FB messenger silently censoring links, claims they were sent
twitter.com
twitter.com
Remember them talking about how they engaged in experiments on their users by trying to influence their mood via intentionally showing their various groups different types of content algorithmically on their news feed? Or when they intentionally kept crashing their Android app to see what’s their user retention rate even on faulty software? Or just open up the app on two phones of the exact similar make and model and see the app menu?
My personal anecdote and experience with this is that they also use random errors to disguise bans. I have a personal and a dev account which I made the first time I accidentally got banned for 24 hours because it also reset OAuth app keys, the next time I got banned I logged in to my dev acct. and tried to make a post, since they managed to associate the two accounts, I ended up banned on that one, too. But it didn’t say that, it kept throwing random errors as if it was only a backend issue. These disappeared once my main ban was gone.
So all in all my point is, people should understand that the platform outright does these kinds of things and use or find alternatives based on that
I also own an Oculus and have given credit for the Quest in the past as the closest thing to mainstreaming VR to date, it's unfortunate that it operates under Facebook but it's probably the only hardware business they'll have that'll hold any interest to me. I have a separate account for mine because I don't trust or like them (and I really dislike "social" features in games). That being said, I expect it to get caught up and destroyed eventually so I hope at that point the hacker community will have an answer to keep it working outside of the Facebook ecosystem. (There may already be one, I have not checked.)
I've used it before as a moderator. For the above reasons, but mostly because I'm lazy and don't want to deal with angry people. Still censorship though. I think that ideally censorship ought to be communicated.
Yeah, you described it well.
Start by understanding, Mr Moderator, there is a hell of a lot of difference between public posts and private messages.
I would be carefuly about that.
"and if you don't give it to them they generally move on."
The craziest has lots of stuff going on. Lots of anger and hate. So if they decide, that you are their mortal enemy for shadow banning them, they might not move on.
In my case, I post using my first name and most regulars would know who I am. It's a sports forum and people have recognised me at games, etc. I've had people look up my phone number and call me aggressively about things. I've had countless legal letters and threats. Someone doxxed my parents in the early days. You quickly learn how many unhinged members of society we have.
(I browse with showdead on because the volume is small on HN, and every now and again you come across people in the former category who were shadowbanned for one or a few incidents relatively far in the past, who since then seem to have acted reasonable, where it's worth pointing it out so they can appeal their ban - mostly the flagged comments or shadowbans are well deserved, though)
Ostensibly used for spam/troll countermeasures. In practice used to dick with whoever they choose for whatever reasons please their black little hearts.
Reddit and Twitter are notorious for it. Other "social media" organisms too.
AND ANOTHER MORE IMMEDIATE EXAMPLE
Consider the way that downvotes progressively remove a post from view.
It's a way of crowdsourcing the task of censorship.
Many hands make light work.
And the blame is neatly spread around.
And the actual shape of the censorship, the form being conformed to, is only indirectly controlled by the admins. Thus more blame neatly escaped.
It's goddamn elegant is what it is!
But that's not the only definition. wikipedia defines censorship thus:
"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".[2][3][4] Censorship can be conducted by governments,[5] private institutions, and other controlling bodies. " (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship)
You can argue whether or not moderation is necessary or not but it most definately is censorship.
The way it is being applied by FB is most certainly censorship and highly inappropriate and destructive.
>You can argue whether or not moderation is necessary or not but it most definitely is censorship.
Moderation is censorship, and censorship is evil. It may be a necessary evil (because liability if nothing else) but it needs to be seen and treated as evil. Meaning to be used as sparingly as possible.
In the context of this conversation? Moderation is evil because it is destructive, repressive, exploitable for the cause of tyranny (eg silencing dissent) and is the opposite of that which is good (freedom of expression, freedom of thought, free flow of information).
Like any other violence, there are times when it's warrented but it's always a balance. The greater good is to keep the forum open, so it's necessary to remove illegal materials. And that's an easy call when what is illegal is child pornography; but what about when what is illegal is a political message or even just a series of seemingly random numbers?
Sometimes it's the lesser evil (child porn is always the greater evil) and sometimes moderation is the greater evil (repressing political messages or being used in the service of propping up totalitarian regimes).
I apologize if this doesn't make things clearer for you. As I said at the beginning; the nature of evil is a broad question that has been wrestled by philosophers for millennia.
Sure, people do bad things, but it’s not ”evil people” who do bad things — it’s just people, the same people who have the capacity to do good things also do bad things.
You can argue the tool is being used too widely by Facebook, but it is silly to pontificate against the practice as a whole.
You reaaaaallly would not like the uncensored internet.
Respectfully, speak for yourself.
I prefer truth to being enslaved into conformance by "the algorithm".
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200630/23525844821/parle...
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210825/17204647438/trump...
You need to understand difference between communication that is meant to be public from one that is meant to be private.
Law makes clear distinction.
Not sure why you brought the law up, as far as I know what FB is doing is 100% legal.
I can't think of any reason one would be considered private and the other not.
Why is FB Messenger 'private' while Reddit DMs are 'not private'?
Piece of paper isn't common carrier. If I write a note to my wife and give it myself it is private because I wanted and expected it private. If I taped it to a billboard it means I no longer expect it private and it is public.
Despite phone companies being common carriers (and thus being required to carry communications without censoring them), the Supreme Court has made it clear that people should have no reasonable expectation of privacy when they relay communications through a pay phone. The reasoning was that you give up your right to privacy when you involve a third party to your conversation. See Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967).
So the two can coexist.
Only common carriers are forced to carry speech unimpeded, regardless of its content. Expectation of privacy is irrelevant to common carrier status. The former is about whether it can be intercepted. The latter is about whether it can be impeded.
More recent decisions suggest that the third party doctrine, according to which there is no legitimate expectation of privacy in information voluntarily turned over to third parties, is unlikely to apply to private messages on Facebook:
As you said, Katz did say that we do have a reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to person-to-person communications. However, that has no bearing on whether the carrier can or cannot block the communication. That still hinges on whether the carrier is a common carrier.
Conversation on messenger is multiple messages, blocking would be preventing entire conversation. Removing some messages selectively changes meaning of other messages
It is according to Facebook. Here is a quote from their own website:
> We’re dedicated to making sure Messenger is a safe, private, and secure place for you to connect with the people who matter.
If you’ve never moderated anything halfway popular you have no idea what “uncensored” means in 2021.
It isn’t early 90s usenet. It’s endless spam, porn, etc
Respectfully disagree. Watching things get disappeared on Reddit sent me in to an anxiety spiral.
I'll take goatse links over that shit any day of the week.
Imagination often does not match reality. I have a (non-Gmail) account that is littered over the web, in git repositories and in multiple leaks. I don't silently drop any emails - the only server-side anti-spam measure I have a regexp to reject the usual spam subjects at submission time, which for normal senders will result in a notification to the user. The amount of spam is hardly at a level that would be anywhere close to making Email unusable.
These days people of every cultural background get a seat at the table. That changes things. And that’s to say nothing of the advent of professional, anonymous astroturfing and disinformation campaigns.
Going back would be an abject disaster.
The Internet might have seemed “better” back then and like it didn’t need moderation. From many people’s perspective it probably was. But that was likely a function of the reality that most people on the Internet at the time had a lot in common with one another.
We don’t get the benefit of that luxury today.
If every discussion on HN was derailed by bad actors, you'd go somewhere else. If there was nowhere else moderated to go to, you'd probably just stop engaging altogether.
There was a greater diversity of social gathering places.
Now -there's facebook, twitter, reddit and HN.
Moderation has ALWAYS been a factor and that's not what made the old internet better.
What made the old internet better was that it was open and more diverse (in terms of viewpoint and choices). The new internet is basically (on a social level) a few social media corporations which are becoming increasingly sterile.
We’ve gone to our own corner here on Hacker News. And yet there’s moderation to keep discussion on-topic and respectful. In my estimation you likely choose to participate in this corner of the Internet because of the moderation of both link submissions and comments. Without it, HN would devolve into a cesspool over time like every other attempt at unmoderated forums that’s been tried. Well-meaning participants would be driven out by trolls, spammers, and angry people with an axe to grind.
There is shadow banning on HN and I disagree with it, but I should be able to make the above generalisation of why HN seems to work with less moderation than expected.
On sites like 4chan, there is some moderation, but again, the few interesting comments that exist get automatically highlighted by the engagement that occurs within the page. Moderation does not allow this to exist, census does. Moderation just helps but I argue the site would work without it, and thats how the internet used to work. Even newgroups that used the wrong mechanic to handle consensus based uploading, and suffered from spam , had content that was good and easy to find, without any moderation that I could see.
I respectfully suggest that HN has significantly more moderation than you believe it does.
Seeing the monopoly of Google in browser sector, the whole predatory ads sphere, manipulative social media and the attitude corporations and politicians have towards ordinary people regarding the technology, I don't think I want to see what will be the next big thing in the evolution of the Internet and related tech.
As late as 2003, 90% of the world was not on the internet.
Internet culture represents the average person now whereas it didn't at all up through the first Internet bubble and bust.
I remember the uncensored internet -it was vastly superior to what we have now.
Vastly.
Keeping online identities separate from the real world worked both ways. It protected rational critics, trolls and shitposters alike.
The problem never was anonymity or freedom of expression. No. Social media is when life online went into freefall. Curiously, a pillar of its business model is melding real life with internet identity.
That is a very, very good analogy, however.
The internet of old had a wider variety of establishments that you could go to. If you wanted a rough-and-tumble dive bar experience it was there. If you wanted a polished experience it was there too.
The effect facebook and other social media has had on the internet is the same effect that walmart had on small mom and pop stores -you can still find one here and there but no, not really.
Incidentally, for all of the censorship and increased barriers to entry (for creating forums) your drooling meth head still presents a danger in the form of doxxing, inciting riots (Jan 6th, any one?) and harassing people.
Think of the scariest person you've ever met (really, take a moment and actually do it) and ask if he or she would have been online in 1995; the chances are they would not. But they are now.
Nowadays allow everybody to post anything and you will only see SPAM for the rest of you life, it will become impossible to see anything of value.
From my point of view it's less commercial vs non-commercial (though I think most of the problems either stem from, or are aggravated by commercial factors) as much as it is diversity versus consolidation.
Ten, fifteen years ago there was a greater number of varied forums and social gathering places with a greater number variety of viewpoints. Now while there's the odd vb bulliten board here and there you have fewer and fewer populated forums -everything seems to have coalescened (socially speaking) into twitter and facebook.
Basically, from my point of view, Social Media has consumed the rest of the social internet (meaning forums). I think there's more than one cause for that but that's what I see as the main thing making the past superior to the present -the ability to not just have your own place, but to have a chance at it reaching out to more people than just you and your friends.
There is a case where I'm pretty sure commercialization is the problem. Phone app stores are modeled on Linux repositories. Linux repositories are good. App stores are awful. The problem is the level of interest from bad actors, and the reason they're interested is the commercialization.
It's a problem, and yes -a major one. But I think that it's just one of many factors contributing (negatively) to the situation.
And Reddit and Discord.
It is a monumentally difficult task to create a forum these days, from a social PoV.
and legal, and probably technical PoV as well; yes.
The large platforms have sucked all of the oxygen out of the room, and have gained what I feel is an unhealthy control of what can and cannot be said.
I have no idea what can be done to fix the situation; but none the less, there it is.
Mountains of spam, porn, violence, etc
If you’d ever moderated anything halfway popular you’d know. Shadowbans are an essential tool.
They can be way overused. But there is a reason everyone used them. Constant arms race between sites and spammers.
Does it really work? A lot of people have no trouble working out that it has happened to them. The theory is that a troublemaker won't realise they've been banned, and so will continue sending their trouble into the void instead of coming back as a new account to cause more trouble that everyone else can see. In practice, it doesn't take long for the troublemaker to work out what is going on, so this only slows them down slightly at best. For some major sites, people have even created shadowban detection tools, so even troublemakers who are too clueless to work it out for themselves can discover it.
This site only really has half-shadowbanning. A lot of people have showdead on, read the dead comments too, and vouch for interesting/constructive ones. Maybe that works for this site; but even if that is true, it doesn't really tell us how well a pure shadowban implementation, without showdead, works. Very few sites with shadowbanning have an equivalent to showdead.
I reserve it for people I believe will ban evade or have in the past.
!!!
Are we nonchalantly accepting its OK to censor and moving on to the argument about deceiving users?
Edit: should add more context to this. I don't think we should be casually OK with censorship. Next thing you know, FB will silently(or not) start censoring political opponents, activists they don't like, etc. I am quite unsettled by how the west is doing the same as China. Censorship is just casually taken as granted now. I don't think counter arguments hold for "private platforms". At some point, it becomes public square when a billion+ people use your platform.
Personally I'm disturbed at the non-chalant attitude taken towards shadow moderation in this thread. Shadow banning and shadow moderation may make one's job easier but it has a disastrous effect on the forum or community by injecting a definite level of deceit into the moderator/poster relationship.
Any forum where shadow bans /shadow moderation are practiced the moderators by definition can not be trusted.
I think that might be a pretty good mechanism, all said and done. Someone acts in a way the community doesn't accept enough times they go dead, and then if they act acceptably they start getting people responding and participating to them as they come out of dead status. They only get attention, and positive attention, from acting responsibly.
I read with showdead=yes and it is nowhere near that description. In fact dead posts are not even that common on most articles. And most of the dead posts, while on average low quality, are very rarely hateful or anything like that.
Like many policies that might actually have an effect, I'm hesitant to say exactly how much it achieves without data comparing what it's like without it.
You say that as if it's fact, but I'm not sure it is. HN has a method of shadow banning that is reversible if you are noticed as posting stuff that contributes and follows the guidelines, and even when you are shadow banned, people can opt into seeing your contributions (I've had showdead on from day one, I think).
There are places in the internet you can go to make sure you are heard and you can say whatever you want. If you prefer to post here instead of there, then some examination on why that is might be warranted, and specifically whether the thing you are complaining about helps or hinders making this place somewhere you feel worth spending time.
How is it not? Shadowbans by definition are deceptive; their whole intent is to deceive the poster into thinking that their message was sent and is readable.
If you post and your message appears to appear on the thread but only you can read it then...you are being deceived. The message board software is lying to you.
Since it is the moderators who decide that then it's the relationship between you (the poster) and the moderators that determines whether or not your post actually successfully completes or if you're being lied to.
That is what I mean when I say that shadowbans inject a factor of deceit into the poster/moderator relationship.
It's possible to argue that it doesn't, but it's also possible to argue that the moon is made of green cheese as well. Neither argument is the truth.
>There are places in the internet you can go to make sure you are heard and you can say whatever you want.
And there are places where if you are banned, you know it; if your comment is removed, you know it. My qualm in this thread is about the deceptive practice of shadowbanning.
> If you prefer to post here instead of there, then some examination on why that is might be warranted, and specifically whether the thing you are complaining about helps or hinders making this place somewhere you feel worth spending time.
May I ask -was it your intent to come off as being condescending and borderline insulting? If not, you ought to be aware that is how that sentence came off. And I'll tell you for nothing that being talked down to after spending 25 years on the internet does NOT contribute positively towards HN being a place worth spending time in.
It's also a hand-wave -meaning a distraction from my primary point which is about shadowbanning and the fact it injects a note of deceit into the moderator/user relationship.
There are pluses and minuses to everything; good points and bad points. Obviously since I will continue posting in HN I see more positive points than negative ones -but that does not change the fact ...and it is a fact... that I believe (and have no reason not to believe) that shadowbans have a negative effect on the larger community that they're practiced on. They make HN a place less worth coming to, and the fact that there are positives reasons to come to HN does not change that.
So -to long didn't read summary; shadowbans undermine posters' faith in moderators and serve to undermine the credibility of moderation as a whole.
This is because the user is not considered part of the community. A shadowban is something you deploy against a user that is presumed to be a malicious actor in the system. It's deceit, but in a similar category of deceit to telling a user the resource is 404 not found instead of 403 or 401 because you don't even trust them enough to let them know that they found a resource that exists. It's deceit with the purpose of stymiing further malicious action.
Is it the same? Showing a 404 is a security measure that applies equally to anyone lacking sufficient privileges. Ideally an app should prevent you from getting these, or show a message like "Not found, or no access".
> It's deceit with the purpose of stymiing further malicious action.
Shadowbans are powerful moderation weapons. Too much so, I'd say. The moderator is both prosecutor, judge and executioner. Who is the lawyer? Who revises after a time if the shadowbanned person has redeemed themself? Maybe their bad behavior was just a temporary fit, or even a mental breakdown they have since recovered from. Or they just become wiser grown-ups over time. All very human things that happen, but now they have a harsh sentence applied to them, and they may not even know about it.
Especially at scale these things should be handled properly. And importantly there should be transparency of how the procedures work, what the status is, and what one can do about it.
I also wonder to what degree on the big social platforms there exist even more subtle measures than all-out shadowbans. Like setting metrics on a sliding scale to define the extent the AI should limit a person's influence on the network.
Maybe this already has a name, but let's call it "shadow suppression". With such measures in place a person's voice can be dimimished for a lifetime without them ever knowing. They get a Like or a Comment here and there, but they will never go viral or even reach the audience that they think they address, and no matter how good their content and behavior becomes.
Facebook is one (which is why they will be reinstating Trump's account in the future: https://about.fb.com/news/2021/06/facebook-response-to-overs...).
Edit: I submitted a separate Ask HN on "shadow suppression": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28344492
Being out of Facebook's decisions on what you may say is as simple as closing your account.
If people can make sound independent judgment, we don't need a law constraining what private companies must allow on their services because private users will find the censorship reprehensible and will voluntarily leave. We need the First Amendment to constrain what government can do because people cannot voluntarily leave a government; the same is not true for their Facebook account.
And if people cannot make sound independent judgment, and their desire to fit in will make them give up all sorts of rights... How can we trust them with the freedom to say and hear unfiltered information? The first demagogue who comes along and convinces them they must do what he says or they don't fit in will have the whole user base in their power, right? In such a context, it is perhaps necessary to allow the media its freedom of the press to transmit what is true and refrain from transmitting what is false.
Why does this always come up? Like this exact example. Where there no others? Do you know how I read this? “I think I’m smarter than everyone, and everyone should look to me for the truth”.
> In such a context, it is perhaps necessary to allow the media its freedom of the press to transmit what is true and refrain from transmitting what is false.
This is mostly what we have now. Go compare the divide between the parties vs the Grand Canyon. This is the result. Why? Because opinions. And what does the left do when they can’t disprove an opinion ? Cancel/censor.
We also need the first amendment to apply to corporations. The left found the loophole and is giddily exercising it.
I am not sure if that is true anymore, with the implementation of anti-discrimination laws.
I mean practically it is still the internet, but if your service is public and beyond a certain size, someone might indeed sue you for doing that.
Just because you and are I reasonable doesn't mean the overarching internet is. It's manifestly not. It's extremely likely that a large part of the signal that makes this community valuable would depart if it was entirely filled with 10x as much noise.
Let people make their own communities with different standards if they don't like this one.
What does this say about those participants who do leave? The entire point of different opinions is different points of view on the same subject. Those leaving simply because they don’t like the general narrative do no abide by this principle and probably shouldn’t have been in the community in the first place. Those leaving because they experienced daily abuse, that’s reasonable. I still don’t think they should leave, but instead grow thicker skin.
Because when someone is censoring you can't know if it's crazy or not. You just assume it is, like you are now.
I think that not getting rid of that content/malicious participants (not community members) undermines faith in moderation.
There’s a clear difference between male enhancement spam and a guy with a poorly thought out comment that most people find disagreeable. A middle schooler can spot the difference.
Back in my day we welcomed those poorly reasoned or flat out wrong comments: you would attack them with logic and use them as opportunities to find the truth of a matter. And the community reading it would revise their priors and the needle would move closer to the truth.
Today those comments get censored, leading to much of the awful discourse you see on FB and Reddit these days. You can’t discuss sacred cows without getting banned from a community or shadowbanned altogether.
The ridiculous rhetoric on the left these days is a direct result if this phenomenon.
Pirated movies, scams that purported to offer pirated movies, people trying to steal passwords, people trying to hack our users.
I think your accusations are aimed at the wrong person.
The question is not whether it's deceptive, but whether "it has a disastrous effect on the forum or community". It is deceptive. Does it have a disastrous effect on the community? It doesn't appear so to me, so I think that needs supporting evidence.
> May I ask -was it your intent to come off as being condescending and borderline insulting? If not, you ought to be aware that is how that sentence came off.
How a sentence is interpreted has a lot to do with the context the person reading it is in. I didn't intend to be dismissive, but I think the point still stands, because I was actually trying to make a point. Why not just use one of the sites that doesn't do shadowbanning or censorship instead? This isn't some sly insinuation you should leave. It's an actual question about what is different here from there in the rules and moderation, and how and why that might contribute to how the community acts at each place respectively.
> It's also a hand-wave -meaning a distraction from my primary point which is about shadowbanning and the fact it injects a note of deceit into the moderator/user relationship.
No, it's a real question that you decided wasn't relevant so then went out of your way to avoid.
> but that does not change the fact ...and it is a fact... that I believe (and have no reason not to believe) that shadowbans have a negative effect on the larger community that they're practiced on.
It hasn't been shown to be a fact. You haven't even really shown how it could be negative to the community, much less provided evidence. "It erodes faith" is both unsubstantiated, and it's also not shown even if it was how that actually results in a problem (I'm not sure there don't exist forums with hated moderators that still function fairly well).
Shadowbanning is censorship and it is deceitful, but it's also aimed squarely at those the moderators think are not part of the community, or at least not productive parts. The whole point of it is to keep those people from realizing their account is banned right away and starting a new account to continue the behavior.
I would argue that for the most part, this has a positive effect. There are plenty of dead posts which you can see too if you want which provide little or no useful contribution to the discussion or the community.
> shadowbans undermine posters' faith in moderators and serve to undermine the credibility of moderation as a whole.
I haven't observed that. I think most people here trust the moderators to use that sparingly, and there's also a system which appears to let the community see and reverse shadowbans in the case it's incorrectly applied or the banned person in question provides more meaningful content later.
I’m not sure how you can think people approve of something they aren’t even aware is happening.
It’s not just deceptive to the shadowbanned user, it’s deceptive to the whole community, too. How can an average user trust that the content they’re viewing isn’t entirely astroturfed? Or alternatively, 100% organic?
Because people often trust people based on reputation, results, or other proxy measures rather than reviewing every action they take.
> It’s not just deceptive to the shadowbanned user, it’s deceptive to the whole community, too.
It is. At the same time I think most people don't care, and are fine not having every moderation action announced to them.
Additionally, as I've stated multiple times here, and so have others, HN allows anyone to opt into seeing these comments from shadowbanned users, so HN doesn't even follow the same ideal of the problem case you and others are putting forth. You'll get a lot farther pushing this idea of shadowbanning being bad and a problem if you actually respond to the reality of the situation you're arguing about here, and the counter-arguments being put forth, rather than just blindly repeating the same thing.
> How can an average user trust that the content they’re viewing isn’t entirely astroturfed? Or alternatively, 100% organic?
How is that anything to do with shadowbanning or moderation? That's a problem entirely separate and that shadowbanning and moderation of the type we're discussing has nothing to do with.
But, if you really want an asnwer to this ridiculous question, it's that you can go into your profile here, find the "showdead" option, turn it on, and then you'll see all the comments you're complaining are hidden and deceptive and hidden from all the users. And if you don't trust this is all the dead comments, you can't really trust the moderators at all (and there's no more or less trust than any other site which says they do or don't do something).
So users are okay with being deceived and ultimately don’t care? Let me know if I’ve misunderstood your argument.
That may be true. And knowing human nature you may be right. I disagree that it’s a morally acceptable way to moderate a community or forum, though.
People lose trust when they find they’ve been shadowbanned, or discover that the practice is used. They rightfully understand that the discourse is being manipulated in an underhanded, opaque way.
Users that expect moderation expect a certain level of housekeeping and don't care if they are exposed to it all, and I would guess a great many don't want to be bothered with it.
The important distinction here is that being shadowbanned is being excluded from the community, and is done to even more effectively keep these people away from and out of the community than just regular banning would accomplish. The community expects to see content from the rest of the community, these people aren't part of that group, regardless of whether they still have an account and can log it, so the amount of deception to the community is little to none.
The alternative to shadowbanning is not letting they people post, it's banning. The effective desired outcome in both cases is that this person no longer is allowed to be part of the community. The effective actual outcome is that regular banning often just results in people making a new account and continuing with the same behavior. The only deception of shadowbanning to the community is that you're not explicitly saying "hey, these posts we tried to stop from being made? We're letting them be made but just hiding them from view, since we don't want them here in the first place."
If I'm going to get mad about that I might as well get mad at the police or a business owner for taking down some banner that was hung illegally across other businesses that I would see on my commute if they didn't act fast enough. Would I feel deceived that people had his some random message someone decided to put up that was unwanted was removed without me being able to see it? No.
> I disagree that it’s a morally acceptable way to moderate a community or forum, though.
If every forum was like that I might agree. But groups of people have the right to choose how to police themselves and there are plenty of other communities out there that do it differently.
> People lose trust when they find they’ve been shadowbanned
Those people are being kicked out. The community, or the mods, want them to lose trust and leave in most cases. I don't worry that someone I think deserves to be in jail is disillusioned because they don't think they deserve to be in jail. Or, if I worry about it, it's not in a way that makes me think they don't deserve the punishment.
> or discover that the practice is used.
I think that's very few people.
> They rightfully understand that the discourse is being manipulated in an underhanded, opaque way.
All moderation is this, whether done by the few with extra powers or outsourced to the crowd. Moderation is censorship. Censorship isn't always bad (like most things in like, it's a matter of extremes being the problem. Too little or too much both have issues, so we generally fluctuate as a society around a sort of middle area).
You can call it underhanded and opaque all you want, but it's only that to those that have already been excised from the community. To everyone else, it's really no different than if that person was banned, except they're less likely to come back for a while.
> Where’s the default option turned on on HN?
I'm not sure what you're asking. If you're asking if showdead is on by default on HN, no, it's not, and I don't think it should be.
The whole point is to make it so people that are not contributing usefully to, or worse are actively harmful to, the discussion and community are less likely to cause a disturbance. Any one of those people can easily tell if they are shadowbanned if they decide to check just by opening up an anonymous browsing instance and looking at the same discussion. They then have the option of either trying to contact the moderators to make a case, continuing on and trying to align better with the community in future comments and hope someone vouches for them (if they're aware of that), or making a new account and starting over.
But, ultimately, even if they don't even know they're shadowbanned, as long as they try to align their behavior with the community, I think there's a good chance they're be vouched for enough to not be shadowbanned after a while. When that doesn't happen, from what I've seen it's because they haven't really made an effort to change. For example, a dead user fit2rule posted yesterday about how they've been dead for a few months. I looked at their comment history, and the vast majority of them are single line responses. Those aren't necessarily bad, but they probably don't cross a threshold to make people decide they contribute enough to vouch for them. At the same time, the occasional comment they have with more than a sentence that seems to try to actually engage often doesn't show as dead, as someone must have vouched for it because they though it was worth being expressed. If they had kept with that type of engagement, I think they would not be dead at this time.
How can you know this? The community is what it is as a result of the discourse that happens here. If you remove one person that discourse, and therefor the community, has changed. So shadowbanning being harmful is more of an opinion of whether all voices should be heard or not.
> I'm not sure what you're asking. If you're asking if showdead is on by default on HN, no, it's not, and I don't think it should be.
I know it’s not, and I think it should be. It’s quite easy these days to have a pop up say “want to see all of the conversation? turn off this setting” and guide the user to turn it off with an easy way to turn it on. In fact, ideally, this censoring would happen on the client configured by rules created by the owner.
> as long as they try to align their behavior with the community
You do realize that everybody aligning means everybody is the same right? What happened to diversity? (cue “some opinions don’t matter” statement)
What? You asked my why my comments are about HN and not FB, and I said it's because up-thread a wider assertion was made about all shadowbanning, which is what we're talking about at this point.
> If you remove one person that discourse, and therefor the community, has changed. So shadowbanning being harmful is more of an opinion of whether all voices should be heard or not.
The people that own and or run the forum ultimately control the community. They may let the community exert pressure on them, but button line, they control it, and anyone that's under some other impression needs to come to term with reality. Those people want different types of communities, and will take different steps to ensure they get what they want. People that do not like those steps, or the communities that develop, have the choice of exerting pressure on the people that run it or on other community members, or they can choose to go elsewhere.
HN is not a public resource. It's a private resource that allows the general public. If you want to make a case that FB is special because it's so big and everyone is on it, that's one thing. Clearly define why and what the criteria is, and we can discuss whether that makes sense or not or breaks down in practice or how it could be games. But to expect that if I stand up a little forum with dozens of users to discuss specifics of care and restoration of the Datsun 240z and I'm contending a persistent forum spammer that's putting gratuitous messages about penis enlargement and I find that banner works for minutes but shadow banning seems to actually solve the problem in most cases, I think it's ridiculous to think that most the small community would be up in arms over how I was being deceitful to them about not showing them this spam.
I get that you might think DB and HN and Reddit are bit public resources and might have to obey a different standard. If you do, please outline what makes them different and how we determine that. If you don't, and think everyone should obey this standard, please explain why my theoretical little car forum that is entirely maintained and moderated by me should even care what the forum members thing if I'm happy with the community as is without any of the people that might left because they don't like how I run it?
> You do realize that everybody aligning means everybody is the same right?
Why'd you even bother to post this? I half moment's thought would make it obvious that I'm talking about aligning a very specific subset of items, namely behavior, as I specifically stated.
Communication is only possible with a shared understanding of some base. At the lowest level, that's generally language, but it can be extended to other norms to make communication easier and less error prone.
> (cue “some opinions don’t matter” statement)
It's not that they don't matter, it's that they don't matter in some contexts to some people, and are thus inappropriate. Does Joe Bob's weekly rant about whoever the current politician that has his ire is matter? Possibly. Does it matter and is it appropriate on a small car enthusiast forum? Nope, and he has no right to have it shown there, nor expectation that if he posts it there that others should see it, whether he thinks they do or not.
You completely ignored the question. How can you know that shadowbanning did not negatively effect this community? You cannot know that. Where does the HN exist that never shadowbanned for you to draw your comparison from? This is opinion, not fact. But, I'll let you move the goalposts. HN is not nearly the size of FB however.
> People that do not like those steps, or the communities that develop, have the choice of exerting pressure on the people that run it or on other community members, or they can choose to go elsewhere.
Pressure was exerted, censorship continues. What recourse does one have for the largest social media company in the world? The left is outright giddy at this thought.
> HN is not a public resource.
Given that no login is required one could argue it is public, given that recent scraping judgement.
> It's a private resource that allows the general public. If you want to make a case that FB is special because it's so big and everyone is on it, that's one thing.
I do want to make that case, but not related to size. Any, ANY, forum or anywhere where discourse happens cannot censor anything but spam. Repeated messages, messages that are clearly marketing, etc. Instead you have individuals who are not qualified playing judge, jury and executioner. Judges recuse themselves when they can't be neutral. How many forum moderators do the same?
> But to expect that if I stand up a little forum with dozens of users to discuss specifics of care and restoration of the Datsun 240z and I'm contending a persistent forum spammer that's putting gratuitous messages about penis enlargement and I find that banner works for minutes but shadow banning seems to actually solve the problem in most cases, I think it's ridiculous to think that most the small community would be up in arms over how I was being deceitful to them about not showing them this spam.
Absolutely nobody but the scam artists will care about this type of censorship. But note that you're using marketing spam to justify censorship of others opinions.
> Why'd you even bother to post this? I half moment's thought would make it obvious that I'm talking about aligning a very specific subset of items, namely behavior, as I specifically stated.
You didn't change the outcome, we're all still the same.
> Communication is only possible with a shared understanding of some base. At the lowest level, that's generally language, but it can be extended to other norms to make communication easier and less error prone.
Like censorship? Yea that would certainly streamline things.
> It's not that they don't matter, it's that they don't matter in some contexts to some people, and are thus inappropriate.
And therefore we should censor them because they absolutely cannot be useful for anybody else? How about this one:
Someone's BS filter is tuned mostly OK, but they still need some work. You censor a false post and they miss an opportunity to do just this. What you're going to end up with is a bunch of people who can't think for themselves who require someone telling them exactly what to do and think. It's been known for a while that the left wants the population following exactly everything they say. And given that all things are cyclical we can easily see that it's a reversion to the style of gov the US came from. Whether or not you are knowingly complacent or not I'm not sure, but you're fighting for that style of government back.
> Does Joe Bob's weekly rant about whoever the current politician that has his ire is matter? Possibly. Does it matter and is it appropriate on a small car enthusiast forum? Nope, and he has no right to have it shown there, nor expectation that if he posts it there that others should see it, whether he thinks they do or not.
Discourse happens where discourse happens. And I doubt Joe Bob randomly spout out his opinions, usually someone would insert some slight reference in everyday communications. The left does this one a lot.
But by all means, let's use this to censor?
You're the one maintaining that it does. Why try to force me to prove a negative, when you've not supported your own assertions in the first place?
> But, I'll let you move the goalposts. HN is not nearly the size of FB however.
No goal posts were moved by me. If someone takes a specific situation and makes s statement about it that generalizes across everything, I think it's pretty clear that's when the goal posts are moved, and claiming the goal posts were moved later when people actual use examples from the wider world is just a rhetorical tactic to cover that up. If you don't like having to defend the claim against a wider set of cases, simply back off that portion of the claim and say maybe it doesn't apply to everything, and don't defend it. It's simple, it doesn't mean you're wrong, it just means you're willing to revise your argument to be more specific and stronger in the fact of facts.
> Pressure was exerted, censorship continues.
Presumably it wasn't enough to matter then? Should one customer control a service? Should one percent?
> Given that no login is required one could argue it is public, given that recent scraping judgement.
Publicly available is not the same thing as a public resource, but if you want to actually use that as some sort of evidence, some indication of what you're referring to would be useful, as I'm not going to google "recent scraping judgement" and assume we're working off the same facts and referring to the same thing. I would read a provided link though.
> You didn't change the outcome, we're all still the same.
I don't think so. Your claim is now that aligning everyone (on behavior, since I clarified that obvious point and you stuck by your statement) means everyone is the same. That's obviously wrong. Just because you and I agree not to yell epithets at each other here and converse in a respectable manner does not mean we are the same, as is obvious by how we disagree on things.
> Like censorship? Yea that would certainly streamline things.
Yes. One of the definitions of censorship is the prohibition of extreme things. I suspect there are a great many places you support censorship, as almost everyone does. I don't let my children speak to me or their siblings in certain ways in my house. I would be disappointed in them if they did so outside my house, and depending on which child and their age, might enact some punishment. I am censoring them, and I believe it's both for their own good and for the good of those they interact with. I would argue the vast majority of parents do this. Every community does this in some manner (even if punishment is just ostracization).
The problem with taking a hard stance of "censorship is bad" is that then you feel compelled to think of something as bad when it's called censorship and is censorship but when viewed on its merits isn't actually bad. It's similar to how "ads" have been so vilified today, that people take nonsensical positions because to them the word embodies something. Names above of business above and on doors are also advertising, but it's clearly useful and informative advertising of what's inside. Similarly, there are types of censorship, such as a community enforcing its norms, which often but not always are mostly beneficial, at least for the community overall.
Does this result in some people feeling like they've been targeted unfairly? Yes. Were they actually targeted unfairly? That depends quite a bit on the circumstances, which includes personal responsibility of the person and what the community is trying to enforce. Whether a person that's breaking the rules of a community get to do so regardless of their wishes should depend on the behavior and the norms. Breaking codes of conduct in a purely opt-in community, where it was a choice to do one thing over another? That sure seems like someone abdicated their own personal responsibility to me. Being punished because of some aspect of your birth such as gender and race? That seems like a problem, unless the community's purpose is a place for people such as that and you don't belong.
> What you're going to end up with is a bunch of people who can't think for themselves who require someone telling them exactly what to do and think.
As if shadowbanning is mandatory across all aspects of life and everyone will use it with the same criteria? That seems fairly far fetched given what we're talking about.
> It's been known for a while that the left wants the population following exactly everything they say.
Please, don't even start with assigning blame to one side. It's trivial to find instances of bad behavior on both sides along this spectrum, and the only reason you wouldn't see it is if you hadn't bothered to look (but many people haven't). All the sources of the right do exactly what you complain about, any person that doesn't toe the party line is not given the opportunities to have their position heard, and you're getting a curated version of facts like everyone else.
Preventing shadowbanning, or banning, or anything else won't help this. There are natural effects of communities that do this well for most cases, those are just useful to weed out the persistent bad actors that aren't acting in good faith anyway. If you actually care about different views and getting information through to people, you need to branch out and actually engage different communities. If those communities silence even coherent and within the rules interactions than find a different one, since that one won't be receptive to that content no matter what, and forcing them to not exclude it won't help that community, it will just make it entirely dysfunctional for the things it was functional for previously.
> Whether or not you are knowingly complacent or not I'm not sure, but you're fighting for that style of government back.
I think your vision is too constrained. You seem to think forcing everyone to hear everyone else is the solution. It's not. You forcing civil rights militants (for lack of a better term) and white supremacists to interact in their own home territory is not a plan to make things better, it's just a way to radicalize them further.
The solution is not to allow anyone to say what they want and make sure it's heard regardless of the community, it's to make people want to actually understand each other, so they're willing to meet people on their own terms and following the rules of the location they're at.
> Discourse happens where discourse happens. And I doubt Joe Bob randomly spout out his opinions, usually someone would insert some slight reference in everyday communications.
Not in my private forum, not without my say, just as not in my house without my say. I reserve the right to kick out or ignore anyone. And it doesn't matter if that person hears or sees a reference. They know the rules or they shouldn't be there, and "not being able to control myself" is not a valid excuse in the real world.
> The left does this one a lot.
I'm flabbergasted that you seem able to suggest this seriously. To think the left is the only side that censors when the right has also had a long and storied history of it, is baffling. Both sides censor when it suits their purposes. Notable times the right as taken up that mantle in the past include McCartyism, censoring portions of climate change science (during both GWB and Trump)[1], and the many times religious organizations aligned with the right wanting to ban certain books.[2]
> But by all means, let's use this to censor?
There's a difference in controlling what your community you control (because you provide what makes it possible) can do and what the wider public is allowed to do. Censorship when applied to all aspects of life is definitely a problem, and why we have freedom of speech. But we also have freedom of association[3] as an important part of that, and if you look into that closely, being able to police your own community is an important part of that (if you can't express what you want in your community you don't actually have a community).
As I noted earlier, if you want to make a case specifically about Facebook and how it should be treated as a public resource (which I'll clarify doesn't just mean something publicly accessible but something people have a public stake in that the state should ensure has additional protections and requirements, like water or clear air), then go ahead and make that case. I might even agree with you on something like Facebook. But what was stated earlier by rnd0 and which we've ostensibly been discussing is shadow banning and communities in general, but public resources or even Facebook in isolation.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_State... (the citation goes into the detail linking Trump)
The canard about what happens when you assume applies in this case. Very much so.
I've moderated forums and I've never had a problem with simply deleting spam out-right when it came up. Same with problematic users and posts.
I haven't had to deal with it recently (since 2015 or so) but at the time captchas seemed to help with the automated stuff and what slipped through we deleted by hand.
Times change, of course, so I see your point
So many people in this thread are talking about death threats from being a moderator. If being a moderator is such a dangerous job then why do people do it? One has to wonder, they’re either getting paid very well, or they like the power. I’m guessing it’s the latter in almost all cases.
If you want to waste precious minutes of your life dealing with the mentally deranged for free -- that's your call. But you shouldn't be disturbed by those who don't.
With great power comes great responsibility. You don't get to be "popular" for free.
And if you don't like it — you don't have to pay that game.
Sure I can. I’m doing it right now. Of course, analogies are imperfect, but they make good teaching and argumentative tools.
> You don't get to be "popular" for free.
Fortunately for society, the law disagrees with you. (Also, your way has been tried in the past, and was not especially popular - to the point of revolution in certain Eastern European countries in the 1960s-1980s.)
Extrema 1: Social network with everyone on the planet addicted to it, it becomes impossible to avoid. Even if one doesn't want to use it, it will become a necessity to communicate to others. Twitter is an example where it is official source of information from Government agencies to local fire department, embassies, and many politicians, etc. Recently they're requiring an account (and phone number) to access what seems to be the official channels of information for many nations. With milions if not billions of users, it is a significant chunk of the entire world's population. Just like any other industry (big oil, big tobacco), big social media and big tech need to be regulated. There is a spectrum between a private forum of 10k users and a megacorp able to control election outcomes even. What's even more eggregious is that the algorithms that govern the engagement of 1B+ users is developed by people of Silicon Valley (probably 0.000001% of US population or around ~300 people give or take). In private. Closed doors. We oughta see how this is terrifying (even if I agree with their stance and moral principles).
Extrema 2: Big tech merges with Gov in the business of law enforcement. A small party where government has absolutely no business gets interrupted by cops who were alerted by the "thought algorithms". These thought algorithms were developed by Gov + Big Tech by fusing various channels of information and it was deemed that this party is too pick-your-fav-niche-topic and cannot be tolerated. It is my business, my party, my friends and my agenda. No one should have the right to interrupt unless I am violating laws and I am granted due process.
Obviously both extremes are encroaching civil rights of people to have privacy and access to information.
Free speech was so important is the first amendment. It’s valued even hire than protection.
Also your analogy is flawed. Facebook doesn’t do what you suggest today (“only allow in those who talk like me”). They allow almost all speech, with opposing viewpoints, different policy perspectives, different cultures, etc. Arguments happen there all the time.
Yes, thanks for the reminder. That’s why this isn’t the gov doing and instead is the left via their means of control. That’s why there’s pending FOIA requests for this very thing.
> Also your analogy is flawed. Facebook doesn’t do what you suggest today (“only allow in those who talk like me”).
Only if you take it quite literally. Otherwise are you saying they don’t censor anybody that doesn’t reiterate the same thing the left is saying?
Yes, and there are plenty of examples of it, too. Republican governors and politicians, and right-leaning people of all levels of fame, with very few exceptions, continue to have a presence on Facebook and communicate there with their followers. Pick any Republican governor or Senator: they will be there.
Occasionally, if it's a common piece of misinformation that's been widely-shared enough to justify manual intervention, a fact-check box may appear underneath. This happens to "facts" with a conservative political slant, as well as "facts" with a liberal political slant. If you run a page, your page can get "strikes" for this sort of thing that will cause you to down-rank in people's pages, but if anything, Facebook has been caught out for tipping towards the conservative side of that scale, suppressing that penalty on some popular conservative pages (https://www.engadget.com/facebook-overruled-fact-checkers-to...).
Rarely, you'll share "misinformation" that is also in violation of community standards (I'll leave that to the reader's imagination) and get a time-out proportional to how often that happens.
To understand Facebook's behavior, it's useful to remember that their goal is growth and retention. They want everybody using the service. I suspect, based on observation of their behavior, that they've discovered for themselves that without those measures, growth and retention are being harmed more than they'e harmed via time-outs and fact-checking (i.e. organized boycotts over Facebook being a place where falsehoods spread wildly, people encouraging their more vulnerable friends and relatives to stay off FB so the misinformation parade doesn't convince them to take horse-dewormer, etc.).
Yes, we've all seen this "fair" fact checking. Hint, if the left is OK with it, the right is furious about it. You cannot be fair to both in a way that is accepting to liberals.
> Facebook has been caught out for tipping towards the conservative side of that scale, suppressing that penalty on some popular conservative pages
As they should, for both sides. But interestingly this makes my point even more. That everybody is quite aware of what censorship was about and is taking place. Yet they put on this falsity and get shills to help defend them because?
> To understand Facebook's behavior, it's useful to remember that their goal is growth and retention.
Right. They are censoring and aligning everybody on FB to the same thought process, which happens to be a majority of Americans.
> I suspect, based on observation of their behavior, that they've discovered for themselves that without those measures, growth and retention are being harmed more than they'e harmed via time-outs and fact-checking
When censorship is the result, do you think we should have more that a suspicion? What about the people on the right leaving? They don't seem to care about retaining those? Interestingly the people left align with the CEO's own political beliefs.
Right, and usually they would. Growth and retention is the lifeblood of everything Facebook does; Zuck would rather cut off his own right foot than intentionally lose users.
Which is why the only rational conclusion I can find with the evidence I see is that Zuck is either afraid that continued inaction was eventually going to land him in jail (or put him through years of Congressional investigations) or they have hard numbers showing that for every X people on the right they retain, they are losing N*X other users, N > 1.
Facts don't have a well-known liberal bias, Colbert Report joking aside.
They already do. [1]
1. https://crimethinc.com/2020/08/19/on-facebook-banning-pages-...
Also refresh the page and the messages disappear from the viewer.
I think this "bug" is intentional and done for plausible deniability in case of a lawsuit: "See, there is transparence. It was just a bug in the code. Human error."
Posts with links tend to be censored out more often. For example if I post a link to a charity donation website often my friends don't see it in their feed, but if I don't post the link and only state the name, they see it.
[0] https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/wechat-surveillance-explained/
To combat spam, mostly. People posting links to scam sites to watch sports games.
https://www.managingcommunities.com/2009/09/14/troll-hack-gl...
I think most people who have the technical skill to do this effectively don't telegraph their intentions on what is, to all intents and purposes, social media.
But saying people don't broadcast their criminal intentions on social media... I'm sure that's more common than you think :P
When installed it extended the idea of banning or shadow banning as it degraded the user experience for the person in question. Basically giving the impression that the site was malfunctioning to the point that it was frustrating for the user and they left the site for a while. This included random delays to the page loading, and sending them to a different page and ignoring their intent.
My entire friend's list left Facebook just to figure out that tragically, Insta was owned by the same dickheads.
The prisoners are perfectly happy here.
To move that needle requires hundreds of thousands or millions of people to act in concert. Scale matters.
If it did, FB would be a spammers heaven.
You can take issue with the censoring (and I do) but it’s not silently censoring which is much worse.
Most of the conversation I’ve seen in the comments has been about shadow banning which just isn’t related to what’s actually happening here.
We’re way past the rubicon. Get your information as best you can and just hope you’re somewhat aligned with the mainstream.
But to OP's point on joebiden.info:
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/hr30p3/reddit_f...
I tried it a few months ago and it was blocked. Here's a screenshot I made of it: https://i.imgur.com/KZa60db.jpg
It's still peacetime so the list is 100% Zuck contents right now.
Not sure if they still are
Not directly related with my comment but this is a proof https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/23/reddit-huffman-trump/
Or are you saying there was a different comment editing incident? If so, that would be big news. He promised not to do it again, so if he did, he's breaking a promise, and I think that would be pretty newsworthy.
> "As the CEO, I shouldn’t play such games, and it’s all fixed now. Our community team is pretty pissed at me, so I most assuredly won’t do this again."
https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
No.
Or are you saying there was a different comment editing incident?
Yes. I have commented that they should try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine_(PaaS) but I guess they didn't click the link and then they have altered the meaning of my comment. At that point of time I was aware that Huffman have edited some comments in Reddit in the past, from the news. Thus I was not surprised.
This seems like a pretty big deal, especially given his previous promise to stop editing comments.
This, like many similar posts here, isn’t censorship. If you want to spread your idea (any idea at all) without hindrance, don’t do it on an advertisement platform.
If Facebook doesn’t want to send my message to you, that’s their choice. It’s not my right to send messages through Facebook and expect them to be delivered to you. Even if they contain horrific circles in a pattern that makes me squirm just describing them.
Am I misreading you?
If Facebook wants to provide private messaging that’s actually so private they can’t know its content, that’s another story. But if they’re hosting messaging they know about, they’re entirely within their rights to decide what content is appropriate on their own resources.
I don't think so. The 2 specific situations you list are different. For child porn, it's illegal. So if Facebook blocks it, it's the government choosing what to censor, not Facebook.
And I think it's possible to prevent "harassing people with pictures of patterns of holes they find unnerving" without Facebook censoring content. Facebook has a block functionality, and the receiver could block the sender. As for the sender making multiple accounts, if Facebook blocks that, that's not censorship of content, that's enforcing a 1 account policy.
Facebook is also allowed to censor child porn in private messages, and that they do so is a good thing, yet it's still censorship.
Is it possible to use the word censorship without it being a rallying cry (which then seems to somehow ~bend reality)?
Yes you do. This is plain as day censorship. You're not allowed to say certain things to your friends. If you're going to claim that that isn't censorship you are absolutely making the affirmative claim.
No, I don’t. I’m not making the claim. Look, still not making a claim! Still not making an argument. It’s up to “Facebook is censoring me” to make the case that warrants a defense. And I’m not Facebook so I don’t have do defend that. I can just… have this conversation without censorship. And if I get moderated here in a way I hope I won’t be but don’t expect… I can go to my blog or Twitter or whatever.
Now, you are claiming it’s not censorship and have provided no basis for that.
If FB is a censor, they’re extremely bad at it, and not authorized to be good at it.
So if Facebook isn't ubiquitous and omnipotent they cannot be considered a censor? You're deliberately applying an impossible requirement that you made up. By this requirement there is nobody that can censor, "China doesn't censor because you can still talk about what you want in America." It's absurd.
FB censors private messages between two people on Facebook Messenger. That's the claim. I'd say it's pretty well backed up with proof and facts in this thread.
And the fact that it's not unexpected doesn't make it not censorship, or not worth pointing out.
Tell that to the dozens of SMS I receive on a regular basis trying to scam me I guess?
Well it can't be really free or the service would not survive is it? It's like a club having free entrance / you pay otherwise.
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-confirms-scans-mess...
Edit : it appears that it is not e2e by default
- we should know that messenger being "subject to community guidelines" means silent censorship
- Zuckerberg saying something publicly means it is justified
I would disagree with both of those implied assumptions
"As people around the world confront this unprecedented public health emergency, we want to make sure that our Community Standards protect people from harmful content and new types of abuse related to COVID-19. We're working to remove content that has the potential to contribute to real-world harm, including through our policies prohibiting coordination of harm, sale of medical masks and related goods, hate speech, bullying and harassment and misinformation that contributes to the risk of imminent violence or physical harm. As the situation evolves, we continue to look at content on the platform, assess speech trends, and engage with experts, and will provide additional policy guidance when appropriate to keep the members of our community safe during this crisis."
(Sometimes the comment can also dissapear from your UI as well - I've tried editing a comment, but it fails saving and after page refreh the comment dissapeared. Reproduced that multiple times.)
Do you have this on screenshot by any chance or can you make one? It seems way too ridiculous and out of place - but then, I stopped using fb few years ago so things could "change"
If HN/Reddit think that you are posting promotions, *HN silently censors your post, claims it was posted*
The purpose of shadow banning is to make it less obvious to the spammer that they triggered the spam filter, so they get less signals to work around.
Same as websites who, instead of blocking access to (computer) users they think are scrapers, change slight details in pages like for prices and whatnot.
A - They have unShadowbanned all previously Shadowbanned users?
OR
B - They are no longer actively shadowbanning users, but previous victims of Shadowbanning are going to stay that way?
Am asking since there is a big difference between the two.
Besides, we’re not talking about political opinions here. If they ever do that (which is unlikely), then we can become justifiably upset. That’s a hill worth dying on — this one is not.
However, some articles on the site are just political opinions about the CCP. Because Facebook blocks those, I think the merits of this censorship at a coarse grain are worth discussing.
Also, censorship is forbidden only to the government and to common carriers (which Facebook is not). Private parties (with very rare and reasonable exceptions) have the right to control what others do with their chattels.
Edgy comment, but unfortunately, even with all the sophisticated jargon and advanced mathematics, economics isn't a real science with objective truths, but medicine is. Don't get me wrong, I too believe that capitalism is the only form of economic system that works, but to equate socialists (however misguided you think they are) with anti-vaxxers is a bit much.
In general you can't distinguish but fortunately that doesn't matter. Facebook doesn't block lies, it blocks "known misinformation". The information in the linked article is known to be false, and it is harmful, so it's blocked.
Let me be super clear here: nobody is entitled to use other people’s stuff to make trouble or potentially harm society. Not your mother’s house; not Facebook’s messenger. If anyone gets to use anyone else’s stuff, it is at the owner’s pleasure and under their conditions.
So no?
The person you reply to is a 7 year old account in good standing.
Also let me give you another example: licensed medical doctors being unable to have a technical discussion between themselves about Ivermectin in one channel and having to move elsewhere.
Person A: "I really don't think weed should be illegal."
Person B: "Oh yeah, so what about raping rural villagers to death? I guess you think that should be legal too huh?"
This is how ridiculous you sound.
So maybe stop and think for one second before commenting?
The line is here: in a private communication between people anything can be said, nothing should be censored. if someone gets caught planning or doing something illegal they go to jail.
Your absolutist position is interesting, but don’t make it sound like private carriers have ever been held to this standard.
The Japanese "set precedent" by bombing Pearl Harbour. How many seaports of the US have been bombed by a foreign power since then?
The US dropped two nukes on Japan. Did it "set precedent" for nations to nuke each other willy-nilly in wars since then?
Pro-gay or pro-weed activists, heck even pro-civil rights activists used to be kooky nutjobs of their time.
We haven't arrived at the end of our moral or legislative evolution. We need to hear some voices that are considered kooky.
For a recent example, see Lenore Skenazy and her free-range parenting. This definitely seems kooky to a paranoid, helicopter parent part of the population. What if this part of the population holds the Delete button?
This isn't a new discussion, and I think you know that. Bureaucracy tasked with suppression of speech and beholden to career politicians hasn't historically shown itself to be subtle and erring on the side of freedom.
As I said elsewhere, if an actual problem arises, fine, let’s do something about it. But that’s not the case today. There’s just no indication that Facebook is going to block mainstream political speech anytime soon. If you find a real example of that, raise it, and I’m sure it’ll get a lot more attention than from just the free-speech absolutists.
If they don't like a message you are sending they are likely to silently drop it and let you think it was delivered. Just no care at all for the user experience at a base level.
I'm sure Discord will be no exception -though I can't think of any current examples that apply to it.
That makes me worry about the way that it's displacing/has displaced IRC.
What good is decentralizing the transport, if the sites and destinations and applications aren't?
Here’s another one: Google can use your aggregate data along with other sources to determine whether you seem like someone favorable to the regime or not. If not, the probability distribution shifts in a way that directs you toward certain jobs and so forth that keep you from what the refine doesn’t want you near. It’s like a BigTech version of providence, except unlike divine providence, they don’t care about you.
Or if they don’t like you, reveal unflattering information about you to people you know in ways that look like search results.
Lots of possibilities. People are also too complaisant to protest things like these even when it’s made public.
I abandon such applications without hesitation.
The error can be seen in some of the screenshots. It briefly shows "couldn't send" and if you refresh the page the messages disappear forever.
"Another day, another dollar"
It’s like asking why scientists would ever invent atomic bombs, they do it to stop Hitler, its only later that those in charge decide it would be good idea to drop a couple on civilian populations.
I mean, I don’t work there, but that’s what I’d think.
Doesn't make it okay.
It is always "a bug" or some other excuse. Then we find out later it wasn't a bug after all.
If you lie frequently enough you loose right for benefit of the doubt.
Ultimately I stopped sharing links over several third party services that I've used for years and have transitioned to other services instead.
I had multiple reports of censoring people discussing my depaywalling of a large cache of public domain historical scholarly papers [1], and went and checked for myself. Messages which included the link to the documents were reported as delivered but not actually delivered.
I believe they may have started it at the time of one of the high profile wikileaks document dumps.
This experiences is part of why I and my partner have since refused to use their services.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/swartz-supporter...
Sharing torrent links, pastebin and a few other sites that can be used for non-legal purposes.
Honestly, do you want FB deciding what is "truth" for you?
Do you really think that these companies are on your side or are your friends?
Dopamine addicition is also real.
People should realize how dangerous it can be, when the main goals of these companies are to get their users to spend as much as time possible on their platforms to watch ads. But many have other things to do, than think stuff like this.
It's better to just use something else.
If you don't need or want a crypto wallet or dapp browser, then simply don't use those parts of the app.
Relevant specs:
Relevant repos:
https://github.com/status-im/status-react
https://github.com/status-im/status-desktop
There are trade-offs, for sure: since there's (deliberately) no integration with contact lists (address books) of the OS or other apps, your social circle probably isn't using the app already, or in any case isn't discoverable.
The public chats facility has turned out to be too spam-prone for "well known" / advertised chats, e.g. #status. However, if you create a public chat that has some unguessable component (e.g. #myfriends-a9e72ab5) and you share it with friends (even lots) in a reasonably private context, then the chances of it being spammed or randomly joined are quite low. Note that public chats, while "public", are still E2EE, using a chat's name as the basis for a symmetric key.
1-to-1 and private group chats are highly secure; the latter have a max size, and depending on their size and your device, sending messages can be a little slow.
Creating a robust alternative to the existing public chats facility has involved a lot of work: the forthcoming Communities feature provides a discord-like facility whereby founders/admins of communities can take advantage of various mechanisms for moderation and governing membership. The Communities feature can already be enabled in advanced preferences of both mobile and desktop apps, but note it's a WIP.
The moderation mechanisms for Communities don't undermine the no-censorship principle of Status because:
(1) Any user can create a community.
(2) A community's rules are managed by those with a stake in the community: there's no override by Status-the-org nor anyone else.
(3) The underlying nodes of the network form a decentralized p2p network, i.e. there's no central actor/authority that controls the flow of messages.
Re: (3), running a Status node should be simple and incentivized.
The "incentivized" aspect is a challenging problem and not solved yet. Long story short, engineering an incentivized decentralized messaging network (it's not a blockchain!) is harder than incentivizing a blockchain network.
That being said, the "simple" aspect isn't too difficult to solve, sneak peek:
https://github.com/status-im/status-node
Finally, with pertinent laws and regulations in flux across the globe, there could come a day when binaries aren't readily available (from app stores, GitHub, etc.), but thankfully there's always `git clone` and `make`.
Disclosure: I'm a core contributor at Status.
Who in their right mind would say China is a dictatorship?
/s
Facebook censors anyone from sharing that report.
Here's the link to try yourself: https://www.doherty.edu.au/uploads/content_doc/DohertyModell...
My company asked me to create a Twitter account. I deleted it a month later.
The soln to bad speech is better speech.
If you want to communicate or reach out to people, you go where the people are. Currently that's FB.
On a separate note, the problem with saying that the solution to bad speech is better speech is that it doesn't take crapflooding by bad actors into account. Your good speech is kinda worthless if it's drowned out by disinformation, lies or just plain non-sense.
Edit: steganography, not stenography.
There's nothing wrong with private businesses removing content they don't deem appropriate. There is also nothing wrong with silencing users obviously lying. Thinking differently totally misunderstands social media as a medium.
When “the private business” is a group so large and dominant in their field that they can stop threats by absorbing them, lawsuits, or other tactics, they aren’t just “a private company” anymore.
Your comment reeks of someone who doesn’t think it will ever be themselves that will be censored.
I could same the same about yours.
> Your comment reeks of someone who doesn’t think it will ever be themselves that will be censored.
Not super concerned with social media posts being taken down, no, as that's always been happening. Websites moderate their content. What's the surprise?
Also amusing name.
When I attempt to navigate to gnews.org the site is very slow, and I wonder if Facebook is having trouble assigning some kind of risk factor to it, then giving up, but ends up sending a "success" response anyway, whereby the front end just assumes the message was sent property and pushes it to your message cache without attempting to fetch it over the network.
edit: since this has been down voted, could you explain why you think I'm wrong?
But well, maybe it is shitty coder(s) mishandling timeouts.
It seems generally less believable that Facebook would censor people without telling them.
Other commenters [0] appear to believe the same as I do, and note that FB typically informs the user that their action/behavior is against the site's terms of use.
Since people don't know whether your speculation is wrong or right (unless there's an FB developer around), they can only judge whether your speculation is plausible or not. And I guess they mostly thought it wasn't plausible.
If you think I'm wrong on a technical level, could you please explain how?