[HN Gopher] Facebook ban on discussing Linux?
___________________________________________________________________
Facebook ban on discussing Linux?
Author : rogerthis
Score : 797 points
Date : 2025-01-27 10:32 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (distrowatch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (distrowatch.com)
| iefbr14 wrote:
| I didn't notice. Maybe because I have a long list of facebook
| domains in my hosts.deny.
| Igrom wrote:
| Surely that's the result of a rogue moderator's overreach.
| jdxcode wrote:
| I agree, overzealousness sounds like the most likely reason for
| this.
|
| > Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook's internal policy
| makers decided that Linux is malware and labelled groups
| associated with Linux as being "cybersecurity threats".
|
| The author gives no evidence to back up on this claim.
| paulnpace wrote:
| > The author gives no evidence to back up on this claim.
|
| How can one provide evidence that something is not being
| displayed on a website? Isn't this, like, a formal fallacy,
| or something?
|
| > We've been hearing all week from readers who say they can
| no longer post about Linux on Facebook or share links to
| DistroWatch. Some people have reported their accounts have
| been locked or limited for posting about Linux.
| fau wrote:
| You've implied it's impossible to give such evidence and
| then you've immediately proved yourself wrong by giving it.
|
| But anyway, they're not asking for evidence that something
| isn't being displayed. They're asking for evidence that
| 'Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook's internal policy
| makers decided that Linux is malware and labelled groups
| associated with Linux as being "cybersecurity threats"'.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > I agree, overzealousness sounds like the most likely reason
| for this.
|
| Who was overzealous if not one or more internal policy
| makers?
| bagels wrote:
| Machine learning algorithms? Someone hacked Facebook to
| block Linux? So, there are other options besides
| overzealous policy makers.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| That sounds like a distinction without a difference. It
| doesn't seem to meaningfully refute the point; it's just
| hung up on the semantics of "policy-maker". Who cares
| that the policy-maker is an algorithm?
| rnd0 wrote:
| I attempted to post the distrowatch link to my feed and it was
| blocked as 'spam'.
|
| That seems pretty automated to me.
| blast wrote:
| Or some overly optimistic attempt at AI moderation.
| not2b wrote:
| Their "moderators" are bots, not humans, so it seems that the
| bots have "decided" that Linux-related links are malware or
| something.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| > Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook's internal policy makers
| decided that Linux is malware and labelled groups associated with
| Linux as being "cybersecurity threats".
|
| That's quite the statement to make without any source to back it
| up; I wonder what the evidence for this is.
| paulnpace wrote:
| [flagged]
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I can't speak for anyone else, it just seems that statement
| is a very specific accusation with nothing backing it up. I'm
| curious, that's all. It is very much possible that there's
| some evidence of policy makers discussing this, or even a
| public statement; nothing to do with "proving a negative".
| jsnell wrote:
| How is this asking to prove a negative?
| soneil wrote:
| Surely this is entirely the opposite of proving a negative?
| It's a direct, testable, provable claim.
| lofenfew wrote:
| They are the source. A journo could write an article and
| mention distrowatch as where they got their information from.
| If you don't trust them - great, you can do your own research.
|
| > I wonder what the evidence for it is
|
| Maybe "Any posts mentioning DistroWatch and multiple groups
| associated with Linux and Linux discussions have either been
| shut down or had many of their posts removed" and "We've been
| hearing all week from readers who say they can no longer post
| about Linux on Facebook or share links to DistroWatch. Some
| people have reported their accounts have been locked or limited
| for posting about Linux"
|
| What do you think evidence consists of if not that?
| MrDresden wrote:
| I thoroughly dislike Facebook as much as the next person, but
| none of what you quoted constitutes evidence for a ban on
| discussing Linux on the platform.
|
| Reading the post, it sounds like this may rather be because
| of incorrect categorization of DistroWatch and links to it
| than an outright ban on Linux discussion. So yet another
| issue with Facebook's content moderation methods.
| taurknaut wrote:
| Does the distinction matter?
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Yes; the scope of censorship over discussing Linux at all
| vs the scope of censorship of linking to Distro Watch is
| vastly different.
|
| If Facebook was removing links to an Pro-Catholic website
| for some reason but still allowed the discussion of
| Catholicism, Catholic Church groups, etc. You would be
| daft to claim that FaceBook is banning all Catholics and
| discussion of thereof.
| valicord wrote:
| The evidence shows that Facebook is blocking Linux related
| posts, while the initial "policy makers decided" claim is
| significantly stronger and is not supported by anything. Much
| more obvious explanation is that some buggy ML classifier has
| added the distrowatch website to the spam list which triggers
| automated enforcement without any policy maker involvement.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| The purpose of a system is what it does. If this behavior
| is happening because nobody with authority cares to do
| anything about it, that's also a decision. I never
| understand why people rush to make excuses for these huge
| companies awash in resources with no real accountability or
| customer support.
| valicord wrote:
| I'm obviously not claiming that Facebook moderation is
| perfect but it's a pretty big stretch to go from
| "Facebook does a bad job of reducing false positives" to
| "Facebook purposefully bans Linux discussions".
|
| > I never understand why people rush to make excuses for
| these huge companies awash in resources with no real
| accountability or customer support
|
| Because if nobody pushes back against the hyperbole then
| it just becomes a competition of who can make up the most
| exaggerated claim in order to attract the most attention.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Would that people would make the same effort to push back
| against PR departments, which in the case of social media
| companies often end up enabling the industrialized
| production and distribution of hyperbole.
| valicord wrote:
| Where can I downvote the PR department?
| emmelaich wrote:
| Sorta agree, but it's useful to distinguish proximate
| cause vs ultimate cause nonetheless.
| jorams wrote:
| If "some buggy ML classifier" is allowed to make decisions
| that trigger broad enforcement, that classifier is, for all
| intents and purposes, a policy maker. The claim made by the
| article is somewhat broad relative to the evidence
| presented, but whether policy decisions are automated or
| not doesn't really matter.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| This is a horrible butchering of language. You know that
| "policy maker" means person in everyday usage, stop being
| obtuse.
| bitzun wrote:
| In the past I would have agreed with this statement, but
| nowadays I would assume an organization's actions are
| their policy until they state and act otherwise.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That's only if humans are properly in charge of the
| system. With lots of moderation tools, they aren't.
| thowawatp302 wrote:
| Humans made a policy that said the computer system could
| do this, so while GP might be inaccurate, you're not
| right either.
| m-s-y wrote:
| then in this case, the policy maker is the person that
| empowered the AI.
|
| doesn't change the fact that the AI is seemingly being
| given final authority over policy decisions.
| blasphemers wrote:
| The evidence only shows that fb is blocking distrowatch
| links
| vkou wrote:
| And it's doing so because of, or as a consequence of
| their policies.
|
| If it's a consequence of a 'buggy ML classifier', well,
| it's FB's _policy_ to use one for censorship.
|
| You can't launder accountability with an 'It's AI' black
| box.
| bee_rider wrote:
| They have a screenshot of Facebook reviewing the post and
| deciding not to restore it, so I guess it isn't _just_ a
| buggy ML classifier (although it could be a buggy ML
| classifier combined with a human that doesn't feel able to
| overturn it).
| guappa wrote:
| I don't think they actually ever review anything.
|
| I've reported nazi content a number of times and it never
| violated the policy.
| genewitch wrote:
| What you just did is a fallacy. That's fine, but it needs
| to be asked: what sort of "Nazi content" did you report?
|
| If it was a user calling Trump a Nazi, then it should
| have been removed, and their moderation failed.
|
| If it just espouses Nazi ideology or rhetoric, that's
| free speech in the US.
|
| That's just how it is. It's part of this country. I have
| to listen to both the throaty, greasy growl of the white
| supremacist and the piercing howl of the victims wounded
| by words.
|
| edit to add additional context: There's a difference
| between someone "posting" "nazi" content on facebook and
| here on HN, for example. on FB they figure you're seeing
| it because of your actions. Your friends, a group you
| joined, etc. If it's a friend posting on their wall, your
| moderation task is easy, block the friend, unfriend, talk
| to the friend, call them out. regardless of your
| decision, FB doesn't have any obligation or, i would
| argue, right to step in and moderate in those
| circumstances. If it's in a group, the moderators of the
| group have to decide if it represents the group. If it
| does and you disagree, leave the group.
|
| Someone spouting nazi nonsense on HN is spouting it into
| a megaphone on the streetcorner, as it were. I _have_ to
| read the content, even if i didn 't actively follow that
| user or "join" that group.
|
| there are different moderation strategies. merely
| invoking "nazi" as the boogyman to back up your point is
| fallacious.
| ghssds wrote:
| It's to easy to hide behind a computer to avoid
| responsibilities. "It's not my fault, the computer did it!"
| is a bad excuse. Computers don't have agency but people do.
| Anything a computer someone own do is one's fault. One had
| the choice to not boot it. One had the choice to not buy
| it.
| nwienert wrote:
| Three claims are there:
|
| - Facebook is censoring this content
|
| - They decided Linux is malware
|
| - They label groups associated with Linux as "cybersecurity
| threats"
|
| The first one they seem to give evidence for the second two
| seem to be assumptions.
| onli wrote:
| There is a screenshot in the article of the appeal,
| confirming 1 and 2. Three follows logically.
| nwienert wrote:
| Confirms that one time, one moderator labeled it that,
| not that "Facebook decided" it.
| notfed wrote:
| To be fair, the screenshots are data points, but more
| would be needed to support the generalization being made.
| loeg wrote:
| No, this doesn't show (2). It shows that Distrowatch
| specifically was considered malware -- not Linux in
| general.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42847474
| skissane wrote:
| > - Facebook is censoring this content
|
| I'm surprised we haven't yet heard from the "it isn't
| censorship if a private company is doing it" crowd in this
| conversation
| Hasu wrote:
| As a member of that crowd, you're misrepresenting the
| argument. It is absolutely censorship when a private
| company does it, but they have the right to do so; it is
| not illegal. But they also cannot force me to use their
| platform, I have the right not to use it.
|
| I don't have a problem with the censorship here on HN, so
| I post here. I do have a problem with the censorship on
| Meta properties (aside from being offended by their
| product design and general aims as an organization), so I
| don't have accounts with them or view content on their
| properties. I also have the right to criticize them for
| their censorship, but not the right to prevent anyone
| else from using it if they want.
| skissane wrote:
| I'm not misrepresenting the argument because you are not
| a member of the crowd I was talking about.
|
| There are people here who literally argue "it isn't
| censorship because a private company did it". Here's a
| random example of a recent such comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787234 - other
| examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42664998
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41385109
|
| There are really three separate issues:
|
| (a) can something a private entity decides to do, without
| any government pressure to do it, count as
| "censorship"?-this is a definitional question
|
| (b) is such private censorship illegal (in whatever
| jurisdiction)?-this is a factual question of what the law
| actually is
|
| (c) should such private censorship be illegal (in
| whatever circumstances)?-this is a public policy question
| of what the law ought to be
|
| You are talking about (b), whereas I was talking about
| (a)
| master-lincoln wrote:
| Why do you bring up that you are surprised? Doesn't seem
| to add to the conversation.
|
| What would a definition of censorship be that includes
| private entities? Can you link to one?
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Why would he bring up what he views as hypocrisy of
| members of this community when they espouse the view that
| it is not censorship when a private entity censors one
| view point(something they disagree with) but stays
| silent(viewed as tacitly agreeing) when there is outrage
| over viewpoints being removed that those members agree
| with.
|
| IMO, it adds more to the conversation than all the
| comments the dog-piled with "It's not censorship because
| it's not the government".
|
| >What would a definition of censorship be that includes
| private entities?
|
| Censorship is the suppression of speech, public
| communication, or other information. This may be done on
| the basis that such material is considered objectionable,
| harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be
| conducted by governments and private institutions.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
|
| Censorship, the suppression of words, images, or ideas
| that are "offensive," happens whenever some people
| succeed in imposing their personal political or moral
| values on others. Censorship can be carried out by the
| government as well as private pressure groups.
| https://www.aclu.org/documents/what-censorship
|
| Censorship, the changing or the suppression or
| prohibition of speech or writing that is deemed
| subversive of the common good. It occurs in all
| manifestations of authority to some degree, but in modern
| times it has been of special importance in its relation
| to government and the rule of law.
| https://www.britannica.com/topic/censorship
|
| I would ask you if you can link to a definition of
| censorship that only calls out the government? Aside from
| XKCD's terrible comic. https://xkcd.com/1357/
| skissane wrote:
| > What would a definition of censorship be that includes
| private entities? Can you link to one?
|
| Merriam-Webster defines censorship [0] sense 1(a) as "the
| institution, system, or practice of censoring" and sense
| 1(b) as "the actions or practices of censors". Neither
| definition includes an explicit requirement that it must
| be done by the government as opposed to a private entity,
| although we also have to look at their definitions of
| "censoring" and "censors". Their example for sense 1(a)
| does mention the government ("They oppose government
| censorship") - but I don't think we should read examples
| as limiting the scope of the definition, plus the very
| phrase "government censorship" suggests there may also be
| "non-government censorship".
|
| For "censor" (noun), their sense (1) is "a person who
| supervises conduct and morals" - it doesn't say such a
| person can only belong to the government. It then says
| "such as" (which I read as implying that the following
| subsenses shouldn't be considered exhaustive), sense
| (1)(a) "an official who examines materials (such as
| publications or films) for objectionable matter" - an
| "official" needn't be government - indeed, their
| definition of "official" [2] gives two examples, a
| "government officials" and a "company official", clearly
| indicating that officials can be either public or
| private. Their example for censor noun sense (1)(a)
| mentions "Government censors..." - but again, examples
| don't limit the scope of the definition, and qualifying
| them as "government" implies there may be others lacking
| that qualification.
|
| For "censor" as a verb, Merriam-Webster gives two senses,
| "to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2)
| or delete anything considered objectionable" (example:
| "censor the news"), and "to suppress or delete as
| objectionable" (example: "censor out indecent passages").
| Neither gives any hint of being limited to the
| government. Let me give my own example of the verb
| "censor" being used, quite naturally, in a sense in which
| the government is not directly involved: "The Standards
| and Practices department of NBC censored one of Jack
| Paar's jokes on the February 10, 1960, episode of The
| Tonight Show", from the Wikipedia article "Broadcast
| Standards and Practices". [3] Now, you might argue that
| NBC was forced into censorship by the FCC - possibly, but
| I'm not sure if the FCC would have objected to the
| specific joke in question, and NBC had (and still does
| have) their own commercial motivations for censorship
| separate from whatever legal requirements the FCC imposed
| on them.
|
| Similarly, Wiktionary's definition of "censorship" starts
| with "The use of state or group power to control freedom
| of expression or press..." [4]. The fact it says "state
| or group" as opposed to just "state" implies that non-
| governmental actors can engage in censorship per their
| definition.
|
| Wiktionary's definition of the noun "censor" includes "An
| official responsible for the removal or suppression of
| objectionable material (for example, if obscene or likely
| to incite violence) or sensitive content in books, films,
| correspondence, and other media" [5] - it never says the
| official has to be a government official, and their
| example sense is "The headmaster was an even stricter
| censor of his boarding pupils' correspondence than the
| enemy censors had been of his own when the country was
| occupied" - which could very easily be about a private
| school rather than a government-run one.
|
| I should also point out that the Catholic Church has
| officials called "censors". To quote the 1908 Catholic
| Encyclopaedia article "Censorship of Books" [6], "Pius X
| in the Encyclical 'Pascendi Dominici gregis' of 8
| September, 1907 (Acta S. Sedis, XL, 645), expressly
| orders all bishops to appoint as censors qualified
| theologians, to whom the censorship of books appertains
| ex officio." And the Catholic Church still employs
| "censors" to this day, [7] although their role has shrunk
| greatly - generally they are theologians (most commonly
| priests, although I believe laypersons are eligible for
| appointment) to whom a bishop delegates the review of
| certain publications (primarily religious education
| curricula) and who then makes a recommendation to the
| bishop as to whether to approve the publication or demand
| changes to it. Obviously if the Catholic Church has
| "censors", the concept includes private bodies, since the
| Catholic Church is a private body almost everywhere
| (Vatican City and the Holy See excluded).
|
| [0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censorship
|
| [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censoring
|
| [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/official
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_Standards_and
| _Practi...
|
| [4] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/censorship
|
| [5] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/censor
|
| [6] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03519d.htm
|
| [7] see 1983 CIC Canon 830,
| https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-
| canonici/eng/docume...
| jeltz wrote:
| While I agree with you this is off-topic. I am happy to
| not have to see that argument. And you were the wine to
| bring it here now.
| thekevan wrote:
| That's circular logic and none of it is evidence.
|
| "A bad thing is happening and the evidence of it happening is
| that I said it's happening."
|
| By the way, I love DistroWatch and do think FB is messing
| with their posts. But there's no evidence to show if it's a
| new policy, a glitch in the moderation or an internal screw
| up.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That's not circular. They are citing sources. The evidence
| is the direct experience of the sources.
|
| If you don't believe them, that's a different objection.
|
| And glitch policies _are_ policies if they 're getting
| enforced.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I assumed that part was conjecture. However, if you define
| "internal policy makers" broadly from the users perspective,
| then it's provably true from the result.
|
| I get that it is worded like it was people in a boardroom
| making a decision after having a debate. However an overworked
| admin, or an AI Moderator could just as easily be lumped
| together as "internal policy makers" from the users
| perspective.
| buyucu wrote:
| the evidence is that facebook is blocking this content.
| amatecha wrote:
| Probably this: "I've tried to appeal the ban and was told the
| next day that Linux-related material is staying on the
| cybersecurity filter." (from the OP) .. Of course, it would
| have helped if the post author quoted FB's response so we could
| judge that for ourselves.
| lexicality wrote:
| I'm genuinely surprised that people were using facebook of all
| things to discuss Linux distros.
|
| The idea of having to wade through AI generated pictures of
| Shrimp Jesus and my mad uncle posting about his latest attempts
| to turn lead into gold (yes, really) to find out about new
| distros to try seems very alien to me.
| UntitledNo4 wrote:
| I want to know more about your uncle. I'm not on Facebook, but
| that would make me consider joining...
| lexicality wrote:
| It's entertaining in the abstract but fairly depressing when
| he's telling you in person that he's spending his children's
| inheritance on turning lead slightly yellow. Still, on the
| bright side, he seems to have stopped talking about the
| "globalists" so much.
| Detrytus wrote:
| Globalists are history now, Trump will take care of them :)
| knowitnone wrote:
| I'm sure lead technically can be turned into gold or anything
| for that matter with enough energy
| brink wrote:
| Your electricity bill might be greater than the value of the
| produced gold though.
| ben_w wrote:
| You can indeed turn lead into gold; it will indeed be more
| expensive than it is worth; also the gold will be
| radioactive.
| cobbal wrote:
| Gold is sold by weight, so those extra neutrons are pure
| profit.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Unfortunately all the heavy isotopes of gold are unstable
| and will decay in a few months.
| saithir wrote:
| That sounds like the buyer's problem though.
| itishappy wrote:
| Shhh, don't tell that to my buyer!
| monocasa wrote:
| Several groups actually have both intentionally and
| unintentionally.
|
| In most cases they're pretty radioactive isotopes of gold.
| But IMO that just makes it feel even more like alchemy. The
| gold is cursed.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| I think they turned some platinum atoms into gold. In a
| particle accelerator.
| jbm wrote:
| Your uncle sounds like a lot more fun than the latest
| javascript build system.
|
| Imagine being confident enough to believe and document that.
| Crazy? Maybe, but a crazy one can appreciate.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I know you're only half serious, but ...
|
| The problem isn't when one uncle is doing this. The problem
| is when the bulk of the content you see on FB is as crazy as
| this.
|
| I mean, if you like purchasing the National Enquirer and
| flipping through it, then by all means, this is for you.
| jbm wrote:
| Yeah, I can understand. I'm fortunate not to have many
| uncles and aunts who were old enough to use Facebook, and
| my parents were fairly tech-antagonistic. I did get to see
| a little of what you are referring to when some of my
| coworkers added me on FB and started sharing political
| content.
|
| I still prefer that to all of the fake AI-slop message
| boards and meme/video culture that seems to have replaced
| it on FB.
| einpoklum wrote:
| (sob) Shrimp Jesus is real! (sniffle)
|
| Also, turning lead into gold is easy: Just break all the
| protons off to get Hydrogen and maybe Helium, then compress it
| back so you get a star to form, and wait for it to go nova. Or,
| if you're in a hurry, you can compress your Hydrogen more and
| if you kind of jiggle it just the right way then you should get
| some gold along with other heavy elements.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Tech obviously isn't a strong suit, but elsewhere Facebook does
| have corners with good/entertaining/useful small communities.
| They have good SNR and are more personal than Reddit.
|
| The secret is to train your feed by bookmarking the groups and
| linking to them directly instead of accepting whatever flailing
| nonsense the algo decides to default to.
|
| Having said that - I hope everyone has worked out by now that
| when you have a "free speech" culture based on covert curation
| and moderation of contentious issues, it's not just going to be
| about porn and trans people.
|
| Non-mainstream (i.e. non-consumer) tech is going to be labelled
| bad-think and suppressed too.
| perihelions wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250127020059/https://distrowat...
| benrutter wrote:
| If I'm reading right, the same facebook who announced a week or
| so ago that they where scaling back all moderation and validation
| around online safety, are now putting a blanket ban on users
| discussing such a fundamental aspect of modern technology that
| facebook itself runs on it?
|
| If this is a genuine policy, I'm at a complete loss to understand
| Facebook's stance on anything.
| spencerflem wrote:
| the "free speech" was a promise to promote right wing speech.
| do not mistake it for ideology.
|
| banning left wing activism, either acknowledging the genocide
| in Gaza or apparently now promoting free (less surveilled)
| software is against what the authoritarians want so it is
| banned.
|
| this is all consistent if you see it through that lens
| CivBase wrote:
| But it's not consistent because Linux is not aligned with
| either side of US politics. This doesn't address OP's
| confusion.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Linux is free software, and software freedom is communist.
| It's also the brainchild of a Finn, and every red-blooded
| American knows that Europeans are all commies.
|
| _Real_ patriots use good ol ' American operating systems,
| like Oracle Solaris(tm).
| spencerflem wrote:
| dang's probably right that its a glitch- but I honestly
| believe Linux is Free as in Freedom, which is opposed by
| both parties but primarily the radical authoritarians in
| charge right now
| loeg wrote:
| Distrowatch has taken the observation that distrowatch URLs are
| blocked and really hyperbolized that into the broader and
| incorrect claim that discussion of Linux is banned. It isn't.
| udev4096 wrote:
| No one, more than linux users, cares about privacy and freedom.
| What is even the point of using crapbook? Everyone in linux
| community is either hanging out on IRC or matrix or have self
| hosted forums
| em-bee wrote:
| to talk to people who are not yet using linux?
| sophacles wrote:
| What? Google is a linux user - I doubt they care about privacy
| or freedom. Same with facebook - that company uses linux a lot
| while actively opposing privacy.
|
| Lots of people use linux because it's a good OS, irrespective
| of privacy concerns (see the occasional flareup about some
| software or another automatically shipping off bug reports -
| some people don't care, others are incredibly concerned).
| paulnpace wrote:
| Why is this submission flagged?
| beardyw wrote:
| People flag stuff.
| RandomBacon wrote:
| HN moderation outsourced to FB? /joke
| kbelder wrote:
| Look at the quality of the posts.
|
| This is an obvious mistake, it's obvious Facebook isn't
| deliberately banning Linux posts, it's obvious their moderation
| is incorrectly flagging some posts for some reason, it'll get
| fixed. It could have been an interesting story and discussion
| about problems with false positives and automated moderating,
| or about the lack of human contact at Facebook scale, but
| instead it's just passionate screeds from too easily excitable
| posters.
|
| (I didn't flag it, btw.)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu..
| .>
| beardyw wrote:
| I am getting no response on that link.
| vmilner wrote:
| Distrowatch seems to be under heavy load (probably because of
| this news story)
| polotics wrote:
| I do confirm that i explicitly tested this with my super unused
| facebook account, just stating that i was testing restrictions on
| talking about Linux, the text was: """I don't often (or ever)
| post anything on Facebook, but when I do, it's to check if they
| really, as announced on hckrnews, are restricting discussing
| Linux. So here's a few links to trigger that: https://www.qubes-
| os.org/downloads/ ... https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/"""
| and indeed within seconds I got the following warning: """ _We
| removed your post_ The post may use misleading links or content
| to trick people to visit, or stay on, a website. """. This is
| one massive wow considering how much Facebook runs on Linux.
| zdp7 wrote:
| I just tried the same two URLs. I also got a message saying the
| post was removed.
| krisoft wrote:
| A user who never posts anything suddenly posting a message
| containing urls might in itself be a signal that something is
| weird. It would be an interestint test to post something not
| linux related and see how that fares.
| Vrondi wrote:
| Any user ever posting URLs should never ever be removed. The
| Web should be allowed to exist. This is utterly despicable
| behavior.
| quesera wrote:
| Insanity. Absolutely. Maybe.
|
| Clearly there's a need for some kind of bad-url blocker.
| You don't want compromised accounts (or clueless people)
| sharing nefarious links to trusted friends.
|
| And clearly blocking distrowatch etc is bizarre overreach.
| And probably not intended behaviour -- it just makes no
| sense.
|
| The web exists just fine. Using Facebook as a front end to
| the web is a terrible idea though.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| The internet would look like the spam folder of a
| compromised email address. No thanks.
| mardef wrote:
| Not if I only seeing updates from the people I actually
| know and explicitly connected to on the social graph.
|
| The current problem exists because the content is chosen
| algorithmically
| raverbashing wrote:
| You would be surprised at the amount of crap that exists
| and the amount of malware that posts to fb
| intended wrote:
| No. Even then. You may know assholes. User accounts may
| be compromised. Users may have different tolerances for
| gore that you don't.
|
| Not gotchas, I'm not arguing for the sake of it, but
| these are pretty common situations.
|
| I always urge people to volunteer as mods for a bit.
|
| At least you may see a different way to approach thing,
| or else you might be able to articulate the reasons the
| rule can't be followed better.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Would not a less draconian solution then to be to hide
| the link requiring the user to click through a [This link
| has been hidden due to linking to [potential
| malware/sexually explicit content/graphically violent
| content/audio of a loud Brazilian orgasm/an image that
| has nothing to do with goats/etc] Type "I understand"
| here ________ to reveal the link.]?
|
| You get the benefits of striving to warn users, without
| the downsides of it being abusive, or seen as abusive.
| intended wrote:
| It's not a bad option, and there may be some research
| that suggests this will reduce friction between mod teams
| and users.
|
| If I were to build this... well first I would have to
| ensure no link shorteners, then I would need a list of
| known tropes and memes, and a way to add them to the list
| over time.
|
| This should get me about 30% of the way there, next..
| even if I ignore adversaries, I would still have to
| contend with links which have never been seen before.
|
| So for these links, someone would have to be the
| sacrificial lamb and go through it to see what's on the
| other side. Ideally this would be someone on the mod
| team, but there can never be enough mods to handle
| volume.
|
| I guess we're at the mod coverage problem - take
| volunteer mods; it's very common for mods to be asleep,
| when a goat related link is shared. When you get online 8
| hours later, theres a page of reports.
|
| That is IF you get reports. People click on a malware
| infection, but aren't aware of it, so they don't report.
| Or they encounter goats, and just quit the site, without
| caring to report.
|
| I'm actually pulling my punches here, because many
| issues, eg. adversarial behavior, just nullify any action
| you take. People could decide to say that you are
| applying the label incorrectly, and that the label itself
| is censorship.
|
| This also assumes that you can get engineering resources
| applied - and it's amazing if you can get their
| attention. All the grizzled T&S folk I know, develop very
| good mediating and diplomatic skills to just survive.
|
| thats why I really do urge people to get into mod teams,
| so that the work gets understood by normal people. The
| internet is banging into the hard limits of our older
| free speech ideas, and people are constantly taking
| advantage of blind spots amongst the citizenry.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > I guess we're at the mod coverage problem - take
| volunteer mods; it's very common for mods to be asleep,
| when a goat related link is shared. When you get online 8
| hours later, theres a page of reports.
|
| When I consider _my_ colleagues who work in the same
| department: they really have _very different_ preferred
| schedules concerning what their preferred work hours are
| (one colleague would even love to work from 11 pm to 7 am
| - and then getting to sleep - if he was allowed to). If
| you ensure that you have both larks and "nightowls"
| among your (voluntary) moderation team, this problem
| should become mitigated.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Then this comes back to size of the network. HN for
| example is small enough that we have just a few
| moderators here and it works.
|
| But once the network grows to a large size it requires a
| lot of moderators and you start running into problems of
| moderation quality over large groups of people.
|
| This is a difficult and unsolved problem.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| I admit that ensuring consistent moderation quality is
| the harder problem than the moderation coverage (sleep
| pattern ;-) ) problem.
|
| Nevertheless, I _do_ believe that there _do_ exist at
| least partial solutions for this problem, and a lot of
| problems concerning moderation quality are in my opinion
| actually self-inflicted by the companies:
|
| I see the central issue that the companies have deeply
| inconsistent goals what they want vs not want on their
| websites. Also, even if there is some consistency, they
| commonly don't clearly communicate these boundaries to
| the users (often for "political" or reputation reasons).
|
| Keeping this in mind, I claim that all of the following
| strategies _can_ work (but also each one _will_ infuriate
| at least one specific group of users, which you will thus
| indirectly pressure to leave your platform), and have
| (successfully) been used by various platforms:
|
| 1. Simply ban discussions of some well-defined topics
| that tend to stir up controversies and heated discussion
| (even though "one side may be clearly right"). This will,
| of course, infuriate users who are on the "free speech"
| side. Also people who have a "currently politically
| accepted" stance on the controversial topic will be angry
| that they are not allowed to post about their "right"
| opinion on this topic, which is a central part of their
| life.
|
| 2. Only allow arguments for one side of some
| controversial topics ("taking a stance"): this will
| infuriate people who are in the other camp, or are on the
| free speech side. Also consider that for a lot of highly
| controversial topics, which side is "right" can change
| every few years "when the political wind changes
| direction". The infuriated users likely won't come back.
|
| 3. Mostly allow free speech, but strongly moderate
| comments where people post severe insults. This needs
| moderators who are highly trustable by the users. Very
| commonly, moderators are more tolerant towards insults
| from one side than from the other (or consider comments
| that are insulting, but within their Overton window, to
| be acceptable). As a platform, you have to give such
| moderators clear warnings, or even get rid of them.
|
| While this (if done correctly) will pacify many people
| who are on the "free speech" side, be aware that 3 likely
| leads to a platform with "more heated" and
| "controversial" discussions, which people who are more on
| the "sensitive" and "nice" side likely won't like. Also
| advertisers are often not fond of an environment where
| there are "heated" and "controversial" discussions (even
| if the users of the platform actually like these).
| intended wrote:
| >Simply ban discussions of some well-defined topics that
| tend to stir up controversies and heated discussion (even
| though "one side may be clearly right").
|
| Yup. One of my favored options, if you are running your
| own community. There are some topics that just increase
| conflict and are unresolvable without very active referee
| work. (Religion, Politics, Sex, Identity)
|
| 2) This is fine ? Ah, you are considering a platform like
| Meta, who has to give space to everyone. Dont know on
| this one, too many conflicting ways this can go.
|
| 3) One thing not discussed enough, is how moderating
| affects mods. Your experience is alien to what most users
| go through, since you see the 1-3% of crap others don't
| see. Mental health is a genuine issue for mods, with PTSD
| being a real risk if you are on one of the gore/child
| porn queues.
|
| These options to a degree are discussed and being
| considered. At the cost of being a broken record, more
| "normal" users need to see the other side of community
| running.
|
| Theres MANY issues with the layman idea of Freespeech,
| its hitting real issues when it comes to online spaces
| and the free for all meeting of minds we have going on.
|
| There are some amazing things that come out of it, like
| people learning entirely new dance moves, food or ideas.
| The dark parts need actual engagement, and need more
| people in threads like this who can chime in with their
| experiences, and get others down into the weeds and
| problem solving.
|
| I really believe that we will have to come up with a new
| agreement on what is "ok" when it comes to speech, and
| part of it is going to be realizing that we want
| freespeech because it enables a fair market place of
| ideas. Or something else. I would rather it happen ground
| up, rather than top down.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Ah, you are considering a platform like Meta, who has
| to give space to everyone.
|
| This is what I at least focused on since
|
| - Facebook is the platform that the discussed article is
| about
|
| - in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42852441 pixl97
| wrote:
|
| "Then this comes back to size of the network. HN for
| example is small enough that we have just a few
| moderators here and it works.
|
| But once the network grows to a large size it requires a
| lot of moderators and you start running into problems of
| moderation quality over large groups of people."
| seattle_spring wrote:
| Lord do I wish that were true. The main reason I left
| Facebook was less the algorithmic content I was getting
| from strangers, and more the political bile that my
| increasingly fanatical extended family and past
| acquaintances chose to write.
| Timwi wrote:
| Mastodon does not restrict the posting of URLs and it
| does not look like "the spam folder of a compromised
| email address" at all.
| Qwertious wrote:
| Mastodon isn't in charge of moderation though, that's up
| to the individual instances.
|
| Also, Mastodon is tiny, and spam is a numbers game.
| somenameforme wrote:
| But are you not somewhat agreeing with the point that
| you're implicitly arguing against: "[This isn't a
| problem] if I [am] only seeing updates from the people I
| actually know and explicitly connected to on the social
| graph. The current problem exists because the content is
| chosen algorithmically."
|
| The size of a total network is irrelevant until you start
| randomly connecting nodes.
| bruce511 wrote:
| At the moment "no one" is on mastodon. The folk there are
| the few, and are likely a self-selecting group that are
| resistant to spam or scams. Therefore you don't see
| (much) spam or scams there.
|
| Of course should it become popular (side note; it wont)
| such that my mom and her friends are on it, then the
| spammers and scammers will come too. And since my mom is
| in my social graph a lot of that will become visible to
| me.
|
| Enjoy mastodon now. The quality is high because the group
| is small and the barrier to entry us high. Hope it never
| catches on, because all "forums" become crap when the
| eternal September arrives.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Mastodon is perfect for affirmation of your worldview and
| strengthen your social bubble because instance rules are
| intolerant to random kind of opinions.
| nunobrito wrote:
| There is always NOSTR. Over there you follow however you
| wish without such artificial walled gardens.
|
| Tip: If someone is trolling you, they can also write to
| your texts without a chance of you stopping them. No
| perfect solution exists, I guess.
| nout wrote:
| You are correct that since nostr is censorship resistant,
| you can't really prevent someone from posting something,
| but you can prevent being exposed to it on your side. If
| it's a single nostr account (npub) sending you something
| you don't want, then you can block or mute them (the
| blocking is done in your app on your device). If they try
| attacking you at scale, then you can rely on web of trust
| (i.e. only allow content from people you actually follow,
| and 2nd degree) - this is now often the default.
| nunobrito wrote:
| That works for our own account to avoid seeing the texts,
| it doesn't prevent the troll from still posting replies
| to our posts.
|
| With that said, that is an exotic situation. I'm a big
| fan of NOSTR in overall, all my recent hobby projects
| used npub and nsec. The simplicity and power of that
| combination is really powerful. No more emails, no more
| servers, no more passwords.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Mastodon looks like a barely used social network instead.
| jrmg wrote:
| The simplest explanation for this would be that spammers
| are not targeting Mastodon.
| bluGill wrote:
| As someone who uses Mastodon I can assure you that
| spammers do target mastodon. So far it is only a few
| though and so human moderators are able to keep up. I
| doubt that will last long.
| bluGill wrote:
| Yet. There are lots of sign spam is coming to Mastodon
| and there is real concern by a fair number of people who
| are there. Anyone with a lot of followers will be tagged
| often by spam (if you tag someone all their followers
| will see your post)
| lostlogin wrote:
| When you browse without a Pihole and a blocker, it does.
| taurknaut wrote:
| ...have you seen the internet in the last 30 years?
| That's exactly what remains.
| gsich wrote:
| I once posted a Youtube comment with a link. Got removed
| without notice. I thought it was the uploader first but no
| ...
| animuchan wrote:
| Amusingly, new YouTube channels can't themselves put
| links in the description of their own videos even.
|
| They really dislike this whole hypertext thing.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They really want Xanadu's for-profit linking.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Clearly there is content that would be unacceptable to
| post. Anything patently illegal, for example.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Or websites that look exactly like paypal, whose URLs
| begin in paypal.com (followed by a dot, not a slash), but
| that are, in fact, not Paypal.
|
| I think that's a much more pressing concern.
| dingnuts wrote:
| the parent said: to block things that are illegal.
| phishing is illegal.
| squigz wrote:
| You should know that this sort of rhetoric is both
|
| a) silly, because... it's not true. Spam, phishing
| attempts, illegal content - all of this should be removed.
|
| b) more damaging to whatever you're advocating for than you
| realize. You want a free web? So do I. But I'm not going to
| go around saying stuff like "all users should be able to
| post any URL at any time" and calling moderation actions
| "utterly despicable"
| taurknaut wrote:
| > A user who never posts anything suddenly posting a message
| containing urls might in itself be a signal that something is
| weird.
|
| ...on a social media site designed to aggregate URLs?
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Facebook is not designed to aggregate URLs and heavily
| penalizes external content
| miningape wrote:
| No this is a supported / common format on facebook.
|
| Source: I work building an SMM tool, and Facebook Link posts
| constantly need our attention
| amatecha wrote:
| I'd be curious if it's blocked if someone links just debian.org
| . I can definitely see a [totally overzealous] "security
| filter" blocking Qubes, but Debian is one of the most popular
| Linux distros in the world, so that would be especially
| ridiculous.
| lemper wrote:
| giving you another confirmation, mate. zuck removed my post
| about qubeos.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| Relicense the kernel with license that prevents usage for
| dystopiadistros?
| froh wrote:
| relicensing needs a cla.
| tobylane wrote:
| That's non-free. Quoting from https://opensource.org/osd
|
| > 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor The license
| must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a
| specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict
| the program from being used in a business, or from being used
| for genetic research.
| jdiff wrote:
| nonfree according to OSI and several other organizations.
| If you have strong feelings that direct you in such a way,
| there's no reason to hold their opinion in sacred regard.
| Multiple philosophies can coexist. The DFSG and the FSF's
| schools of thought for instance are often in conflict and
| yet the world keeps on spinning.
|
| Your custom license built with your own philosophy will
| still interoperate just fine with many common open source
| licenses, and as a bonus for some, will ward off
| corporations with cautious lawyers who don't like unknown
| software licenses.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| Indeed. One of the most important freedoms you grant to
| others by using an Open Source license is the freedom to do
| something you might not like.
| taurknaut wrote:
| Non-open, you mean. OSI never tried to contribute to the
| free software movement.
| Propelloni wrote:
| What is a "dystopiadistro"? It's not like that I don't know
| the individual words, but combined? What is "dystopiadistro"
| supposed to mean?
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| Companies that actively decay society for profit? PS:
| Compamies that support change away from lawbased society
| also violate the license by virtue of it being based on
| laws and rules
| richrichardsson wrote:
| Opposite anecdata point: posted a link to DistroWatch and
| mentioned Linux without issue.
| oliwarner wrote:
| This should not be flagged.
|
| Post itself is a little light on evidence, but there are people
| here already who've tried to post Linuxey things, and have seen
| it in action.
| johnea wrote:
| I notice a lot of topics being flagged recently.
|
| I would ask flaggers to simply skip those posts and let people
| who are interested in discussing those topics have their
| discussion.
|
| Shutting down other peoples conversations is a disturbing trend
| and it is giving HN more of a one sided echo chamber feel.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Tech censorship, especially during the pandemic, made some
| giddy with power that they thought would extend to everything
| forever.
| lproven wrote:
| @dang: I do not know why this is flagged, but I think it's a
| significant development and it shouldn't be.
|
| Even LWN is covering it.
|
| https://lwn.net/Articles/1006328/
| LorenDB wrote:
| Anybody here have connections at Meta? Seems like this should
| be fixed.
| lproven wrote:
| I have written to their PR department. TBH I am not expecting
| a useful answer.
| ahoka wrote:
| Good luck connecting to a human at Meta. Even the CEO is a
| cyborg.
| lproven wrote:
| :-)
|
| But also :-(
|
| Lord Astor was right.
| dang wrote:
| I've turned the flags off now. It's not a very good thread,
| though--mostly jokes and generic reactions, which is what
| happens when an article contains little information, but the
| information it does contain is provocative. (Edit: the comments
| got somewhat better through the afternoon.)
|
| These little scandals nearly always turn out to be glitchy
| emphemera in the Black Box of $BigCo, rather than a policy or
| plan. I imagine that's the case here too. Why would Facebook
| ban discussion of the operating system it runs on, after 20+
| years?
|
| (Btw: @dang doesn't work - if you want reliable message
| delivery you need to email hn@ycombinator.com)
| lproven wrote:
| Thank you very much!
|
| TBH I didn't think the @ thing would work - I was just hoping
| you'd notice. I have been meaning to email you, though.
| VanTheBrand wrote:
| Ultimately, @dang seems to have worked just fine, so well
| that it worked even without working.
| americasonly wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| I get quite a few of those
| oefrha wrote:
| I flagged it when it first showed up because "Facebook ban on
| discussing Linux" is obviously bullshit, it took me half a
| minute to confirm The Linux Foundation was posting about
| Linux as recently as an hour ago.
|
| I can believe DistroWatch the website got blocked by Facebook
| for whatever reason and I can sympathize, but exaggerating it
| to something obviously false doesn't do them any favors. I
| think the title needs to be changed if it's allowed to stay
| up.
| amatecha wrote:
| It's not just distrowatch that is blocked, so it's not
| "obviously bullshit":
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42840143
| oefrha wrote:
| That's still not remotely a "ban on discussing Linux".
| "Some Linux-related links or discussions are blocked on
| Facebook" may be a reasonable title.
|
| Also, according to a recent comment
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42847474 it's not at
| all clear if these blocks are related.
| everdrive wrote:
| Somewhat ironic given that actual linux packages are mirrored
| there.
|
| http://www.fedora.mirror.facebook.net/
| bluedino wrote:
| Reminds me of when they do 'firewall updates' at work, and many
| of the common open-source repositories/hosting etc are blocked.
|
| I understand than some malicious software may use things like
| _curl_ , but it's also annoying to have to re-create the same
| ticket and submit to internal IT, and then if someone working
| on the ticket hasn't done this before, they close it, we have
| to have a meeting about why we need access to that site...
| devnullbrain wrote:
| The inverse isn't tolerated. If you're a software developer,
| you get tested for IT knowledge with phishing emails. Yet in
| IT it's perfectly normal to have an ignorance of the core
| needs of the developers - and computing itself - that results
| in reduced productivity or shadow IT systems.
|
| It's not an exaggeration to say I've experienced it at every
| employer I've had.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Was reading a news article the other day that described wget
| as a "hacking tool" and about rolled my eyes into the back of
| my head.
| userbinator wrote:
| Remember the old saying, "it's easier to ask for forgiveness
| than permission".
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I was on a penetration testing team at a large corp that
| doesn't specialize in cybersecurity and I downloaded
| Metasploit and about 15 minutes later an IT person came up to
| my desk to talk about the malware I just downloaded. I had to
| walk him to my manager to get him to understand what it was
| and why it was okay for me to download it.
| nailer wrote:
| Last I checked (2008) Facebook Linux was indeed a Fedora
| derivative.
| somanyphotons wrote:
| I think in 2014 era it was centos
| homebrewer wrote:
| Their OS is based on CentOS Stream, I think they're one of
| the very few major organizations that stuck with CentOS post-
| Stream and did not switch to something else entirely.
| xor-eax-eax wrote:
| Untrue, it's purist startup people and some ISVs who
| believe that Alma or Rocky are the somehow "better".
|
| Meta runs 10M+ CentOS 9 Stream boxes migrating to 10
| eventually.
|
| Cent has shorter security update availability latency and
| they're shipped more consistently. The benefit with Rocky
| and Alma is double the lifecycle time and arguably better
| governance, unfortunately though they're both tiny
| operations that suffer from a narrow bus factor, are always
| playing catch-up, drifting away from RHEL compatibility,
| and are the definition of fragmentation.
|
| If you need RHEL-ish for servers, use CentOS Stream. It's
| not great for desktop. Use Fedora or something more LTS for
| that.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Untrue, it's purist startup people and some ISVs who
| believe that Alma or Rocky are the somehow "better".
|
| It's anyone who appreciates the value of stability in
| server software. In my personal opinion, that value is
| quite high and far too quickly cast aside by others in
| the industry.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| I think it's unsurprising that the company that coined
| "Move fast and break things" was fine using Stream.
| bjoli wrote:
| I am one of those people who agree with you. On my main
| family computer we run Alma Linux with flatpaks for the
| main accounts.
|
| I use guix to get up to date tools for development stuff.
|
| (On my laptop I run aeon desktop and guix. I really do
| think that model is the future. Right now I am hoping to
| be able to run aeon desktop but with the opensuse
| slowroll packages which would give me all the benefits of
| aeon but without the constant updates).
| josefx wrote:
| > drifting away from RHEL compatibility
|
| Any source for that claim? I am testing software on Rocky
| and never got complaints from users that run it on RHEL.
| loeg wrote:
| Fedora and CentOS are both used.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Woah, Facebook is hosting malware.
|
| Seriously though, I'm curious (have no account): are you able
| to post that link on Facebook?
| bawolff wrote:
| Facebook seems to be going really heavy handed with moderation.
| They also blocked some wikimedia sites like
| https://meta.wikimedia.org and https://species.wikimedia.org
| numbsafari wrote:
| [flagged]
| dmix wrote:
| Meta barely changed their moderation policy. The community
| standard docs which list every violation are still extremely
| long and cover a large swath of speech
| https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/,
| to which they only added 2 bullet point exceptions (and
| eventually the future addition of community notes)
| sunshowers wrote:
| The exceptions are not minor. Some groups can be called
| mentally ill, but other similarly situated groups cannot.
|
| It's a capitulation to the idea that speech standards
| should be determined by public opinion and not by reason,
| evidence and a scientific mindset.
| dmix wrote:
| > speech standards should be determined by public opinion
| and not by reason, evidence and a scientific mindset.
|
| Yes this is largely a debate between a top-down
| technocratic worldview vs democratic/meritocratic one.
| The point is FB is still very much on the former highly
| centralized expert-defined guideline/automated system
| side while only making small moves in the other direction
| with community notes. Maybe they'll keep going in that
| direction but what they say vs do is an important
| distinction.
| sunshowers wrote:
| To be clear, the people who believe speech standards
| should be determined by public opinion are as incorrect
| as, say, flat earthers.
|
| I don't have a huge problem with community notes per se.
| I do have a huge problem with blatantly unequal standards
| just because large parts of the public have morally
| rotten views.
| captainbland wrote:
| And it still works less well than community moderation.
| thephyber wrote:
| "Works less well" is a subjective claim.
|
| How are you evaluating this? Are you including the truth
| of the Facebook post, whether moderators
| correctly/accurately act upon the flagging, whether users
| choose to stick on the platform after seeing the content,
| whether users stop believing in any objective truth, or
| something else?
|
| Community notes only does fact-checking, but moderation
| has the ability to reduce the activity of bad actors.
| They serve 2 different purposes from where I stand.
| worik wrote:
| Let me make a correction please:
|
| > a top-down technocratic worldview vs
| democratic/meritocratic one.
|
| You mean to say: "a top-down technocratic worldview vs
| majoritarian one."
|
| Majoritarian != Democracy
| roenxi wrote:
| Speech standards should be determined by public opinion,
| science has never had a seat at the table in the West. If
| anything Communism was the pro-science approach,
| typically centrally planned societies love science and
| technocrats - they put a lot of effort into working out a
| true and optimal way and it didn't work very well. The
| body count can be staggering.
|
| The moment we start talking about speech standards being
| set by "science" you get a lot of people who are
| pretending that their thing is scientific. Ditto reason
| and evidence.
|
| The win for free speech is setting up a situation where
| people who are _actually_ motivated by science, reason
| and evidence can still say their piece without
| threatening the powerful actors in the community. And
| limiting the blast radius of the damage when they get
| things wrong despite being technically correct. But
| principles of free speech go far beyond what is true,
| correct and reasonable.
| sunshowers wrote:
| > Speech standards should be determined by public opinion
|
| To confirm, you are making a normative "ought" statement
| here, not just a descriptive "is" statement?
|
| > science has never had a seat at the table in the West.
|
| This is a strange idea to me. As a simple example,
| vaccinations are mandatory for a reason. The unfreedom
| there is clearly justified.
|
| > If anything Communism was the pro-science approach,
| typically centrally planned societies love science and
| technocrats - they put a lot of effort into working out a
| true and optimal way and it didn't work very well. The
| body count can be staggering.
|
| What James Scott called high modernism is indeed bad. The
| problem was not the fact that science was used, but the
| fact that the models used weren't complex enough to
| describe local conditions, and that politically motivated
| models (e.g. Lysenkoism) gained prominence. Science was
| also used in other parts of the world to much better
| effect, such as vaccines and HIV medications.
|
| > The moment we start talking about speech standards
| being set by "science" you get a lot of people who are
| pretending that their thing is scientific. Ditto reason
| and evidence.
|
| True, and yet some of those people are more correct than
| others. This is _challenging_ , but it is not a challenge
| we can run away from.
|
| > The win for free speech is setting up a situation where
| people who are actually motivated by science, reason and
| evidence can still say their piece without threatening
| the powerful actors in the community. And limiting the
| blast radius of the damage when they get things wrong
| despite being technically correct. But principles of free
| speech go far beyond what is true, correct and
| reasonable.
|
| I think people not applying reason is far, far worse of a
| problem today than people applying it.
| righthand wrote:
| > science has never had a seat at the table in the West.
|
| Other than science being the entire reason the US were
| able to corner the fascists in WW2. Let a lone all the
| scientific break throughs in the last few decades coming
| from the West. Heck before WWII, the automobile?
|
| Perhaps you meant it wasn't primarily embraced.
| worik wrote:
| > science being the entire reason the US were able to
| corner the fascists in WW2
|
| Not to my knowledge
|
| Economic heft had a lot to do with it as did the weight
| of numbers
|
| I love science, BTW. But it is not the source of all
| knowledge.
| righthand wrote:
| We took their scientists, broke their codes, and built a
| bomb that took out two cities. That requires science in
| my book.
| worik wrote:
| For the Japanese. The war was shortened. But by the time
| of the bomb they were doomed. They could not replace
| their losses like the Americans could
|
| The Germans were beaten mostly by the Soviets. They (the
| Germans) were overwhelmed. And they too could not replace
| their losses like the Soviets could. Especially humans
| righthand wrote:
| And none of their forces would have been so drastically
| depleted without science.
| roenxi wrote:
| 1. There was an entire sentence, taking the second part
| without the first ("Speech standards should be determined
| by public opinion") removes essential context.
|
| 2. The fascists were Westerners (and leaders in
| science/technology, for that matter, the US didn't beat
| them with more technology).
| righthand wrote:
| I still disagree, science has had a seat at the table in
| the West especially around speech. Speech was either
| locked down using control of technologies or speech was
| empowered using proliferation of technologies.
| lmm wrote:
| Speech standards have never been set by "reason, evidence
| and a scientific mindset". The people who are complaining
| now that the shoe is on the other foot were quite happy
| when it was their side setting the rules.
|
| Objective standards would be best, but subjective
| standards that you pretend are objective are far worse
| than subjective standards that are honest about it.
| sunshowers wrote:
| I think what Meta did is objectively bad.
| nntwozz wrote:
| "Our greatest ethical imperative is to create our own life's
| meaning, while protecting the freedom of others to do the
| same."
|
| -- Simone de Beauvoir
| w0m wrote:
| Define Blocked? I just posted a https://meta.wikimedia.org/
| link without issue.
| bawolff wrote:
| Based on this comment https://www.facebook.com/story.php?stor
| y_fbid=90140663553077... (can i even directly link to fb.
| Idk)
|
| Some people were complaining about meta, but species seems
| the main one. And only the main site, the mobile site is
| fine.
| Nemo_bis wrote:
| Thanks, added to
| https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T341665#10499534
| Symbiote wrote:
| I tried to make a post with the
| https://species.wikimedia.org/ link, and I get "Your content
| couldn't be shared, because this link goes against our
| Community Standards".
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Being generous, it could be there's NSFW imagery in there?
| I can't be arsed to dig into a mountain of scientifically
| named links, but you can find troves of pr0n among other
| things in Wikimedia if you know where to look.
| linuxandrew wrote:
| I mean you can find porn on Google and you don't have to
| look that hard
| zblevins wrote:
| Thank you for actually spelling porn. This whole thing
| around altering spelling to avoid blocking which I
| presume comes out of other apps has gotten to be quite
| annoying.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| "Pr0n" is classic internet slang that predates onerous
| censorship let alone "apps".
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Right, the form to deal with onerous censorship is
| "corn".
| zblevins wrote:
| Was totally unaware thanks!
| Fnoord wrote:
| What the fork?
| im3w1l wrote:
| It's a little depressing to think about how much better
| modern LLMs are at preventing "harmful" content than past
| systems.
| tyre wrote:
| I can't believe we have grown ass adults posting "seggs"
| on social media and bleeping it out in audio.
|
| People shape themselves so much around algorithms.
| moron4hire wrote:
| It absolutely came from censorship. IRC chat rooms and
| PHPBB message boards with blacklists of words that would
| get starred out. Hoping it wasn't implemented with
| substring match so typing "shell" didn't come out
| "s****".
| bawolff wrote:
| I guess if they blocked *.wikimedia.org to get at
| commons.wikimedia.org that could make sense. However all
| those images are also accessible via an en.wikipedia.org
| url.
| Symbiote wrote:
| (I'm not sure why my comment is now collapsed by default.
| It doesn't seem to be flagged, and has a score of 15.)
|
| I tried again, and this time I get "Posts that look like
| spam are blocked", and a similar message if I try to
| leave a link in a comment.
|
| I wonder if spammers have been vandalizing Wikispecies
| and posting the links, but unlike Wikipedia the editors
| of Wikispecies struggle to remove the spam in time? The
| project has hundreds of thousands of pages, but the vast
| majority would have very little content or oversight. It
| could be the Wiki project with the worst pages-per-editor
| ratio.
|
| There isn't pornography, or at least only indirectly --
| Wikispecies doesn't host any images itself (says
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikispecies ).
| cess11 wrote:
| Perhaps they've become closer buddies with MICROS~1. I wouldn't
| be surprised if they did this in exchange for "AI" compute, i.e.
| that losing the Linux audience is worth less than being seen
| favourably by elder oligarchs.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| MS doesn't care about Linux any more like they did in the 90's
| and 00's.
| cess11 wrote:
| Sure they do. They really, really don't want government
| agencies and non-techies to realise that there is a better
| option for most everyday computer tasks.
| James_K wrote:
| > Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook's internal policy makers
| decided that Linux is malware
|
| I'm glad someone finally said it.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's been known for over 20 years:
| https://homestarrunner.com/sbemails/118-virus
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Ok, what's the true story?
|
| It is obviously allowed to discuss Linux. There is plenty of
| discussion about Linux on Facebook, including some about the
| recent "ban".
|
| My guess is that some automated scanner found something wrong
| about the linked page. Maybe there is some link to a
| "hacking"-oriented distro, maybe some torrents, some dubious
| comment, etc... Probably a false positive, it happens.
| indymike wrote:
| Kali is one example. That said Kali is not a bad thing.
| quesera wrote:
| We are obligated to have an external auditor run PCI DSS
| penetration testing and network segmentation testing every
| year.
|
| Their second request (after a network diagram) is always to
| create an EC2 instance running Kali.
|
| Which, honestly, confuses me a bit -- all of the packages are
| available in AL or Ubuntu, so why do they care? I don't know,
| and I guess I don't care enough to ask. Just give me the
| attestation document please. :)
| zblevins wrote:
| Think about all the time saved not having to do sudo or su.
| panki27 wrote:
| Kali has actually used a non-root user as default for a
| while now.
|
| Anyways, if you don't run `sudo -s` as your first command
| in a shell - are you really hacking?
| bluedino wrote:
| They don't know how to use Linux they just know Kali
| tsujamin wrote:
| More like compiling a bunch of github projects written by
| hackers is a pain in the ass, so "make me an ec2 with
| Kali" is more cost effective
| bluedino wrote:
| Fair point
| alp1n3_eth wrote:
| My assumption is it's for reducing the number of things
| they need to configure, and therefore troubleshoot.
|
| It's easy to say "The newest Kali release is the distro the
| org will use" instead of "Use whatever Linux flavor you
| want and here's an install script that may or may not work
| or break depending on your distro and/or distro's version".
|
| Them spending time troubleshooting a setup that's out-of-
| spec is still time billed, so it's better for their
| customers for everything to roll smoothly too. They also
| just want to execute their job well, not spend time
| debugging script / build issues.
| maple3142 wrote:
| From my experience, it is obviously not all the packages in
| Kali Repo will be in Ubuntu (or other regular distro) Repl.
| Lots of specific pentesting tool can be installed with just
| `apt install ...` in Kali, which make it a lot more
| convenient when you need to do pentesting.
| indymike wrote:
| Out of the box experience and some extra scripts :-)
| emmelaich wrote:
| pic mentions openKylin, I suppose Kylin is a bit like Kali?
|
| Likewise, discussion should be allowed.
|
| The actual title of this story is literally _not believable_
| if you take the most generic meaning of discussion and Linux.
|
| I'd go even further: I don't believe that _anyone_ could
| believe that the title is believable.
| indymike wrote:
| It is believable if you've experienced anything to do with
| moderation on Facebook. It's a dystopian experience that
| defies any ordinary expectation of normalcy.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Probably some jobsworth decided that free software = piracy.
|
| I knew a company that leapt to the same conclusion regarding
| GitHub.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Meta is one of the biggest contributors to free software in
| the world. They certainly don't believe that it's equivalent
| to piracy. If your guess is indeed what happened, it will be
| corrected by higher-ups soon.
| graemep wrote:
| It is perfectly possible that someone at a lower level,
| especially a non-technical person, would believe that.
| Moderators are not going to be highly paid and skilled
| people.
|
| It has to get to the attention of higher ups.
|
| The one time I have reported a comment to FB, it was
| horrible racism (said "do not interbreed with [group x]
| because they are [evil - not sure of exact wording]" and
| got a reply saying that it did not violate community
| standards.
| etc-hosts wrote:
| I thought Facebook fired all the human moderators ?
| emmelaich wrote:
| The pic accompanying mentions openKylin. Kylin is China's Unix,
| formerly based on FreeBSD, now Linux/Ubuntu.
|
| I presume that it is used for launching hacks, but even so
| discussion should not be banned.
|
| Just makes me wonder if DistroWatch is telling the whole story.
| thephyber wrote:
| " Just makes me wonder if DistroWatch is telling the whole
| story."
|
| Nobody outside of Facebook can possibly know the whole story.
| Hell, most people within Facebook can't know, either.
|
| Are you suspecting that distrowatch knows more about the
| context than they are letting on?
| emmelaich wrote:
| They know more than us, by definition. They could do more
| analysis and not be so dramatic. I'm not alleging anything
| nefarious.
| ramon156 wrote:
| But how else are you going to get the clicks?
| nottorp wrote:
| I think they're wrong about the policy. It's more likely that the
| policy is "let's run the moderation bots unattended to save
| costs" and is actually site agnostic.
|
| It's just some "AI" hallucinating.
| notfed wrote:
| Seems antithetical to Zuckerberg's recent "More Speech and
| Fewer Mistakes" announcement.
| im3w1l wrote:
| To be fair whenever something radically changes the risk of a
| regression is higher than normal.
| BryanLunduke wrote:
| No, Facebook is Not Censoring "Linux", Only "DistroWatch".
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOdMTS6XVu4
| tombert wrote:
| [flagged]
| RIMR wrote:
| [flagged]
| tombert wrote:
| I didn't say I felt bad.
| dang wrote:
| No personal attacks, please.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| paulnpace wrote:
| I'm not watching a 20 minute video on the topic, but there is a
| user in an HN comment[1] stating links to debian.org and qubes-
| os.org were removed by facebook.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42840143
| tored wrote:
| Thus Facebook is not censoring Linux discussions or Linux
| content, what DistroWatch claimed, it blocks linking to what
| Facebook deems as malicious links (correctly or incorrectly),
| something a lot of software does these days.
|
| This is what the yanks call "a complete nothing-burger".
| loeg wrote:
| It's a shame that this is one of the only accurate top-level
| comments and it's downvoted to hell.
| tombert wrote:
| I think the complaint is that it's not really a "comment", so
| much as it's a link to Bryan's own 20 minute video talking
| about it. It comes off as an annoying bit of self-promotion.
|
| Though I will admit that Bryan is just a deeply unlikable
| human who is generally under-informed-at-best on any given
| subject that he's talking about, so people might be looking
| at it more cynically than if someone else posted it.
| loeg wrote:
| Fair enough.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Facebook has been blocking distrowatch at least part of the time
| for three years now, see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29529312
|
| I've been perplexed for years, I wonder if it went unnoticed all
| this time or they reverted then reimplement the ban.
| loeg wrote:
| It's probably a recurrence of the same issue.
|
| If your domain links to content that AVs flag as malware, it
| gets blocked on FB. Distrowatch is likely uniquely susceptible
| to this because they're constantly linking to novel, 3rd-party
| tarballs (via the "Latest Packages" column).
|
| In this case, it was the Privoxy 4.0.0 release from the 18th.
| You can see it linked in this Jan 19 snapshot of the site:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250119125004/https://distrowat...
| rob74 wrote:
| Right, a proxy focused on privacy and removing ads. Of course
| that's "malware" to Facebook, a site recommending devilry
| such as this must be silenced at all cost...
| loeg wrote:
| Buddy. Not everything is a conspiracy theory.
|
| https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/c08e2ba0049307017bf9d8a
| 6...
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| It's either intentional, which would be puzzling and
| unsettling, or it's a bug which has gone unnoticed. In any case
| it is proof that big tech is in no shape to take on the
| responsibility for moderating discourse on the internet. This
| reminds me of the bug that falls into a typewriter in the
| beginning of the movie "Brazil" which causes a spelling error
| and the arrest and execution of a random innocent person.
| Granted, this type of automated banning without any ability to
| involve a real human is not costing any lives (yet), but I am
| increasingly worried about how big tech is becoming a
| Kafkaesque lawnmower. One thing is to deliberately censor
| speech that you do not like, another is to design a system
| where innocent and important speech is silently censored and
| noone in charge even notices.
| dmurray wrote:
| > It's either intentional, which would be puzzling and
| unsettling, or it's a bug which has gone unnoticed.
|
| I've long believed that a large part of technological evil
| comes from bugs which were introduced innocuously, but
| intentionally not fixed.
|
| Like, your ISP wouldn't intentionally design a system to
| steal your money, but they would build a low-quality billing
| system and then prioritise fixing systematic bugs that cause
| errors in the customer's favour, while leaving the ones that
| cause overbilling.
|
| This could easily be the same on Facebook - this got swept up
| in a false positive and then someone decided it's not a good
| one to fix.
| sixothree wrote:
| There's a rumor that an unnamed ISP did exactly that -
| overcharged a large portion of its customers due to a
| software bug. Then decided to not fix the issue instead
| relying on customers to call support and have the charge
| fixed.
| Neonlicht wrote:
| This has been going on for years. There are no humans to
| review your ban appeal. Tech companies don't want to spend
| money on customer service.
|
| And what are you going to do about it? Get into a lawyer slap
| fight with a foreign trillion dollar corporation?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| So this is what Zuck meant when he said Meta was "getting back to
| its roots"? (And I thought he was talking about reviving
| Facemash)
| nu2ycombinator wrote:
| Interesting. Same Facebook, refuses take action on reports
| submitted on fake accounts created to spam people and harassment
| videos.
| lukaslalinsky wrote:
| Yeah, I was really surprised by this. Last year, I reported a
| number of people, who were trying to scam me (via Messenger
| messages related to Marketplace listings). Not only did
| Facebook did not see anything wrong with the accounts and
| scammy messages, I was flagged for sending useless reports.
| guappa wrote:
| I suspect that the report button doesn't actually cause any
| human to be involved in the process.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| it (used to) in aggregate trigger human review (i.e. if many
| people report the same post). However, the humans who
| reviewed it were underpaid, overworked, and unlikely to have
| any context, so the output was not necessarily better than
| the automated system...
| buyucu wrote:
| this is why content moderation is a really bad idea. the false
| positives are going to dominate any moderation you do.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| I'd assert that using private walled gardens as primary
| distribution channels is the root bad idea here.
| buyucu wrote:
| they go together. once you have a walled garden, the
| temptation to moderate/censor it is too large. censorship was
| practically impossible in the old internet before social
| media.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| It was also largely unnecessary because folks hadn't
| normalized acting like wild animals in online spaces, tools
| for automating acting like a wild animal online were
| lacking, and reach was extremely limited so there was
| little financial incentive for private interests to engage
| with the space in any way. All of which takes a back seat
| to folks more or less agreeing that online is where
| bullshit lived and only an embarrassing rube would take any
| of it seriously. The great irony here being the amount of
| bullshit online has only increased decade over decade yet
| weirdly at some point folks started taking it seriously,
| with utterly predictable results.
| duxup wrote:
| Bot or ML gone wrong and it misunderstood the mention of Linux
| when associated with bad things and just equated them?
| beretguy wrote:
| Facebook is a cyber security threat.
| kazinator wrote:
| Didn't Zuck recently announce that he's getting rid of fact
| checkers, on the pretext that the parties hired to do fact
| checking are biased and introduce censorship and unfair false
| positives that get accounts shut down?
|
| Was it just a cost reduction: fact checking takes effort and
| those checkers have to be paid? With the result being situations
| like this?
| notfed wrote:
| Yes, which makes this claim more extraordinary. (And to be
| fair, I don't think there's extraordinary evidence presented
| here.)
| maeil wrote:
| It doesn't; it makes the ban more likely if anything. See how
| on certain topics the censorship immediately _increased_ as
| Musk took over Twitter.
| NikkiA wrote:
| > Was it just a cost reduction
|
| No, it was clearly an attempt to court Trump, unfortunately
| 'not enough ass kissing, yet' according to the trump team.
| unicornporn wrote:
| Both. Clearly both.
| the-grump wrote:
| Their phrasing was "mainstream discourse" wouldn't be censored.
|
| I guess Linux needs to go mainstream first.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| I'm pretty sure we're entering the year of the Linux desktop
| :)
| breakitmakeit wrote:
| Kowtowing to the king
| germandiago wrote:
| There is no such thing as unbiased information. So FWIW, I
| think fact checking is really just a fight for censorship.
| Official lies and half truths instead of lies from everywhere
| intermixed with truths.
|
| There are so many ways to do it wrong even if you tag info as
| true or fake and in principle you do it with good intention.
| For example it was the case that certain information was tagged
| as fake and when claimed for a correction the administrators
| "could not do anything" (Spain cases researched by Joan Planas
| by doing requests himself personally for the biggest official
| agency in Spain, called Newtral, which is intimately tied to
| the Socialist Party in Spain... really, the name makes me
| laugh, let us call war peace etc. like in 1984). But they were
| way faster in doing it in the other direction or often found
| excuses to clearly favor certain interests.
|
| Now put this in the context of an election... uh... complicated
| topic, but we all minimally awake people know what this is
| about...
| voidUpdate wrote:
| whats the bias on "1+1=2"?
| beeflet wrote:
| the decision to include the information or not include it
| in the discussion in the first place, regardless of whether
| it's objective information
| alt227 wrote:
| Bias towards base 10 numbering? How did you know 1+1 wasnt
| wanted to be calculated in binary?
| kazinator wrote:
| 1+1=2 has a correct interpretation in any base 3 and
| higher.
|
| How we know that it wasn't to be calculated in binary is
| that the digit 2 occurs.
|
| We have to have a reason to suspect that it was intended
| to be binary, otherwise we are inventing an inconsistency
| that isn't there in order to find a false or not-well-
| formed interpretation.
| germandiago wrote:
| I was going to say something but the other two replies
| illustrate well enough things, especially the one of what
| information to hide or show. Others: where a headline goes,
| how fast information is corrected, what is the protocol to
| correct and if that protocol has a neutral appearance that
| favors someone more than others.
|
| In fact I believe neutrality does not exist as such. No
| problem with it, objective information and multiple sources
| with their biases are ok to get an idea as long as facts
| are shown. But an official truth? Come on, what is that? It
| is dangerously similar to a dictatorship to have the
| monopoly of truth.
| kazinator wrote:
| Your point doesn't hold together because it seems to be
| conflating fact checking with bias elimination.
|
| They are obviously different and mostly separate.
|
| A presentation of facts can be biased.
|
| E.g. a news agency can have a characteristic political slant,
| yet not make up facts to suit that narrative.
|
| When a bias is severe, such that it leads to behaviors like
| concealing important facts in order to manipulate the correct
| understanding of a situation, then fact checking can find a
| problem with it.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Lol. So glad they let literal lies and propaganda going with
| community notes but keep something usefull. Garbage as always.
| Beretta_Vexee wrote:
| My wife was temporarily banned for a photo of a marble statue. My
| mother receives invitations to groups that share photos of
| migrants drowned in the Mediterranean. Don't use Facebook, and
| certainly don't depend on it.
|
| Edit: Recently, a lot of associations working to prevent HIV,
| sexually-transmitted diseases and family planning have been
| progressively de-listed, or their content blocked and their
| accounts banned, all over the world on all META platforms. This
| is the true face of freedom of expression according to META and
| its "community rules".
|
| Meta censorship of abortion pill content (french) :
| https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/veille-sanit...
| rglover wrote:
| This is the trouble with automation. It's clear this isn't a
| malicious post, it just matched some keywords their moderation
| bot identified as such.
|
| I think a lot of the censorship problems would be resolved if
| they just shut the bots off and relied on user flagging. Does
| that require a lot more people? Sure. But the long-run result
| would be far more people would use and trust these networks
| (covering the revenue of hiring moderators). I know I'd be a lot
| happier if there was a thinking human deciding my fate than a
| random script that only a few people know the inner-workings of.
|
| As-is, it seems like a lot of these social networks are just
| shooting themselves in the foot just to avoid costs and get a
| false sense of control over the problem.
| maybesomaybenot wrote:
| Um, no. I don't want to see pics of NSFL gore before the
| userbase has had a chance to remove them. Which is what most
| moderators spend time removing from FB, to the point where it
| psychologically traumatizes them.
| rglover wrote:
| You don't have to. That's actually a place where automation
| could help. You could just use image detection and auto-tag
| stuff as to what you think it contains. Then, have a list of
| sensitive tags that are automatically blurred out in the feed
| (and let users customize the list as they see fit).
|
| If it's something trending towards illegal, toss it into an
| "emergency" queue for moderators to hand-verify and don't
| make it visible until it's been checked.
|
| So in your example, if someone uploads war imagery, it would
| be tagged as "war," "violence," "gore" and be auto-blurred
| for users. That doesn't mean the post or account needs to be
| outright nuked, just treated differently from SFW stuff.
| maybesomaybenot wrote:
| You assume automation solves the problem. If it did,
| Facebook wouldn't be hiring close to 100,000 humans to
| inspect content.
| rglover wrote:
| Automation + human intervention, yes. In the setup I
| described, worst case scenario something gets blurred out
| that's benign, but it doesn't create a press/support
| nightmare for Meta.
|
| Considering they've open sourced one of their image
| detection API [1], I'd imagine it's more a problem of
| accuracy and implementation at scale than a serious
| technical hurdle.
|
| [1] https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2
| notfed wrote:
| Those are subjective clarifications, and so will differ
| between each person. And models are pre-trained to
| recognize these classifications.
|
| Since you mentioned war, I'm reminded of Black Mirror
| episode "Men Against Fire", where an army of soldiers have
| eye implants that cause them to visually see enemy soldiers
| as unsightly. (My point being this is effectively what
| Facebook can do.)
| vcryan wrote:
| Dump Facebook.
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| What am I missing here? Why would anyone go to Facebook to
| discuss Linux?
| mindcrime wrote:
| I'm not convinced this is intentional. I think their auto-
| moderation stuff is just buggy lately. To illustrate part of why
| I say that:
|
| Yesterday I tried to submit a link to a Youtube video of the
| Testament song "Native Blood". Nothing _terribly_ controversial
| about that, and I 'm nearly 100% sure I've posted that song
| before with no problems. But it kept getting denied with some
| "link not allowed because blah, blah" error.
|
| So is "Native Blood" banned on FB? Well, I tried a link to a
| different video of the same song, and was able to submit it just
| fine. This feels like a bug to me, and I wouldn't be surprised if
| similar bugs were interfering with other people trying to post
| stuff.
|
| Granted that's just speculation so take this for what it's worth.
| thefounder wrote:
| Facebook is just a website. Move on!
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I thought they were going to go full free speech. /s
|
| Seriously, if you haven't already, sign up for a Mastodon
| account. This is the motivation you need. Encourage some friends
| and family members to connect with you there.
| loeg wrote:
| Distrowatch was blocked for linking to an AV-flagged privoxy
| 4.0.0 tarball. The same kind of anti-malware blocking you'd
| expect for a mass-market, non-technical audience. Nothing to do
| with "speech" or Linux in general.
|
| Some context: https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/site-support/26448/
| amatecha wrote:
| Well, that doesn't explain why someone else in this discussion
| had their post removed, as there was no mention of distrowatch:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42840143
| loeg wrote:
| Probably entirely unrelated to the distrowatch thing.
| amatecha wrote:
| Who knows? The article says "I've tried to appeal the ban
| and was told the next day that Linux-related material is
| staying on the cybersecurity filter." -- presumably we
| could ask Distrowatch to share the exact wording of the
| response they got back, but the fact FB apparently
| responded in such a way suggests it wasn't a filter
| specific to Distrowatch.
| loeg wrote:
| I think the Distrowatch author is just missummarizing the
| interaction.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42848244
| amatecha wrote:
| Maybe! We're all just speculating about the degree of
| accuracy here. I messaged them on Mastodon to see if they
| will clarify the text. Will post back if I hear from
| them.
| ozim wrote:
| I guess filtering is level of: _" My 11-year-old son keeps
| talking about this Linux thing with his computer. What is
| Linux? Is it a hacking tool? Should I be worried?"_
| Vaslo wrote:
| Thank you for providing this, it seemed a little clickbaity.
| Even far less technical companies run some things in Linux so
| seems weird they'd ban Linux talk in general.
| bjoli wrote:
| I had my post removed a couple of weeks ago for linking to aeon
| desktop (immutable opensuse).
| archon810 wrote:
| On another note, Sourceforge just removes the malware flag, but
| did they actually check anything or just went with the provided
| explanation without any concrete details? If I hijacked some
| software and got caught, I'd act nonchalantly like this as well
| and hope it'll blow over without anyone noticing.
| loeg wrote:
| As far as I know, they didn't check anything. (And neither
| have I -- no comment on whether this is an AV true positive
| or false positive.)
|
| Here's VirusTotal on the tarball (note Chrome blocks its
| download, for the same reason): https://www.virustotal.com/gu
| i/file/c08e2ba0049307017bf9d8a6...
|
| Nimda was a Windows malware from 2001. It seems unlikely that
| would be a meaningful attack vector for a compromised privoxy
| in 2025. But again, I have not investigated it.
| habibur wrote:
| I get blocked anytime I share my github project.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Their filters are comically bad. I belong to a Selectric
| Typewriter enthusiats group and we keep having to re-word things
| so they don't go into a black hole. Typewriter parts like
| "operational shaft" or "type ball" or even brand names of gun
| cleaners and lubricants that are popular with typewriter folks
| will cause a post not to appear.
| emmelaich wrote:
| Oh just stop it you, I feel my loins tingling.
| userbinator wrote:
| Like the others have mentioned, I don't think this is anything
| more sinister than AI moderation gone wild.
| amatecha wrote:
| I'd argue that automated ""AI""-driven moderation is actually
| more sinister than a human being deciding it. Censorship and
| control over communication by automated processes should be
| held to a very high standard (and probably regulated, I'd
| think). From IBM in 1979: "A computer can never be held
| accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management
| decision." (
| https://web.archive.org/web/20221216204215/https://twitter.c...
| )
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Yeah, these days it's basically the opposite: since a
| computer making a decision means we (in the C-suite) can't be
| held accountable, ALL decisions should be made by computer..
| amatecha wrote:
| haha, I was thinking something along those lines as I was
| typing the prior msg! "oh, machine algo, not our fault.
| we'll try to fix it in the future" >_>
| hansvm wrote:
| I wonder how thinly veiled those decisions can be and still
| fly under a court's radar [0].
|
| [0] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/algo?ht-comment-
| id=1201119...
| chris_wot wrote:
| Another great reason to not use Facebook or any other social
| media.
| kussenverboten wrote:
| discuss GNU instead... or maybe microcontrollers
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Wonder if someone used "qubes" as a way to work around a ban on
| "pubes" and the filter thought it was porn?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I recall a headline from (checks notes) 2014. Linux users are
| extremists according to the NSA
| (http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/nsa-linux-journal-
| extrem...).
|
| I imagine something about that caused certain lists to be
| populated in certain ways, and no linux user cares enough about
| Facebook to help them correct the problem.
| hansvm wrote:
| I cared tiny bit. I even went out and bought a phone so that I
| could "prove I was a real person" or whatever to try to make a
| FB account. Account creation failed, my IP was banned, and I
| just blocked every FB domain and haven't looked back.
| kouru225 wrote:
| Ah shit I guess they've been storing my browsing history
| then...
| imchillyb wrote:
| Can't sell Linux users AI.
|
| Inability to market directly is antithesis to Facebook and its
| ilk.
|
| Linux gives users control. That is the very last thing anyone in
| power wants anyone else to have.
| docmars wrote:
| Welcome to 2020 Facebook, except they're coverage of valid topics
| to ban and censor has expanded more broadly now. This might've
| been avoided had more of its users sent a message 4-5 years ago
| that social media censorship isn't acceptable in a society that
| prides itself on free speech.
| zactato wrote:
| It makes sense
|
| I assume Facebook doesn't want anything posted on FB that can't
| be turned into a racist diatribe. There's not a whole lot of
| racism potential in Kernel tuning.
|
| Maybe you could squeeze in anti-Finnish rant about Linus, but it
| would be minimal
| rolandog wrote:
| My hypothesis is that they're now censoring things that seem
| "lefty".
| guappa wrote:
| They have been censoring lefty things for ages... It's well
| known how you could be openly nazi but never openly communist.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| There's no excuse for Facebook's behavior, but... Who savvy
| enough to use Linux also uses Facebook?
| Iolaum wrote:
| The ones who have family and friends that use it.
| funcDropShadow wrote:
| Didn't Mark Zuckerberg say he would reduce censorship on FB just
| a few weeks ago?
| aurelien wrote:
| For information X and Meta are not Social Network but Identity
| Tracing Network.
|
| Give their database to bot for search and destroy and you will
| understand by how many will survive.
|
| Good luck!
| 7bit wrote:
| I thought Zuckerberg was removing any fact checkers and platform
| censoring. I'm thoroughly confused. But maybe since Zuckerbergs
| death the company changed directions again.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| The cost of pissing of devs is so high, why cant companies just
| knuckle under- stop attacking add-blocking browsers like firefox
| or dev-operating systems. Why would you want to enter that world
| of pain of getting a ton of adversaries with while balancing on
| stack o swiss-cheese and duct tape? What is going wrong in those
| decision maker heads.
| akurilov wrote:
| After the ethnic cleaning of the Linux maintainers list I would
| say I'm not impressed
| germandiago wrote:
| Well, my confidence in the owner of this company is as high as...
| so I am not surprised that if he is paid (I have no idea this os
| the case in this very situation), he will no wonder do what the
| money dictates without any consideration whatsoever. Did anyone
| see the ridiculous change he made after years of selling (at
| least in Europe) fact checking, following censorship and teaming
| up, the scandal selling data to influence an election before. I
| do not expect anything nice from this leadership. That is why I
| stopped using Facebook years ago as much as I could.
| yuvalr1 wrote:
| Maybe it is about time that we stop relying on closed gardens,
| censored and managed on a whim, and start reclaiming our internet
| and freedom back, publishing in open platforms?
| ribcage wrote:
| Only morons use garbage like Twitter or Facebook anyway.
| Lardsonian wrote:
| Interesting, lets just see what Facebook runs on...
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