Facebook/Meta blocks accounts for posting link to EFF privacy tips
techhub.social
techhub.social
Maybe:
* This account already scored poorly on spamminess and attempting to post a bare link (with no content) on their page pushed them over the edge?
* The EFF Privacy Tips link was somehow used in a parallel spam campaign, or some characteristic of the page itself causes it to be flagged as spammy?
* Something about this specific browser session was flagged, preventing posting? (this might go along with the No Violations observation about the page).
I find it much more interesting to try to reverse engineer these strange behaviors of some spam detection systems than to just chalk them up to a "Facebook hates the EFF" conspiracy theory - if this happened to me, I'd be doing some more tests to try to see what's up.
But alas, we humans love our conspiracy theories because they tell a more interesting story.
I would be overjoyed if someday that changes, but that still wouldn't be relevant to a flagging today.
Accidentally a perfect analogy, because elephants do think about ants, and take steps to avoid them. The only other small animal they avoid is bees (not mice).
And just like ants, the EFF are one group that could have lots of tiny little warriors scaling up inside Facebook's fleshy trunk.
With a fence, the mass of the elephant helps to knock it over. With a ditch or a hole, the elephant's mass works against it. It risks getting stuck or breaking important bones that are already under a lot of stresses.
> The MythBusters hid a mouse under a ball of elephant dung, planning to flip the dung over and reveal the mouse when the elephants approach it. When they flipped the dung and revealed the mouse, the approaching elephant was startled and quickly moved away from the mouse. The MythBusters then flipped dung without the mouse under it, but the elephants did not react at all. They then repeated their first experiment to confirm their results, and the elephant noticed the mouse and actively avoided it. Even though the elephants did not panic at the sight of the mouse, their acting cautiously around them was enough to have the myth be considered plausible, as it was not known whether the reaction was due to fear of or empathy for the mouse.
... Note how they were wild elephants, in an unnatural environment, facing weird dirt behavior.
In any case, elephants still avoid ants.
We're not talking about capital punishment here, we're talking about social media, and Facebook appears to have made the very reasonable decision that it's worth accidentally rate limiting some innocent accounts in order to keep spam lower than would otherwise be possible.
That sounds reasonable.
Well, reasonable unless you happen to be (or care about) one of the innocents being accidentally punished, because some corporation's algorithm said so.
Scholars have been worrying about this kind of thing in the real world's justice system for a long time (think of William Blackstone's "it is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer" quote, which is over 250 years old[0]; of the 1895 U.S. Supreme Court's "it is better to let the crime of a guilty person go unpunished than to condemn the innocent", and these weren't novel ideas, they go all the way back to the Romans).
Where are the checks and balances for the online world?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentaries_on_the_Laws_of_En...
Yes, it is.
> if i am talking to a customer on facebook and i get blocked for a few days this could cause me to loose a job. (and no, sometimes i can't choose how to communicate with customers. if they insist on facebook then that's where i need to be).
This scenario feels contrived. In this hypothetical, you're talking to a customer using your personal Facebook account and that's the only way you have to contact them? And your employer somehow would see you getting blocked from Facebook as the problem, not their nutty customer relations practices.
> same for my grandparents. they may be upset if i can't talk to them and i can't reach them in other ways.
Again, this is super contrived. You act like you have no other contact method for your grandparents, and no way to get another contact method.
> the risk of this makes facebook an unviable option for me to communicate in the first place.
This is a very decent conclusion to come to. I wish more people would do the same. But there's no sense blaming Facebook for using moderation practices that any other platform in the same position would also choose.
apart from that, i have relatives in another country, and neither of us have our phones set up so we can make international calls (because that costs extra money), so while we could get in touch, we wouldn't unless it was something urgent. instead either of us would just wonder why the other is staying silent for a few days. and some relatives just refuse to use any other way to communicate besides the one of their choice. it's not facebook fortunately, but still, the example is not really that contrived.
i also have many friends that i can only reach through one method. if i loose that method, they are gone unless i am lucky and i can reach them through intermediaries.
ADDED:
temporarly blocks may not be that serious, but permanent blocks exist too. we have seen many of those stories even here on HN.
the problem is really that i fear many do not think that this could happen to them, so when it happens, they are caught unprepared and unaware.
i certainly lost contact to some people because we didn't consider this a possibility.
And unfortunately, some conspiracy theories are true
Not saying this is true but sadly sometimes it is.
Exactly! This is also one of the most traditional domain names (Creation Date: 1990-10-10T04:00:00Z). I can assume FB has a lot of people working on spam prevention and they should have reviewed all old domains, relevant NGOs, political parties, country-level governments, etc. by now and chose to not whitelist EFF. If it was malice or incompetence it is a matter of (endless?) discussion, however.
Some part of me wonders how is this even news? I guess "some person was blocked temporarily and that's all we really know" is not going to make it to the top of HN.
this is far too little data to make assumptions like the one in the link.
No, this is just an observation with no strong emotions or reactions attached - it's tiring and it's probably unhealthy. No one has wronged me or caused offence to me. If anything, it's self-inflicted. We all ultimately decide what we consume.
Anyways, your comment was interesting in the way you see this, and I think, illustrative of the point I was making. Outrage online has become so normal it is to be expected.
I was just saying that it's ironic that the outrage is being directed towards Facebook, which is usually the generator of social media outrage, and out of all the outrage you complain about, it's the one directed at the source.
It seems like there are many small but easy to understand factors in social media that led to the outrage culture. In one of Sam Harris' or Lex Fridman's podcast episodes with Jack Dorsey, an idea was brought up that we might have less fracturing in our society if the social media didn't have a "like" button, but instead a "thanks" button. People like a lot of tribality and toxic things, but few are grateful for them. I think that things like these show the negative impact social media had in this area of the social fabric.
You can really see how people are much more likely to take sides and galvanize against each other in every day life, even if it's against their interests. It's certainly not limited to social media, even if it could have been the biggest driver for it.
And without more evidence, that seems more plausible to me than Facebook banning links to the EFF.
The point here is that facebook is particularly abhorrent. It's a risk to offload any data to anyone outside of your own self, but it's a serious mistake to interact with a zuck product in any way.
I disagree with your sentiment. Being public/private doesn't make one more/less trustworthy. I would posit it is the business model of the company itself that should be given scrutiny.
Yes. It's privately owned, and publicly traded. Publicly owned would be like the USPS or national parks.
Yes we do (if you're a US citizen). You even get to vote for the "board of directors" so to speak (the legislative/executive branches of the US gov).
As for your other example, I can own quite a bit of a company and still get denied access to their offices and computer systems.
This high minded notion of "public owned" is quite different than what we are discussing here. The fact we're having this goofy conversation is sad.
I own part of Google. I can't take it home with me. I don't even know what that would mean.
> If I own it, I can get a permit to build on it.
It is indeed possible to get a permit to build on/use public grounds.
> If I own it, I can refuse to allow everyone else to use it.
You can vote for representation that could in theory restrict access to just you. The other owners probably wouldn't agree to it, though. There are a lot of owners who want open access.
I think you're confusing things here. You seem to be talking about having full ownership of something, as if partial ownership isn't a thing.
The public doesn't have a home, but if it did, it already took the national parks there. The public can get a permit to build there. The public can refuse to allow anyone else to use it. Remember: members of the public are not the public. "Anyone else" here actually includes members of the public (ie: you and I).
Just because I can (legally) buy a Ferrari doesn't mean I own one.
You have bought a Ferrari, so you own it.
Having performed an "Initial Public Offering" (IPO) means explicitly that the public has purchased, at least in part, ownership of your company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock
No. Members of the public can own stock. The public does not own stock.
> You have bought a Ferrari, so you own it.
No. I have not purchased a Ferrari, so I do not own one.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_company
This link does not talk about public ownership.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_sector
This link talks about public ownership in the same way I have explained.
You are not the public. You are a member of the public.
Members of the public own stock, so the public owns stock. Your distinction here is pedantic at best, but generally plain wrong.
> No. I have not purchased a Ferrari, so I do not own one.
It seems the concept of a metaphor struggles to take grasp. I'll leave progress in this area to those certified.
> This link does not talk about public ownership.
It's very literally the first line.
If you're going to be a pedant, be right.
It really just seems like you're uncomfortable with the fact that you're wrong about this, having resorted to name calling. It's ok, this really is a common mistake to make. I do encourage you to read the Wikipedia links you sent though. I think they do a good job of explaining what I have said. Just remember that individuals are not the public. The public actually owns national parks. The whole public as an entity.
Actually I just found another Wikipedia page which may help elucidate this for you, if you're still having trouble with the links you posted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_ownership
I hope the first two lines will make things clear :-)
“A public company is one that issues shares that are publicly traded, meaning the shares are available for anyone to buy and sell on the open market, usually very easily. Note that publicly traded companies are not publicly owned -- they are not owned or controlled by any government.”
You seem to be equating members of the public with the entirety of the public. You need to get this misunderstanding straightened out to correctly understand the concepts being discussed here.
If you're going to be a pedant, be right.
> In most cases, public companies are private enterprises in the private sector, and "public" emphasizes their reporting and trading on the public markets.
Ostensibly, no. But practically, there is a single majority shareholder who can choose to do pretty much whatever he wants with the company. So... kind of?
You know, ultimately, you can choose to not share that much with Facebook. There are tools for privacy that don't let Facebook get too much from you. The easiest one is clearing cookies automatically in a browser to disrupt long-term tracking. Beyond that, there are VPNs and burner phone numbers. I feel like people are not as powerless against Facebook as you might mean to say, and it's not that hard to care about privacy and value Facebook.
Facebook has a very long history with privacy that speaks for itself.
That's 10 false positives _every single day_. And in all likelihood their spam detector isn't that good, and there are many, many more posts than that.
Every now and then one of those false positives will be an interesting web site or one that feels really obviously wrong. But that's just what statistics does. When you take enough samples from a distribution, even very low-probability events happen.
Sometimes something will feel really out of the ordinary and wrong, but it happened entirely by chance.
If there were evidence of systematic decisions like this, it would be more of a story. But what we have here is just a big nothing-burger.
The reality is that moderation relies heavily on imperfect machine learning models and overworked human reviewers making rushed judgments on hundreds of cases per day. There's no meticulous strategy document mapping out the pros and cons before banning accounts that upset the company.
Mistakes inevitably happen when relying on this combination of flawed automation and human reviewers who are stretched too thin. The moderation policies may seem arbitrary or politically motivated from the outside, but much of it comes down to hasty human error and buggy algorithms rather than some malicious scheme.
By that I don't mean it is bad, just that it is business as usual for the EFF. The article is expected and not particularly provocative. There are dozens like this on the EFF own Facebook page.
That's what makes me think the content of the article and the fact it comes from the EFF doesn't have much to do with the blocking.
well it's subtly wrong but points in the overall direction.
the capacity to manipulate this kind of stuff, to sabotage ideologies such as EFFs privacy ideology IS the product.
governments spend money for this, it's a product from governments to other governments.
though I suppose this is an instance of FB dogfooding
Actually it's not at all funny, it's horrifying
It's getting a bit depressing that the only thing worth replying to so many comments is 'Bot.'
https://gist.github.com/smashah/667d4d5cf31670ee87547450861a...