastodon you can follow
| @someone@anothermastodon.local even if you are on
| firstmastodon.local, and the server running your instance
| will phone out to anothermastodon.local to retrieve posts
| from the person you follow.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Do you have to use federation, or can you create your own
| little bubble and everything is self contained?
| gargron wrote:
| It's self-contained by default and as you follow outside
| users it starts receiving their posts and so on. You
| don't have to participate in the whole fediverse.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Apologies, I should have worded that differently. As the
| server admin, can I configure it so that it's impossible
| to follow someone outside of that server and that server
| has no outbound network dependencies?
|
| My /etc/resolv.conf currently uses
| options attempts:1 timeout:1 max-inflight:1
| nameserver 127.0.0.50
|
| There is nothing listening on 127.0.0.50 and iptables
| does not permit outbound connections.
| folmar wrote:
| Yes, but then it's probably not the best tool for
| whatever you need.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Thankyou. Yes I currently use Murmur/Mumble + UnrealIRCd
| + phpBB for friends. Just exploring options. The UI's of
| my existing choices are a little dated.
| rglullis wrote:
| Federation can be disabled and it will still work totally
| fine.
|
| I am just wondering why is it such a hard requirement for
| you to stop other people to follow someone else that is
| not part of your server? Costs?
| [deleted]
| rglullis wrote:
| Federation is not forced. You can set up an instance just
| for you and your friends/family.
| pokey00 wrote:
| Does firstmastodon.local need to be federated with
| anothermastodon.local for you to follow someone on it?
|
| I don't understand the system well enough to know if this
| is a dumb question or not.
| minoru wrote:
| Ain't a dumb question at all! It actually takes reading
| the ActivityPub specs to answer it, so no surprise if you
| didn't get it just from reading the landing page ;)
|
| The answer is: it'll happen automatically. Just search
| for someone's handle, and your server will talk to that
| other server. When you follow that other users, your
| server will start federating with that other servers.
|
| Note though that servers might block each other. For
| example, many Western servers block Japanese pawoo.net,
| since it allows posting lolicon. Western servers don't
| want this content in their timelines and caches, so they
| block it. If your server blocks another.social, you won't
| be able to follow anyone on there.
|
| But your question also hints at a real problem with
| Fediverse (of which Mastodon is a part), which is: each
| instance only sees a subset of the Fediverse. Thus,
| searching by hashtag will only get you a subset of all
| posts that contain it. Full-text search is even more
| complicated.
| pokey00 wrote:
| Gotcha, thanks for the info. That does seem like a real
| problem, and I do see the complexity of the issue. Are
| there any current proposals for tackling it without
| adding centralization? Or do we just acknowledge/accept
| that that's a tradeoff?
| silisili wrote:
| Thanks. But how would I find said user...is there a way to
| get erm, the top posts of the day from anothermastodon and
| firstmastodon together?
| schmorptron wrote:
| There is a timeline that randomly mixes in posts from
| users from other instances whom users from your instance
| follow
| silisili wrote:
| Perfect. I'll give it a go. Any specific recommendations?
| I figured mastodon.social just because it's the largest,
| is that bad reasoning?
| FiXato wrote:
| While mastodon.social would ensure you are always on the
| latest branch of the mainline Mastodon server software as
| it's the 'flagship' maintained by Mastodon's
| main/original developer, its large size has caused an
| increasing number of instances to mute (still allowing
| their users to follow users on mastodon.social, but not
| to include its posts in their 'federated timeline'), or
| outright block the instance (meaning none of the posts on
| mastodon.social are accessible to the instance's users at
| all). Reasons for these decisions can include but are not
| limited to:
|
| - the instance has grown too big and thus some consider
| it counter-productive towards the federated nature of the
| protocol
|
| - disagreement with the direction its main developer /
| maintainer is taking Mastodon, such as intentionally
| hiding the local timeline from the official iPhone app
|
| - some consider it under-moderated, or not responding
| quickly enough to reports
|
| - disagreement over its content moderation guidelines
|
| - in case of a mute, it could also be not wanting their
| federated timeline to be flooded with primarily
| mastodon.social posts
|
| Lack of federation between these instances and
| mastodon.social could be a reason not to pick
| mastodon.social. (Similar situation applies to
| mastodon.online btw, which is a spin-off server of m.s.)
|
| Another reason to pick a different instance could be not
| wanting to use mainline Mastodon software. For example
| because you want to run your own instance on limited
| hardware (Mastodon can get a bit resource intensive),
| don't like Ruby, miss certain features, don't like the
| front-end (though alternative external front-ends to
| Mastodon do exist), or some other reason.
|
| Personally I've switched my primary use over to an
| account on an instance that runs Mastodon Glitch Edition,
| also known as Glitch-Soc (https://glitch-
| soc.github.io/docs/), which is a compatible fork of
| Mastodon which implements a bunch of nice features such
| as increased post character count (Mastodon defaults to
| 500 characters per post, Glitch-Soc supports increasing
| this in the server settings), Markdown support (though
| only instances that also support HTML-formatted posts
| will see your formatting; mainline Mastodon servers will
| serve a stripped down version of your post instead), and
| improved support for filters / content warnings / toot
| collapsing, optional warnings when posting uncaptioned
| media, and other additional features.
|
| Another alternative Mastodon fork is Hometown
| (https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown) which focuses
| more on the local timeline (showing posts only from your
| own instance) with the addition of local-only posts, to
| nurture a tighter knit community.
|
| Aside from Mastodon there are other implementations of
| ActivityPub which can still federate with Mastodon
| instances, such as:
|
| - Misskey (https://github.com/misskey-dev/misskey)
|
| - diaspora* (https://diasporafoundation.org/) (which
| AFAIK inspired Google Plus back in the day)
|
| - Hubzilla (https://hubzilla.org//page/hubzilla/hubzilla-
| project)
|
| - Peertube (https://joinpeertube.org/) (focused on peer-
| to-peer video distribution)
|
| - Friendica (https://friendi.ca/)
|
| - Pleroma (https://pleroma.social/)
|
| - Socialhome (https://socialhome.network/)
|
| - GoToSocial
| (https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial)
|
| - Pixelfed (https://pixelfed.org/) (which started as a
| sort of federated Instagram alternative) and more.
|
| Fediverse.party (https://fediverse.party/) is a nice way
| to discover various protocols that make up the bigger
| Fediverse.
|
| Instances.Social (https://instances.social/) can also be
| used as an alternative to find instances, though I
| believe it is limited to Mastodon-based instances.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| There's also the minimalist Honk[1] from 'tedunangst
|
| [1] https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk
| type0 wrote:
| if you're into Free and Open Source Software,
| fosstodon.org is an option, but you'll have to wait until
| your account is manually reviewed though.
| schmorptron wrote:
| I've found koyu.space to be very friendly, as long as
| you're cool with left leaning politics posts in there.
| sneak wrote:
| Beware, many instances will blacklist other instances
| simply based on rumor or clique, and it makes it
| impossible to follow or read users on those other
| instances via the first.
|
| I recommend evaluating primarily based on the censorship
| policies of the instance operator. For example, the list
| of servers on joinmastodon is restricted to those who are
| actively engaged in censorship of legal speech (full
| uncensored instances are not indexed there) so you may be
| interested in searching for instances not shown there,
| depending on your attitude toward censorship.
| folmar wrote:
| It's not bad for a user, but somewhat kills the
| distributed effect in the long run.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| In reality, Mastodon instances block a lot of other
| neighboring instances a lot of the time.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| You can "subscribe" to hashtags which allows you to follow
| them in a column ("timeline") as you would your followers,
| mixing hashtags into a single timeline if you wish.
|
| There's also the option of adding "featured hashtags" to
| one's profile, allowing a user to search for users of a
| particular interest.
|
| Along with the "Federated Timeline", which others have
| mentioned, and your follower's boosting posts (akin to
| retweeting) I've found it quite easy to find a diverse list
| of people to follow and interact with.
| xondono wrote:
| They are independent but federated.
|
| The best example of how it works would be email. You can set
| up your own email server, and interact with other independent
| email servers seamlessly, or just find a provider you trust
| and get your email access from them.
| ineedasername wrote:
| If I used social networks, I might give it a try. (I did
| actually check it out though) But all social media networks
| seem anti-productive to me and, well, just not actually very
| social.
|
| With respect to connecting with family & friends, I'd much
| prefer a pure platform based pretty much on just that.
|
| With respect to other people with interesting things to say,
| I'd prefer blogs aggregating & curated sites like, well, HN
| itself.
|
| For the former, I don't know how you get to a "pure" platform
| like that where you can communicate & share experiences/photos
| with each other without also letting meme-ish "lol this person
| of <political affiliation I hate> is an idiot"> posts through,
| but at the very least it could avoid surfacing them
| algorithmically and rewarding them with "internet points".
| cvwright wrote:
| You're right that it's infeasible to block everything dumb
| from an online system. Humans gonna human.
|
| > avoid surfacing them algorithmically and rewarding them
|
| This is the key. And I've come to believe that the only way
| to prevent the platforms doing their algorithmic engagement
| maximization thing is to encrypt everything E2E.
| sneak wrote:
| The social networks you may be used to are historically
| manipulative, censoring and shaping your feed to benefit the
| social network, not the society.
|
| The nice thing about these open protocols is that they are
| simply reverse chronological. You see what you choose to see,
| in the order it was published.
|
| It's a totally different experience than the engineered
| rollercoaster that is corporate social media.
| playguardin wrote:
| Problem is in the first paragraph they say they are against
| racism, sexism and homophobia. Gab is the way to go for free
| speech.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| The big problem I have with Mastodon is that it has a culture
| of censorship equivalent to Facebook. My recollection is that
| to be listed in their directory of instances, you need to abide
| by the content rules created by key Mastodon people, and those
| instances in turn are required to only peer with other
| instances that follow the same rules. Those rules basically
| include moderation based on various progressive political
| stances, so you can't honestly discuss controversial topics
| from different perspectives. It creates a federated network
| that is still an echo chamber rather than a platform for civil
| discourse and free thought. And if that's the case I am not
| sure why I need Mastodon or why I would lend it attention or
| credence.
| gargron wrote:
| > My recollection is that to be listed in their directory of
| instances, you need to abide by the content rules created by
| key Mastodon people, and those instances in turn are required
| to only peer with other instances that follow the same rules.
| Those rules basically include moderation based on various
| progressive political stances, so you can't honestly discuss
| controversial topics from different perspectives.
|
| Here are the requirements for us to promote your server:
|
| https://joinmastodon.org/covenant
|
| The only hard requirement related to content is that racism,
| sexism, homophobia and transphobia be not allowed. There is
| no requirement to peer with anyone or have any specific
| political stances. If your political stance or perspective
| requires you to dehumanize people of different races or
| sexual orientation, then yes, you are not welcome.
| inkblotuniverse wrote:
| Mastodon follows the activitypub protocol. There are other
| backends that implement the same protocol, like Pleroma; the
| Fediverse (all the systems that use activitypub) is bigger
| than mastodon, and much bigger than mastodon.social and co.
|
| There's a sort of blocking firewall around mastodon.social
| and sites broadly on the same 'side' as it, in that all these
| servers tend to share blocklists. One of the things they'll
| block a server for is being 'free-speech maximalists'.
|
| But outside of the mastodon.social bubble, there are lots of
| free speech maximalist fediverse instances that don't block
| anyone, or block different people.
|
| Pleroma instances tend to be more free-speech oriented
| (because the technical choice of using Mastodon or Pleroma as
| your backed became part of a signalling game). I think
| Pleroma's better software, anyway.
| gargron wrote:
| We at mastodon.social don't copy our blocklist from anybody
| and don't consider ourselves to be on anyone's "side". Our
| blocklist is of a quite reasonable length for 5 years of
| operation and based on personal experiences of our
| moderation team only:
|
| https://mastodon.social/about/more#unavailable-content
| avsteele wrote:
| I think you are correct about having your instance listed,
| but I created my own server from a digital ocean droplet
| (newathens.net) (its quite easy) and I can follow anyone. So
| I don't know about that second part
| [deleted]
| edorsey wrote:
| This exact thing happened to me last week.
|
| I was notified on Sept 4 at 6:40pm.
|
| Clicking on a link in my post to joinmastodon.com notifies you
| that the link goes against their community standards.
| justbored123 wrote:
| So, the author is surprised that a private business doesn't let
| him use their free platform to promote their competition at the
| same time that they trash them...
|
| The level of delusion and entitlement of some people is simply to
| hard to understand for me.
| plandis wrote:
| Given the number of articles from Facebook saying how they
| won't censor speech (doing a basic Google search here) that all
| seems like false advertising.
|
| Note: I don't use Facebook so perhaps I'm missing something.
| semitones wrote:
| Facebook isn't just a "private business" or just a "free
| platform", they're a gigantic global entity that have
| integrated their product into the lives of billions of people.
|
| If it was a free service by a mom and pop shop with "use at
| your own risk" in the agreement, then yes, it would be
| entitlement.
|
| However, there exist people, for whom 90% of their
| communication happens via Facebook or social media. And it's
| not even by choice, kids are born into it being the status quo,
| and if 100% of your friends are using it while you're growing
| up, chances that you won't use it too are slim to none.
|
| Thus, the company needs to hold responsibility for providing
| open communication. Censoring posts about their competitors
| goes against that.
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