Still, it does seem like the sort of thing that could get Facebook in trouble with a regulator if you squint at it.
I genuinely am curious, in Facebook's world today, how do you see this playing out in a way that actually hurts Facebook. I legit want to know so I can actively work toward making it happen.
Negligible: so small or unimportant as to be not worth considering; insignificant.
The first page of search Mastodon results for me are all about a heavy metal band from Atlanta. Sounds like a negligible risk to me.
So if there is 2^-500 chance of an alien invasion, lets put a team on it!
Does the team cost about 2^-500 of your resources and attention? Then, YES, do it. That's my point.
I'm not saying that this is what you SHOULD do all of the time, I'm saying that it is entirely plausible, even likely, that Facebook might deliberately "go after" Mastodon because it very very easily can.
I was saying what is the impact (damages) if this guy can't post about his software on facebook to his friends and family. Do you even think this would be in the top 100 ways to crush the competition???
Four data points ain't a lot, but you can no longer claim it's a one-off event either.
What you're really looking for is what happened to Parler which looked like a serious act of anti-competitive behaviour which showed the true brutish nature of these large companies destroying an alternative social network.
That was a much worse form of 'anti-competitive behaviour' than this.
Networks can.
Whether or not Mastodon will is another question. (I've been on it since ~2016.) But in FB's position, paranoia pays, and is worth throwing billions at, if deemed a sufficient threat.
Also note that Twitter has taken an interest in decentralized protocols with Bluesky project.
And the ~100,000 or so people who actually used that network.
On the contrary, Newscorp for example is great to get dynamic patterns of headlines you don't want to read.
Perhaps after certain number of people report it, it automatically will be marked as one (such logic would be more reliable on FB, than for example reddit or HN, since most FB users have a single profile tied using their real name)
How could it?
Make no mistake, this is bi-partisan. Both sides have their own agendas against Big Tech.
Oh, I hope so...
My best guess is that their lists of competitors to keep an eye on got mixed up with other stuff. Or, of course, that they simply don't want to promote competitors on their platform, which would be normal for any non-monopoly.
Source: I used and helped maintain one of the “don’t federate with these instances” list.
It would be interesting to do some experiments here: post the same text to see if it gets removed again, and then repost it and remove sentences to see which one triggered the filter.
the largest mastodon instance has 500k users. Facebook has two billion users. If you can post twitter and tiktok and tumblr links on facebook, do you seriously think there's someone sitting at facebook taking names and making lists about a social network that practically nobody even uses
there are competitors a hundred times as large you can link too. My first guess is it probably tripped some NSFW filter because on some mastodon instances there's quite a lot of porn.
Yes, when I worked at a 500-person startup there was an employee who’s sole task was to stay aware of our established competitors and nimbler startups. It was jokingly nicknamed the “office of paranoia.”
That said, I highly doubt FB is using their list of competitors to block posts mentioning them.
Such a weird thing for regulators to be chasing - there seems to be so many more obvious issues than this. Is this a political winner - in other words, does the average person think I can put of Burger King flyers in a McDonalds store?
Facebook claims to be a social network. Those types of networks normally DO NOT allow you to promote other social networks.
Even review platforms which are a bit more communication in nature block posting other sites reviews.
I don't see how that makes it legal.
Herey other examples of potential actions that would also clearly qualify as illegal anti-competive behavior:
Microsoft could decide to block the download pages for Chrome and Firefoz from being shown in IE.
Google could block results related to Bing in their search engine or browser.
I don't see how this behavior by Facebook is any different. If it can be shown that this was done deliberately by Facebook, I have little doubt that it would also qualify as anti-competive behavior.
When you first search on bing for chrome downloads they will put up a big edge promo above the result. After you download they will pop up a box asking if you are sure you want to switch as edge is "Faster and more secure".
The problem for mastadon is it has a TON of content that is against facebook policies. So facebook can simply say - users are reporting this crap as spam - we've blocked it. Done.
European law tends to favor maximizing competitors. American law tends to favor maximizing consumer value. At first glance, these can be considered equivalent, but they differ at the margins (which is why, for example, Amazon keeps getting hit with antitrust in France but not in the US).
I thought what happened to alternative social networks was a warning to show that not only they can do it to anyone but it shows how anti-competitive they really are.
What happened here to this person mentioning Mastodon is no different but was like 1% of what Facebook and many other private platforms can really do.
Walmart's legalese:
> C. Prohibited Content
> * contains advertisements, solicitations, or spam links to other web sites or individuals, without prior written permission from Walmart;
https://www.walmart.com/help/article/walmart-com-terms-of-us...
Facebook on the other hand, promotes itself for creating and sharing user content. If it then moderates in ways that are not disclosed, opaque, and with little recourse, their deceptive behavior is neither ethic or in line with how they promote themselves as a service.
Nowadays most of our communication channels are owned by corporations. Are you okay that they get to decide what we're allowed to talk about? Zoom for example banned meetings talking about the Tiananmen Square massacre; You can't post links to The Pirate Bay in private chats on Facebook... on private chat!
And this coming from me who's quite okay with Twitter banning Trump and other idiots off their platform.
Facebook (and social media in general) is essentially a public forum and comes with the expectations of such since these companies control such a large part of internet discourse.
If all of them said "we won't allow anyone to talk about any of our competitors on our site" then it strikes me as a company using their dominance to silence other players in the market, i.e. anti competitive behavior.