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Comment by snarf | Hacker News Reader

Facebook sat idly by during an election cycle as their platform was used to propagate fake news because blocking this stuff would amount to censorship, and now they suddenly have the moral imperative to police your private messages? I am so glad I quit Facebook a long time ago. They are the big tech company I like the least.

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> because blocking this stuff would amount to censorship

Facebook fired its "news curators" in response to criticism of it suppressing "news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential 'trending' news section" [1]. This happened in May of last year.

[1] http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-supp...

Right, in an effort not to appear as though they are editorializing legitimate news stories for one side or the other via what appears in the trending news section, they threw the baby out with the bath water. Fake news is not legitimate news. It's a form of spam. They did nothing to remove this spam once they got rid of the human editors. So the trending news section went from left leaning legitimate news stories under human editors to a bunch of spam. Now they want to use automated methods to police your private messages when they couldn't be bothered to figure out an automated method to remove spam from their trending news section when it really mattered.

The policing of private messages is not new or sudden. Facebook has censored "offensive" (yet legal) private messages for years. One can assume they also already detect and report criminal activity to some degree. But it's understandable that they wouldn't want to shine the spotlight on this practice.

For a while there it was headline news every time a breastfeeding mother got censored.

AFAIK those are images posted publicly or semi-publicly and getting flagged by prudes, or at least that's how it gets portrayed. But my friend sent a series of Middle East carnage images to me in "private" messages, and they were removed a few days later with a message about being inappropriate for the site. Neither of us flagged them.

Those same photos might have just been posted elsewhere on Facebook publicly and flagged there. Not that I am supporting Facebook or censorship or anything, but on the technical aspect, maybe there's an explanation that doesn't involve reading the private messages.

There is an easy to prove that they do read private messages. Send a private message with a link that points to your private website. Wait a few minutes and you should see in your server's logs that Facebook's bot is trying to crawl that url.

True, but they also show a preview of the page in the message, which would require fetching it. Pretty much every messaging service does that now. Also, there are legitimate reasons to scan URLs (malware, for example). Again, not trying to defend Facebook or absolve them of violating privacy, just saying that for these specific criticisms, there are technical explanations.

If you're scanning the URL for malware, why wouldn't you pick up some data mining info for the involved users while at it?

Because that takes (a lot) more effort, and you're on a schedule?

Yeah but you make money if you do, even if you spend the resources. This is not really a convincing answer.

I know I was having difficulties sharing a link to porn video. I was using private message, but it didn't let me to send the damn link.

> because blocking this stuff would amount to censorship

Or because they were raking in money off the back of it.

This maybe true, but the mechanics of it escape me?

Many fake news sites were destination sites which carried ads. It seems unlikely that the margin on that traffic would have been enough to pay for significant Facebook traffic.

The version of this play which I've heard was:

- Create fake "news" site with outrageous stories.

- Cover it with ads (from Google and others)

- Seed it in Facebook groups

- Rely on organic reach to generate traffic.

I maybe wrong about the ability to to arbitrage on this traffic. If anyone has numbers I'd love to see them.

When our granparents did this, they called it satire and had to chop down a lot of trees to like and share.

I believe the parent means Facebook makes money off of this indirectly. The more salacious fake news on Facebook, the higher the user engagement rate with the news feed, and the more time spent on Facebook reading and sharing this stuff. This translates to more ad revenue for Facebook.

Yeah, maybe, if we are stretching.

But I wouldn't describe that as "raking in money" - more like a marginal increase which might have been matched by other changes in the news feed algorithm.

> Facebook sat idly by

if you think that, you have been reading Fake News

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