Facebook banned website that links to critical article, claims phishing
bsky.app
bsky.app
> Looks like it a few domains, including thehandbasket.co, were mistakenly classified as a phishing site, which has since been corrected as Andy mentioned. Unfortunately, at our scale, we get false positives on safety measures all the time. Apologies for the trouble.
False positive that was already corrected at the time is was posted on Bluesky and corrected long before it was posted here on HN.
This all happened and was fixed days ago, but people are still trying to post headlines that imply something more nefarious is still happening.
There is no story here, just journalists trying to stir up controversy and imply malice. Unfortunately this is a valid tactic for driving attention to small substacks and similar outlets who wouldn’t otherwise be noteworthy. Getting “banned” by Facebook is the most effective thing they could ask for to gain more exposure, as evidenced by the way this has shot to number 1 on Hacker News despite having been corrected days ago.
At this point, the “at our scale …” argument is such an arrogant excuse for doing damage all over the world. If I can’t ensure people are treated fairly, don’t get harassed, etc, maybe it’s not a viable business then. Stop offloading all kinds of externalities onto the public.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Moderation and filtering needs to be decoupled from content hosting and authn/authz. This is a major part making me optimistic about bluesky/atproto.
I'm not a fan of these privately owned social media platforms with no oversight, fairness, or recourse for the public, but people want corporate social media and I'm not sure what these giants are supposed to do or what people even want here.
Maybe? It's not that crazy of an idea that if you can't serve your clients that you are put out of business?
Given hospitals are frequently privately owned, one could argue Facebook provides a public service in running a social media platform. Discriminating models based on public goodness is simply command-economy picking of winners and losers based on politicians’ limited knowledge and preferences.
Perhaps if free/ad was not workable we could see subscription services with better moderation. If not (people won’t pay), then it’s not actually worth that much to users so it’s fine to let it die.
Just give the user a warning that Facebook sees some likelihood that the site is a phishing site, and let the user decide by himself whether he wants to follow the link or not.
If we instead say that people are more important than a corporation’s right to scale, then a single large-scale violation would have been the end of Facebook and have criminal consequences for the leadership of the company. The scale of the act should make you more culpable, not less.
What you're saying is that if something isn't perfect, it shouldn't exist at all. And guess what: Nothing is perfect.
There is controversy and malice
If you have different information, perhaps post a valid source here rather than saying “wrong” and then injecting something else. I literally just copy and pasted the linked post text.
The linked post is halfway through a BlueSky thread that has a screenshot of a part of a Twitter thread about a link to something else that I can’t click. Nothing screams “social media ragebait mill” like a long chain of unclickable screenshots to some ragebait take about some story that happened elsewhere.
> There is no story here, just journalists trying to stir up controversy and imply malice.
Which was not a quote
Assuming you’re not familiar with this story at all, here is some previous discussion of the numerous events in which the critical article was stopped from being shared on meta’s platform. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39945811
It is clearly underplaying questionable behavior that has caused serious problems for a media outlet that were only fixed because this got attention.
- Criticism of Facebook’s ad policies and functions
- Discussion of climate change issues
- Links to Vox, government sources, and a bunch of PBS sites
https://kansasreflector.com/2024/04/04/when-facebook-fails-l...
This gets blocked, yet I see significantly spammier links on Facebook by accident. To me, the real issue is likely that their filters aren’t very good.
There's continued to be intermittent bans on the Kansas Reflector site, and there's even fresh bans on blog posts talking about the ban on the site. Also, the original KR post about Facebook still seems to be blocked from being posted on Facebook or Instagram. Someone is actively adding these URLs to the filter.
There's this weird tendency to bend over backwards to assume Facebook, a company repeatedly convicted of doing malicious things, wouldn't do a malicious thing, and none of the excuses stand up to the facts for a second. Would a company run by a man who openly compares himself to Caesar Augustus try to silence its critics?
original Kansas Reflector post:
Facebook blocked local news site for posting an editorial critical of them
https://www.rs21.org.uk (small UK socialist group)
After they posted - guess what - an article critical of Facebook:
"How Facebook tried to censor indigenous struggle" https://www.rs21.org.uk/2020/10/07/how-facebook-tried-to-cen...
Fits a pattern, I think...
the only people clicking on them are extremely low info olds
It took less than 10 minutes for the Safety and Security team to thank me for the report, but that the ad was determined to be legit
The weird thing about some of those ads were full NSFW content. Literally Porn. During reporitng the ads, it says "It was targeted to People from the age of 19 - 30, living in country <Some Asian Country>. It was a third world country. It seems like they don't fukin care who promotes what contents in such countries.
If they had been clear about it, posting a warning "we consider this post detrimental to our business" go ahead and censor it, being underhanded just made it stink much, much more.