Facebook deactivated account after it advocated decentralized social networks

Why not? I remember long time ago they blocked and de-ranked posts with urls to competitive products.

And I don't see anything illegal here. Facebook.com is a private website of Mark and stakeholders, they can do whatever they want on their territory (if it's legal). As much as you can do on your backyard.

Ethics is a different topic, but it's perfectly legal.

I agree, although there's another side to "patently stupid ideas", which is that outlandish (yet true) happenings are minimized.

Like if someone said "facebook tracks you everywhere you go" or "your phone is listening to you" or "your television watches everything you watch" it would be shrugged off.

It sounds like the people are the problem, not the platform. If anything things could be much worse without the moderation that does take place, and security.

If Facebook provided an explanation, the individual affected might be less prone to speculation.

no obviously not. User was probably banned for another reason or in error.

I mean do people seriously believe Sheryl Sandberg is sitting somewhere banning Lincoln from Utah with a thousand followers so that he can't spread the gospel of Mastodon

I do, and am working on it, not to profit... just to route around the damage to the internet it causes.

If anything I wouldn't be surprised to hear Facebook funding them. Can't be a monopoly if you've got a "competitor"

Like how Google gave duck.com to DuckDuckGo and funds Mozilla

It’s still facebooks fault for not providing a real reason. They should show the reason a user got banned and not just a vague “rules violation”.

Most likely.

However, given the strength of Facebook's monopoly, they have the power of a state over people's lives (e.g. via a livelihood that depends on a Facebook account).

The lack of due process (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_process) is very worrying.

The Magna Carta says "No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land."

This feels like a breach of that, even though it is a monopoly corporation, instead of a state.

Well, I have a lighter but somewhat similar story. I deactivated my FB account a good 4-ish months ago. I went back to change my name (to indicate for folks where to find me) 2 weeks ago and I was greeted with a message that I cannot post or comment for 60 days because one of my posts (they showed which) is against community guidelines. I posted that a long time ago (8+ months) and it was fine until it apparently wasn't. The post was a single image, this one: https://imgur.com/a/BqgX28c

Without specifics, Facebook has basically given the suspended person freedom to choose whatever reason they want. This is fair.

If Facebook doesn’t like this explanation and it circulates to millions of people, they are free to offer a competing explanation.

Arguing an unproven point isn’t a problem here, it’s a strategy, and it’s a good one.

A good guess for the actual reason would perhaps be that someone who posts lots of links runs a risk of posting ones found in a blacklist. That blacklist probably doesn’t deliberately contain “competing social networks” though, but could contain such links in error, indicated as phishing or malware.

Twitter and Facebook have radically different leadership, and therefore they do not take the same approach. In a related note, Twitter is actively developing and promoting decentralized social mediums and decentralized protocols.