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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

A link recently discovered was blocked by facebook (and I had no idea they were actively blocking the posting of links by users!): eulawanalysis.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/the-partys-over-eu-data-protection-law.html

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Wow. Facebook actively blocking links discussing Facebook in a critical way is very bad. Are you sure?

Multiple users reported it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10385612

Someone from Facebook explained what happened though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10386811

Sounds like a made up excuse.

I used to work on the Site Integrity team at Facebook. It's really challenging to fight spam at scale. We've accidentally blocked many top domains in the past -- mistakes happen and we work to fix them as quickly as we can.

Really? Facebook likely is a huge target for spam, and it's not unreasonable to think there would be false positives in an effective spam killer at scale.

I find it strange that people are so quick to conclude censorship. Do they really think Facebook cares what some blogspot blog thinks? Facebook erroneously blocks links for a lot of reasons such as if many people report the link or if the link gets more shares than the domain usually gets.

"erroneously blocks links for a lot of reasons" is also a problem, whether it's incompetence or conspiracy.

With billions of links being shared on Facebook every day I suspect that they error on the side of caution.

Censorship is whan something is blocked or removed, whatever the reason. Facebook has several years of documented use of censorship, if you remember the case of thepiratebay up to the recent "hohol" case.

Facebook has definitely been known to suppress criticism in the past, though. I've shared articles about facebook, on facebook, and they've been removed.

Unrelated, but the last time I criticized FB on HN there was a rabid backlash along the lines of "you can't just criticize the biggest name in the valley and expect to get away with it".

I suspect Facebook censors things for various despotic governments in the fashion that Google does (in order to comply with local guidelines would be the excuse used here). It's also possible that Facebook has deals with advertisers and blocks some content that may reflect poorly on them as well, but it's nebulous.

I just tried and I could post that link without problems (full URL with "http://")

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