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Comment by bri3d | Hacker News Reader

It's always worth thinking a little more about these things than "Facebook is blocking EFF privacy tips."

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.

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Yeah, this is just so little evidence to simply come to the conclusion that Facebook hates EFF. The decision of blocking someone has probably many variables, previous posts, ip addresses, browsers, ...?

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.

It’s news because it’s rage bait.

404media story this in...5...4....3...

FB will remain opaque as long as FB benefits from opacity. FB has won a strategic victory. Now even HN is using opacity against any company, no matter how questionable, to the benefit of that company. No one is saying that the armor of opacity must be broken.

All people here are saying is that it's worth taking a breath before jumping on the rage train. HN posts like this usually end up going full rage mode for a few hours before someone finally digs up the rest of the story, so I'm relieved to find that this one got nipped in the bud.

This would be my first thought... This doesn't seem the link itself, but maybe something else - perhaps other logins with that account, since it seems to be a not-person account. Maybe they should have a Page for their business instead of a named account? Definitely needs more info.

Maybe one of those reasons is right, but personally, Meta lost benefit of the doubt long ago. Just like I wouldn't give the benefit of the doubt to someone walking towards me brandishing a knife, just because I don't know for certain they're going to attempt robbery/murder/etc.

If you had a leg to stand on you wouldn’t need to use such an absurd comparison. It isn’t that at all. It’s exactly what it is, and nothing other than that.

How dare I incorporate previous experience into my threat model, bad human.

yeah, on top of that, it might've been an account that haven't been used for long time and suddenly started posting links out of nowhere.

this is far too little data to make assumptions like the one in the link.

Yeah. Which seems pretty likely as the sort of person that’s looking to rage against this particular machine probably has a largely dormant Facebook account with fake details, a protonmail email address, being accessed via a VPN.

Stop giving FB the benefit of the doubt

Having worked at Facebook, albeit a long time ago. It’s far more likely that a conflict of events caused a false positive of an Automated spam system than Facebook giving a crap about privacy campaigns that hurt revenue.

But alas, we humans love our conspiracy theories because they tell a more interesting story.

but in the end the outcome is the same. malicious or not, facebook blocks what it should not block and that in itself is the problem. it being a false positive is not an excuse. if they don't fix this it just shows that facebook doesn't care about false positives either.

If Facebook could have a false positive rate of 0% and a false negative rate of 0%, they would absolutely make that happen. Unfortunately, due to the way statistics work, Facebook can pick its false positive rate or its false negative rate, but it's impossible to get to 0% false positives without just giving up on moderation altogether.

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.

> 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...

There's a world of difference between subjecting an innocent person to the penalties afforded for felonies by 18th-century English law and subjecting an innocent person to "limited access to [Facebook] for a few days." That difference completely changes the acceptable ratio of innocents-suffering to guilty-prevented-from-harm and the expected level of oversight for the process.

blocking for a few days is not rate limiting. 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). same for my grandparents. they may be upset if i can't talk to them and i can't reach them in other ways. the problem is that most people are not aware of this risk and it will catch them off guard which has the potential to hurt more than it would otherwise. the risk of this makes facebook an unviable option for me to communicate in the first place.

> blocking for a few days is not rate limiting.

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.

i don't know how contrived the examples are for facebook, as i am not on it, but replace it with wechat in china and you have reality. many people really have no other way to keep in touch with some people.

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.

In this case some actual conspiracies have been ousted. Like when Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data to influence elections. There's a track record here.

Not saying this is true but sadly sometimes it is.

Facebook has had many privacy scandals in the past.

And unfortunately, some conspiracy theories are true

Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence

And in every user-hostile campaign there is a checkbox that needs to be ticked: can we make it look like incompetence ?

If you could prove beyond doubt that Facebook cared an iota about this person posting an EFF privacy tips link, I’ll lick any NYC subway pole you ask me to.

I agree. I don't think Facebook thinks for a second about privacy related issues.

I love the EFF, but let's be honest: they're not a threat to Facebook. It's like the elephant thinking about the ant.

I would be overjoyed if someday that changes, but that still wouldn't be relevant to a flagging today.

> It's like the elephant thinking about the ant.

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.

Mythbusters showed them avoiding mice. Shocked the crew as like many people the really expected it to be an old wives tale

Imo that segment used a flawed design.

> 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.

Similarly, I think there's something poetic about how elephants aren't blocked as much by fences--even if those look more significant to us humans--compared to trenches.

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.

I disagree. One should give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

Sure but how many times?

Even if it's automated, it's still not great for Facebook that they are treating EFF as a spam link. That's a story in itself.

I'm a paying supporter of the EFF, so they are important to me. But I disagree, it would be a story if this was a regular occurrence for sure, but moderation is a hugely complex, distributed, and opaque process. If somebody found code like `post.censor() if post.mentions("EFF")` then yes, it's an outrage. But it's not gonna be that simple. The real story is probably "when using statistics to make decisions, sometimes things that shouldn't get flagged get flagged, and vice versa"

Also important to note that it's not as simple as having a whitelist of domains that are exempt, because at Facebook scale that immediately becomes an avenue for accusations of bias (see all of the noise around the twitter files).

If it's a malfunctioning spam detection algorithm, and the malfunction has nothing to do with Facebook's actual policies about what constitutes spam, it's really not a story in itself, or at least no more of a story than any other downtime.

You can probably make it do this with any link if you post it enough multiple times in quick succession.

> Even if it's automated, it's still not great for Facebook that they are treating EFF as a spam link. That's a story in itself.

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.

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