Facebook ban on discussing Linux?
distrowatch.com
distrowatch.com
Clearly there's a need for some kind of bad-url blocker. You don't want compromised accounts (or clueless people) sharing nefarious links to trusted friends.
And clearly blocking distrowatch etc is bizarre overreach. And probably not intended behaviour -- it just makes no sense.
The web exists just fine. Using Facebook as a front end to the web is a terrible idea though.
The current problem exists because the content is chosen algorithmically
Not gotchas, I’m not arguing for the sake of it, but these are pretty common situations.
I always urge people to volunteer as mods for a bit.
At least you may see a different way to approach thing, or else you might be able to articulate the reasons the rule can’t be followed better.
You get the benefits of striving to warn users, without the downsides of it being abusive, or seen as abusive.
If I were to build this… well first I would have to ensure no link shorteners, then I would need a list of known tropes and memes, and a way to add them to the list over time.
This should get me about 30% of the way there, next.. even if I ignore adversaries, I would still have to contend with links which have never been seen before.
So for these links, someone would have to be the sacrificial lamb and go through it to see what’s on the other side. Ideally this would be someone on the mod team, but there can never be enough mods to handle volume.
I guess we’re at the mod coverage problem - take volunteer mods; it’s very common for mods to be asleep, when a goat related link is shared. When you get online 8 hours later, theres a page of reports.
That is IF you get reports. People click on a malware infection, but aren’t aware of it, so they don’t report. Or they encounter goats, and just quit the site, without caring to report.
I’m actually pulling my punches here, because many issues, eg. adversarial behavior, just nullify any action you take. People could decide to say that you are applying the label incorrectly, and that the label itself is censorship.
This also assumes that you can get engineering resources applied - and it’s amazing if you can get their attention. All the grizzled T&S folk I know, develop very good mediating and diplomatic skills to just survive.
thats why I really do urge people to get into mod teams, so that the work gets understood by normal people. The internet is banging into the hard limits of our older free speech ideas, and people are constantly taking advantage of blind spots amongst the citizenry.
When I consider my colleagues who work in the same department: they really have very different preferred schedules concerning what their preferred work hours are (one colleague would even love to work from 11 pm to 7 am - and then getting to sleep - if he was allowed to). If you ensure that you have both larks and "nightowls" among your (voluntary) moderation team, this problem should become mitigated.
But once the network grows to a large size it requires a lot of moderators and you start running into problems of moderation quality over large groups of people.
This is a difficult and unsolved problem.
Nevertheless, I do believe that there do exist at least partial solutions for this problem, and a lot of problems concerning moderation quality are in my opinion actually self-inflicted by the companies:
I see the central issue that the companies have deeply inconsistent goals what they want vs not want on their websites. Also, even if there is some consistency, they commonly don't clearly communicate these boundaries to the users (often for "political" or reputation reasons).
Keeping this in mind, I claim that all of the following strategies can work (but also each one will infuriate at least one specific group of users, which you will thus indirectly pressure to leave your platform), and have (successfully) been used by various platforms:
1. Simply ban discussions of some well-defined topics that tend to stir up controversies and heated discussion (even though "one side may be clearly right"). This will, of course, infuriate users who are on the "free speech" side. Also people who have a "currently politically accepted" stance on the controversial topic will be angry that they are not allowed to post about their "right" opinion on this topic, which is a central part of their life.
2. Only allow arguments for one side of some controversial topics ("taking a stance"): this will infuriate people who are in the other camp, or are on the free speech side. Also consider that for a lot of highly controversial topics, which side is "right" can change every few years "when the political wind changes direction". The infuriated users likely won't come back.
3. Mostly allow free speech, but strongly moderate comments where people post severe insults. This needs moderators who are highly trustable by the users. Very commonly, moderators are more tolerant towards insults from one side than from the other (or consider comments that are insulting, but within their Overton window, to be acceptable). As a platform, you have to give such moderators clear warnings, or even get rid of them.
While this (if done correctly) will pacify many people who are on the "free speech" side, be aware that 3 likely leads to a platform with "more heated" and "controversial" discussions, which people who are more on the "sensitive" and "nice" side likely won't like. Also advertisers are often not fond of an environment where there are "heated" and "controversial" discussions (even if the users of the platform actually like these).
Yup. One of my favored options, if you are running your own community. There are some topics that just increase conflict and are unresolvable without very active referee work. (Religion, Politics, Sex, Identity)
2) This is fine ? Ah, you are considering a platform like Meta, who has to give space to everyone. Dont know on this one, too many conflicting ways this can go.
3) One thing not discussed enough, is how moderating affects mods. Your experience is alien to what most users go through, since you see the 1-3% of crap others don't see. Mental health is a genuine issue for mods, with PTSD being a real risk if you are on one of the gore/child porn queues.
These options to a degree are discussed and being considered. At the cost of being a broken record, more "normal" users need to see the other side of community running.
Theres MANY issues with the layman idea of Freespeech, its hitting real issues when it comes to online spaces and the free for all meeting of minds we have going on.
There are some amazing things that come out of it, like people learning entirely new dance moves, food or ideas. The dark parts need actual engagement, and need more people in threads like this who can chime in with their experiences, and get others down into the weeds and problem solving.
I really believe that we will have to come up with a new agreement on what is "ok" when it comes to speech, and part of it is going to be realizing that we want freespeech because it enables a fair market place of ideas. Or something else. I would rather it happen ground up, rather than top down.
This is what I at least focused on since
- Facebook is the platform that the discussed article is about
- in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42852441 pixl97 wrote:
"Then this comes back to size of the network. HN for example is small enough that we have just a few moderators here and it works.
But once the network grows to a large size it requires a lot of moderators and you start running into problems of moderation quality over large groups of people."
There’s a better alternative for all of these solutions in terms of of consistency, COPE was released recently, and it’s basically a light weight LLM trained on applying policy to content. In theory that can be used to handle all the consistency issues and coverage issues. It’s beta though, and needs to be tested en masse.
Eh.. let me find a link. https://huggingface.co/zentropi-ai/cope-a-9b?ref=everythingi...
I’ve had a chance to play with it. It has potential, and even being 70% good is a great thing here.
It doesnt resolve the free speech issue, but it can work towards the consistency and clarity on rules issues.
I will admit I’ve strayed from the original point at this stage though
Also, Mastodon is tiny, and spam is a numbers game.
The size of a total network is irrelevant until you start randomly connecting nodes.
Of course should it become popular (side note; it wont) such that my mom and her friends are on it, then the spammers and scammers will come too. And since my mom is in my social graph a lot of that will become visible to me.
Enjoy mastodon now. The quality is high because the group is small and the barrier to entry us high. Hope it never catches on, because all "forums" become crap when the eternal September arrives.
Tip: If someone is trolling you, they can also write to your texts without a chance of you stopping them. No perfect solution exists, I guess.
With that said, that is an exotic situation. I'm a big fan of NOSTR in overall, all my recent hobby projects used npub and nsec. The simplicity and power of that combination is really powerful. No more emails, no more servers, no more passwords.
They really dislike this whole hypertext thing.
Wikipedia links seem to be an exception, maybe that’s special-cased.
I think that's a much more pressing concern.
a) silly, because... it's not true. Spam, phishing attempts, illegal content - all of this should be removed.
b) more damaging to whatever you're advocating for than you realize. You want a free web? So do I. But I'm not going to go around saying stuff like "all users should be able to post any URL at any time" and calling moderation actions "utterly despicable"
...on a social media site designed to aggregate URLs?
Source: I work building an SMM tool, and Facebook Link posts constantly need our attention
> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
Your custom license built with your own philosophy will still interoperate just fine with many common open source licenses, and as a bonus for some, will ward off corporations with cautious lawyers who don't like unknown software licenses.
I've been perplexed for years, I wonder if it went unnoticed all this time or they reverted then reimplement the ban.
If your domain links to content that AVs flag as malware, it gets blocked on FB. Distrowatch is likely uniquely susceptible to this because they're constantly linking to novel, 3rd-party tarballs (via the "Latest Packages" column).
In this case, it was the Privoxy 4.0.0 release from the 18th. You can see it linked in this Jan 19 snapshot of the site: https://web.archive.org/web/20250119125004/https://distrowat...
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/c08e2ba0049307017bf9d8a6...
I've long believed that a large part of technological evil comes from bugs which were introduced innocuously, but intentionally not fixed.
Like, your ISP wouldn't intentionally design a system to steal your money, but they would build a low-quality billing system and then prioritise fixing systematic bugs that cause errors in the customer's favour, while leaving the ones that cause overbilling.
This could easily be the same on Facebook - this got swept up in a false positive and then someone decided it's not a good one to fix.
And what are you going to do about it? Get into a lawyer slap fight with a foreign trillion dollar corporation?
Some context: https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/site-support/26448/
Here's VirusTotal on the tarball (note Chrome blocks its download, for the same reason): https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/c08e2ba0049307017bf9d8a6...
Nimda was a Windows malware from 2001. It seems unlikely that would be a meaningful attack vector for a compromised privoxy in 2025. But again, I have not investigated it.
That's quite the statement to make without any source to back it up; I wonder what the evidence for this is.
> I wonder what the evidence for it is
Maybe "Any posts mentioning DistroWatch and multiple groups associated with Linux and Linux discussions have either been shut down or had many of their posts removed" and "We've been hearing all week from readers who say they can no longer post about Linux on Facebook or share links to DistroWatch. Some people have reported their accounts have been locked or limited for posting about Linux"
What do you think evidence consists of if not that?
Reading the post, it sounds like this may rather be because of incorrect categorization of DistroWatch and links to it than an outright ban on Linux discussion. So yet another issue with Facebook's content moderation methods.
If Facebook was removing links to an Pro-Catholic website for some reason but still allowed the discussion of Catholicism, Catholic Church groups, etc. You would be daft to claim that FaceBook is banning all Catholics and discussion of thereof.
> I never understand why people rush to make excuses for these huge companies awash in resources with no real accountability or customer support
Because if nobody pushes back against the hyperbole then it just becomes a competition of who can make up the most exaggerated claim in order to attract the most attention.
doesn’t change the fact that the AI is seemingly being given final authority over policy decisions.
If it's a consequence of a 'buggy ML classifier', well, it's FB's policy to use one for censorship.
You can't launder accountability with an 'It's AI' black box.
I've reported nazi content a number of times and it never violated the policy.
If it was a user calling Trump a Nazi, then it should have been removed, and their moderation failed.
If it just espouses Nazi ideology or rhetoric, that's free speech in the US.
That's just how it is. It's part of this country. I have to listen to both the throaty, greasy growl of the white supremacist and the piercing howl of the victims wounded by words.
edit to add additional context: There's a difference between someone "posting" "nazi" content on facebook and here on HN, for example. on FB they figure you're seeing it because of your actions. Your friends, a group you joined, etc. If it's a friend posting on their wall, your moderation task is easy, block the friend, unfriend, talk to the friend, call them out. regardless of your decision, FB doesn't have any obligation or, i would argue, right to step in and moderate in those circumstances. If it's in a group, the moderators of the group have to decide if it represents the group. If it does and you disagree, leave the group.
Someone spouting nazi nonsense on HN is spouting it into a megaphone on the streetcorner, as it were. I have to read the content, even if i didn't actively follow that user or "join" that group.
there are different moderation strategies. merely invoking "nazi" as the boogyman to back up your point is fallacious.
- Facebook is censoring this content
- They decided Linux is malware
- They label groups associated with Linux as "cybersecurity threats"
The first one they seem to give evidence for the second two seem to be assumptions.
I’m surprised we haven’t yet heard from the “it isn’t censorship if a private company is doing it” crowd in this conversation
I don't have a problem with the censorship here on HN, so I post here. I do have a problem with the censorship on Meta properties (aside from being offended by their product design and general aims as an organization), so I don't have accounts with them or view content on their properties. I also have the right to criticize them for their censorship, but not the right to prevent anyone else from using it if they want.
There are people here who literally argue “it isn’t censorship because a private company did it”. Here’s a random example of a recent such comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787234 - other examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42664998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41385109
There are really three separate issues:
(a) can something a private entity decides to do, without any government pressure to do it, count as “censorship”?-this is a definitional question
(b) is such private censorship illegal (in whatever jurisdiction)?-this is a factual question of what the law actually is
(c) should such private censorship be illegal (in whatever circumstances)?-this is a public policy question of what the law ought to be
You are talking about (b), whereas I was talking about (a)
What would a definition of censorship be that includes private entities? Can you link to one?
IMO, it adds more to the conversation than all the comments the dog-piled with "It's not censorship because it's not the government".
>What would a definition of censorship be that includes private entities?
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". Censorship can be conducted by governments and private institutions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
Censorship, the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are "offensive," happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their personal political or moral values on others. Censorship can be carried out by the government as well as private pressure groups. https://www.aclu.org/documents/what-censorship
Censorship, the changing or the suppression or prohibition of speech or writing that is deemed subversive of the common good. It occurs in all manifestations of authority to some degree, but in modern times it has been of special importance in its relation to government and the rule of law. https://www.britannica.com/topic/censorship
I would ask you if you can link to a definition of censorship that only calls out the government? Aside from XKCD's terrible comic. https://xkcd.com/1357/
Merriam-Webster defines censorship [0] sense 1(a) as "the institution, system, or practice of censoring" and sense 1(b) as "the actions or practices of censors". Neither definition includes an explicit requirement that it must be done by the government as opposed to a private entity, although we also have to look at their definitions of "censoring" and "censors". Their example for sense 1(a) does mention the government ("They oppose government censorship") – but I don't think we should read examples as limiting the scope of the definition, plus the very phrase "government censorship" suggests there may also be "non-government censorship".
For "censor" (noun), their sense (1) is "a person who supervises conduct and morals" – it doesn't say such a person can only belong to the government. It then says "such as" (which I read as implying that the following subsenses shouldn't be considered exhaustive), sense (1)(a) "an official who examines materials (such as publications or films) for objectionable matter" – an "official" needn't be government – indeed, their definition of "official" [2] gives two examples, a "government officials" and a "company official", clearly indicating that officials can be either public or private. Their example for censor noun sense (1)(a) mentions "Government censors..." – but again, examples don't limit the scope of the definition, and qualifying them as "government" implies there may be others lacking that qualification.
For "censor" as a verb, Merriam-Webster gives two senses, "to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable" (example: "censor the news"), and "to suppress or delete as objectionable" (example: "censor out indecent passages"). Neither gives any hint of being limited to the government. Let me give my own example of the verb "censor" being used, quite naturally, in a sense in which the government is not directly involved: "The Standards and Practices department of NBC censored one of Jack Paar's jokes on the February 10, 1960, episode of The Tonight Show", from the Wikipedia article "Broadcast Standards and Practices". [3] Now, you might argue that NBC was forced into censorship by the FCC – possibly, but I'm not sure if the FCC would have objected to the specific joke in question, and NBC had (and still does have) their own commercial motivations for censorship separate from whatever legal requirements the FCC imposed on them.
Similarly, Wiktionary's definition of "censorship" starts with "The use of state or group power to control freedom of expression or press..." [4]. The fact it says "state or group" as opposed to just "state" implies that non-governmental actors can engage in censorship per their definition.
Wiktionary's definition of the noun "censor" includes "An official responsible for the removal or suppression of objectionable material (for example, if obscene or likely to incite violence) or sensitive content in books, films, correspondence, and other media" [5] – it never says the official has to be a government official, and their example sense is "The headmaster was an even stricter censor of his boarding pupils’ correspondence than the enemy censors had been of his own when the country was occupied" – which could very easily be about a private school rather than a government-run one.
I should also point out that the Catholic Church has officials called "censors". To quote the 1908 Catholic Encyclopaedia article "Censorship of Books" [6], "Pius X in the Encyclical 'Pascendi Dominici gregis' of 8 September, 1907 (Acta S. Sedis, XL, 645), expressly orders all bishops to appoint as censors qualified theologians, to whom the censorship of books appertains ex officio." And the Catholic Church still employs "censors" to this day, [7] although their role has shrunk greatly – generally they are theologians (most commonly priests, although I believe laypersons are eligible for appointment) to whom a bishop delegates the review of certain publications (primarily religious education curricula) and who then makes a recommendation to the bishop as to whether to approve the publication or demand changes to it. Obviously if the Catholic Church has "censors", the concept includes private bodies, since the Catholic Church is a private body almost everywhere (Vatican City and the Holy See excluded).
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censorship
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censoring
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/official
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_Standards_and_Practi...
[4] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/censorship
[5] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/censor
[6] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03519d.htm
[7] see 1983 CIC Canon 830, https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/docume...
"A bad thing is happening and the evidence of it happening is that I said it's happening."
By the way, I love DistroWatch and do think FB is messing with their posts. But there's no evidence to show if it's a new policy, a glitch in the moderation or an internal screw up.
If you don't believe them, that's a different objection.
And glitch policies are policies if they're getting enforced.
I get that it is worded like it was people in a boardroom making a decision after having a debate. However an overworked admin, or an AI Moderator could just as easily be lumped together as “internal policy makers” from the users perspective.
It is obviously allowed to discuss Linux. There is plenty of discussion about Linux on Facebook, including some about the recent "ban".
My guess is that some automated scanner found something wrong about the linked page. Maybe there is some link to a "hacking"-oriented distro, maybe some torrents, some dubious comment, etc... Probably a false positive, it happens.
Their second request (after a network diagram) is always to create an EC2 instance running Kali.
Which, honestly, confuses me a bit -- all of the packages are available in AL or Ubuntu, so why do they care? I don't know, and I guess I don't care enough to ask. Just give me the attestation document please. :)
Anyways, if you don't run `sudo -s` as your first command in a shell - are you really hacking?
It's easy to say "The newest Kali release is the distro the org will use" instead of "Use whatever Linux flavor you want and here's an install script that may or may not work or break depending on your distro and/or distro's version".
Them spending time troubleshooting a setup that's out-of-spec is still time billed, so it's better for their customers for everything to roll smoothly too. They also just want to execute their job well, not spend time debugging script / build issues.
Likewise, discussion should be allowed.
The actual title of this story is literally not believable if you take the most generic meaning of discussion and Linux.
I'd go even further: I don't believe that anyone could believe that the title is believable.
I knew a company that leapt to the same conclusion regarding GitHub.
It has to get to the attention of higher ups.
The one time I have reported a comment to FB, it was horrible racism (said "do not interbreed with [group x] because they are [evil - not sure of exact wording]" and got a reply saying that it did not violate community standards.
And particularly in the context of work primarily about communication or computing : having an official Xitter account for a journalist or a GitHub account for a software developer is like promoting a brand of cigarettes or opiates by a doctor - a violation of professional deontology.
I presume that it is used for launching hacks, but even so discussion should not be banned.
Just makes me wonder if DistroWatch is telling the whole story.
Nobody outside of Facebook can possibly know the whole story. Hell, most people within Facebook can’t know, either.
Are you suspecting that distrowatch knows more about the context than they are letting on?
I understand than some malicious software may use things like curl, but it's also annoying to have to re-create the same ticket and submit to internal IT, and then if someone working on the ticket hasn't done this before, they close it, we have to have a meeting about why we need access to that site...
It's not an exaggeration to say I've experienced it at every employer I've had.
Meta runs 10M+ CentOS 9 Stream boxes migrating to 10 eventually.
Cent has shorter security update availability latency and they're shipped more consistently. The benefit with Rocky and Alma is double the lifecycle time and arguably better governance, unfortunately though they're both tiny operations that suffer from a narrow bus factor, are always playing catch-up, drifting away from RHEL compatibility, and are the definition of fragmentation.
If you need RHEL-ish for servers, use CentOS Stream. It's not great for desktop. Use Fedora or something more LTS for that.
It's anyone who appreciates the value of stability in server software. In my personal opinion, that value is quite high and far too quickly cast aside by others in the industry.
I use guix to get up to date tools for development stuff.
(On my laptop I run aeon desktop and guix. I really do think that model is the future. Right now I am hoping to be able to run aeon desktop but with the opensuse slowroll packages which would give me all the benefits of aeon but without the constant updates).
Any source for that claim? I am testing software on Rocky and never got complaints from users that run it on RHEL.
Seriously though, I'm curious (have no account): are you able to post that link on Facebook?
Was it just a cost reduction: fact checking takes effort and those checkers have to be paid? With the result being situations like this?
No, it was clearly an attempt to court Trump, unfortunately 'not enough ass kissing, yet' according to the trump team.
I guess Linux needs to go mainstream first.
There are so many ways to do it wrong even if you tag info as true or fake and in principle you do it with good intention. For example it was the case that certain information was tagged as fake and when claimed for a correction the administrators "could not do anything" (Spain cases researched by Joan Planas by doing requests himself personally for the biggest official agency in Spain, called Newtral, which is intimately tied to the Socialist Party in Spain... really, the name makes me laugh, let us call war peace etc. like in 1984). But they were way faster in doing it in the other direction or often found excuses to clearly favor certain interests.
Now put this in the context of an election... uh... complicated topic, but we all minimally awake people know what this is about...
How we know that it wasn't to be calculated in binary is that the digit 2 occurs.
We have to have a reason to suspect that it was intended to be binary, otherwise we are inventing an inconsistency that isn't there in order to find a false or not-well-formed interpretation.
In fact I believe neutrality does not exist as such. No problem with it, objective information and multiple sources with their biases are ok to get an idea as long as facts are shown. But an official truth? Come on, what is that? It is dangerously similar to a dictatorship to have the monopoly of truth.
They are obviously different and mostly separate.
A presentation of facts can be biased.
E.g. a news agency can have a characteristic political slant, yet not make up facts to suit that narrative.
When a bias is severe, such that it leads to behaviors like concealing important facts in order to manipulate the correct understanding of a situation, then fact checking can find a problem with it.
They might not be the same, but they are interrelated sonce this is a fight to monopolize the truth and bias and lies are what you end up seeing. Many times they say sorry and get away with it,, but they are not saying sorry: they are working for some interests.
What happened to Biden's son in Ukraine. They totally disappeared before an election, for example. Why? Why it did not get through and went viral? I do not give a hell from these agencies. They are everything but seeking the truth. Yes, for some irrelevant info they might be ok but we all know who they work for.
Remember part of the leakages that Musk showed when he bought Twitter also with the mail exchanges of what to censor. Only a retarded would believe those agencies at this point.
Not to say fake news do not exist though.
I imagine something about that caused certain lists to be populated in certain ways, and no linux user cares enough about Facebook to help them correct the problem.
It's just some "AI" hallucinating.
Yesterday I tried to submit a link to a Youtube video of the Testament song "Native Blood". Nothing terribly controversial about that, and I'm nearly 100% sure I've posted that song before with no problems. But it kept getting denied with some "link not allowed because blah, blah" error.
So is "Native Blood" banned on FB? Well, I tried a link to a different video of the same song, and was able to submit it just fine. This feels like a bug to me, and I wouldn't be surprised if similar bugs were interfering with other people trying to post stuff.
Granted that's just speculation so take this for what it's worth.
> Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labelled groups associated with Linux as being "cybersecurity threats".
The author gives no evidence to back up on this claim.
How can one provide evidence that something is not being displayed on a website? Isn't this, like, a formal fallacy, or something?
> We've been hearing all week from readers who say they can no longer post about Linux on Facebook or share links to DistroWatch. Some people have reported their accounts have been locked or limited for posting about Linux.
But anyway, they're not asking for evidence that something isn't being displayed. They're asking for evidence that 'Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labelled groups associated with Linux as being "cybersecurity threats"'.
Who was overzealous if not one or more internal policy makers?
That seems pretty automated to me.
[0] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/algo?ht-comment-id=1201119...
Avoid platforms altogether.
I think a lot of the censorship problems would be resolved if they just shut the bots off and relied on user flagging. Does that require a lot more people? Sure. But the long-run result would be far more people would use and trust these networks (covering the revenue of hiring moderators). I know I'd be a lot happier if there was a thinking human deciding my fate than a random script that only a few people know the inner-workings of.
As-is, it seems like a lot of these social networks are just shooting themselves in the foot just to avoid costs and get a false sense of control over the problem.
If it's something trending towards illegal, toss it into an "emergency" queue for moderators to hand-verify and don't make it visible until it's been checked.
So in your example, if someone uploads war imagery, it would be tagged as "war," "violence," "gore" and be auto-blurred for users. That doesn't mean the post or account needs to be outright nuked, just treated differently from SFW stuff.
Considering they've open sourced one of their image detection API [1], I'd imagine it's more a problem of accuracy and implementation at scale than a serious technical hurdle.
Since you mentioned war, I'm reminded of Black Mirror episode "Men Against Fire", where an army of soldiers have eye implants that cause them to visually see enemy soldiers as unsightly. (My point being this is effectively what Facebook can do.)
There should be - after all, this is akin to graffiti, which is typically fined.
What is not acceptable, is a platform creating a paralegal environment.
This is what the yanks call "a complete nothing-burger".
Though I will admit that Bryan is just a deeply unlikable human who is generally under-informed-at-best on any given subject that he's talking about, so people might be looking at it more cynically than if someone else posted it.
All the Linux reviews that I have been warned about or have been removed have been links to DistroWatch.
Inability to market directly is antithesis to Facebook and its ilk.
Linux gives users control. That is the very last thing anyone in power wants anyone else to have.
The idea of having to wade through AI generated pictures of Shrimp Jesus and my mad uncle posting about his latest attempts to turn lead into gold (yes, really) to find out about new distros to try seems very alien to me.
In most cases they're pretty radioactive isotopes of gold. But IMO that just makes it feel even more like alchemy. The gold is cursed.
Imagine being confident enough to believe and document that. Crazy? Maybe, but a crazy one can appreciate.
The problem isn't when one uncle is doing this. The problem is when the bulk of the content you see on FB is as crazy as this.
I mean, if you like purchasing the National Enquirer and flipping through it, then by all means, this is for you.
I still prefer that to all of the fake AI-slop message boards and meme/video culture that seems to have replaced it on FB.
Also, turning lead into gold is easy: Just break all the protons off to get Hydrogen and maybe Helium, then compress it back so you get a star to form, and wait for it to go nova. Or, if you're in a hurry, you can compress your Hydrogen more and if you kind of jiggle it just the right way then you should get some gold along with other heavy elements.
The secret is to train your feed by bookmarking the groups and linking to them directly instead of accepting whatever flailing nonsense the algo decides to default to.
Having said that - I hope everyone has worked out by now that when you have a "free speech" culture based on covert curation and moderation of contentious issues, it's not just going to be about porn and trans people.
Non-mainstream (i.e. non-consumer) tech is going to be labelled bad-think and suppressed too.
Platforms seem to get a lot more leeway than abusing drugs (alcohol,smoking...) for some reason ?
Fortunately, my parents rejected Facebook from the start; and they're online plenty.
We're all going to have to start having the same conversations about LinkedIn, AKA Facebook Pro.
I assume Facebook doesn't want anything posted on FB that can't be turned into a racist diatribe. There's not a whole lot of racism potential in Kernel tuning.
Maybe you could squeeze in anti-Finnish rant about Linus, but it would be minimal
I'm glad someone finally said it.
Give their database to bot for search and destroy and you will understand by how many will survive.
Good luck!
Lots of people use linux because it's a good OS, irrespective of privacy concerns (see the occasional flareup about some software or another automatically shipping off bug reports - some people don't care, others are incredibly concerned).
Edit: Recently, a lot of associations working to prevent HIV, sexually-transmitted diseases and family planning have been progressively de-listed, or their content blocked and their accounts banned, all over the world on all META platforms. This is the true face of freedom of expression according to META and its “community rules”.
Meta censorship of abortion pill content (french) : https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/veille-sanit...
It's a capitulation to the idea that speech standards should be determined by public opinion and not by reason, evidence and a scientific mindset.
Yes this is largely a debate between a top-down technocratic worldview vs democratic/meritocratic one. The point is FB is still very much on the former highly centralized expert-defined guideline/automated system side while only making small moves in the other direction with community notes. Maybe they'll keep going in that direction but what they say vs do is an important distinction.
I don't have a huge problem with community notes per se. I do have a huge problem with blatantly unequal standards just because large parts of the public have morally rotten views.
How are you evaluating this? Are you including the truth of the Facebook post, whether moderators correctly/accurately act upon the flagging, whether users choose to stick on the platform after seeing the content, whether users stop believing in any objective truth, or something else?
Community notes only does fact-checking, but moderation has the ability to reduce the activity of bad actors. They serve 2 different purposes from where I stand.
> a top-down technocratic worldview vs democratic/meritocratic one.
You mean to say: "a top-down technocratic worldview vs majoritarian one."
Majoritarian != Democracy
The moment we start talking about speech standards being set by "science" you get a lot of people who are pretending that their thing is scientific. Ditto reason and evidence.
The win for free speech is setting up a situation where people who are actually motivated by science, reason and evidence can still say their piece without threatening the powerful actors in the community. And limiting the blast radius of the damage when they get things wrong despite being technically correct. But principles of free speech go far beyond what is true, correct and reasonable.
To confirm, you are making a normative "ought" statement here, not just a descriptive "is" statement?
> science has never had a seat at the table in the West.
This is a strange idea to me. As a simple example, vaccinations are mandatory for a reason. The unfreedom there is clearly justified.
> If anything Communism was the pro-science approach, typically centrally planned societies love science and technocrats - they put a lot of effort into working out a true and optimal way and it didn't work very well. The body count can be staggering.
What James Scott called high modernism is indeed bad. The problem was not the fact that science was used, but the fact that the models used weren't complex enough to describe local conditions, and that politically motivated models (e.g. Lysenkoism) gained prominence. Science was also used in other parts of the world to much better effect, such as vaccines and HIV medications.
> The moment we start talking about speech standards being set by "science" you get a lot of people who are pretending that their thing is scientific. Ditto reason and evidence.
True, and yet some of those people are more correct than others. This is challenging, but it is not a challenge we can run away from.
> The win for free speech is setting up a situation where people who are actually motivated by science, reason and evidence can still say their piece without threatening the powerful actors in the community. And limiting the blast radius of the damage when they get things wrong despite being technically correct. But principles of free speech go far beyond what is true, correct and reasonable.
I think people not applying reason is far, far worse of a problem today than people applying it.
Other than science being the entire reason the US were able to corner the fascists in WW2. Let a lone all the scientific break throughs in the last few decades coming from the West. Heck before WWII, the automobile?
Perhaps you meant it wasn’t primarily embraced.
Not to my knowledge
Economic heft had a lot to do with it as did the weight of numbers
I love science, BTW. But it is not the source of all knowledge.
The Germans were beaten mostly by the Soviets. They (the Germans) were overwhelmed. And they too could not replace their losses like the Soviets could. Especially humans
2. The fascists were Westerners (and leaders in science/technology, for that matter, the US didn't beat them with more technology).
Objective standards would be best, but subjective standards that you pretend are objective are far worse than subjective standards that are honest about it.
— Simone de Beauvoir
Some people were complaining about meta, but species seems the main one. And only the main site, the mobile site is fine.
People shape themselves so much around algorithms.
I tried again, and this time I get "Posts that look like spam are blocked", and a similar message if I try to leave a link in a comment.
I wonder if spammers have been vandalizing Wikispecies and posting the links, but unlike Wikipedia the editors of Wikispecies struggle to remove the spam in time? The project has hundreds of thousands of pages, but the vast majority would have very little content or oversight. It could be the Wiki project with the worst pages-per-editor ratio.
There isn't pornography, or at least only indirectly — Wikispecies doesn't host any images itself (says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikispecies ).
Even LWN is covering it.
But also :-(
Lord Astor was right.
These little scandals nearly always turn out to be glitchy emphemera in the Black Box of $BigCo, rather than a policy or plan. I imagine that's the case here too. Why would Facebook ban discussion of the operating system it runs on, after 20+ years?
(Btw: @dang doesn't work - if you want reliable message delivery you need to email hn@ycombinator.com)
TBH I didn't think the @ thing would work - I was just hoping you'd notice. I have been meaning to email you, though.
I can believe DistroWatch the website got blocked by Facebook for whatever reason and I can sympathize, but exaggerating it to something obviously false doesn’t do them any favors. I think the title needs to be changed if it’s allowed to stay up.
Also, according to a recent comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42847474 it’s not at all clear if these blocks are related.
If this is a genuine policy, I'm at a complete loss to understand Facebook's stance on anything.
banning left wing activism, either acknowledging the genocide in Gaza or apparently now promoting free (less surveilled) software is against what the authoritarians want so it is banned.
this is all consistent if you see it through that lens
Real patriots use good ol' American operating systems, like Oracle Solaris™.
Post itself is a little light on evidence, but there are people here already who've tried to post Linuxey things, and have seen it in action.
I would ask flaggers to simply skip those posts and let people who are interested in discussing those topics have their discussion.
Shutting down other peoples conversations is a disturbing trend and it is giving HN more of a one sided echo chamber feel.
Seriously, if you haven’t already, sign up for a Mastodon account. This is the motivation you need. Encourage some friends and family members to connect with you there.
This is an obvious mistake, it's obvious Facebook isn't deliberately banning Linux posts, it's obvious their moderation is incorrectly flagging some posts for some reason, it'll get fixed. It could have been an interesting story and discussion about problems with false positives and automated moderating, or about the lack of human contact at Facebook scale, but instead it's just passionate screeds from too easily excitable posters.
(I didn't flag it, btw.)