Facebook Censored Me For Mentioning Open-Source Social Network Mastodon

Yes, Facebook's upper management is definitely not freaking out about Mastodon. However, from my own experience working at a large, somewhat ethically-challenged organisation (not fb), it would not surprise me in the least if they gently yet actively pushed down a competitor, provided it can be done discreetly.

I have personally never heard of, or seen, any scams or malware related to mastadon - aren't you giving too much benefit of the doubt?

My best guess is that their lists of competitors to keep an eye on got mixed up with other stuff. Or, of course, that they simply don't want to promote competitors on their platform, which would be normal for any non-monopoly.

What is the violation? I'm serious. If I post a link to a target product page on walmart it will be taken down. I'm sure amazon does the same. Do business have to allow you to promote their competitors?

Such a weird thing for regulators to be chasing - there seems to be so many more obvious issues than this. Is this a political winner - in other words, does the average person think I can put of Burger King flyers in a McDonalds store?

It's probably an AI thing. When these things occur it's a good idea not to presumptively jumping to attributing to human interference until more evidence surface.

" it does seem like the sort of thing that could get Facebook in trouble with a regulator if you squint at it."

Oh, I hope so...

> could get Facebook in trouble with a regulator if you squint at it.

How could it?

But… it makes for great publicity for Mastodon.

Given the date of the post, the content and that it happened with delay, I am quite sure his friends who disagreed with him politically reported it as a spam.

Perhaps after certain number of people report it, it automatically will be marked as one (such logic would be more reliable on FB, than for example reddit or HN, since most FB users have a single profile tied using their real name)

Well, Facebook bought the Israeli startup Onavo explicitly so they could track which new social apps are starting to become popular on user phones, so they could quickly acquire those or copy their features and kill the competition.

As we say in crypto "its probably nothing"

This seems to be a wildly incongrous conclusion based on a clear indication that a global pandemic is impacting operational efficacy and staffing levels. Not that it's an excuse or justification for blanket censorship.

If there's one job that doesn't exactly depend on what location you're working from...

That seems like a much more complex line of thinking than "a combination of lots of ongoing misinformation campaigns combined with global staffing and availability issues means content moderation teams are less responsive".

> Interesting how "because COVID" has become the thinly veiled excuse here.

The message says it triggered spam filters. It's not related to COVID misinformation.

The only place COVID appears is in the warning that their manual review queues are longer than normal due to COVID.

At this point anything done with covid as an excuse should be thought of as a power grab.

We have vaccines for those that want them.

We have drugs that treat it very well.

There’s no reason to censor information or shut things down over it.

Or maybe, OP wanted a whole bunch of people here to post joinmastadon.org to their FB pages. I bet it worked too.

So, seems mastodon is fragmented or segmented into many independent networks. Do those interact with each other in any way? I'd hate to join one and miss truly interesting content on another...is it possible to distill multiple into one on the user end? Just asking, as I've never tried it before and the concept seems a little confusing.

If I used social networks, I might give it a try. (I did actually check it out though) But all social media networks seem anti-productive to me and, well, just not actually very social.

With respect to connecting with family & friends, I'd much prefer a pure platform based pretty much on just that.

With respect to other people with interesting things to say, I'd prefer blogs aggregating & curated sites like, well, HN itself.

For the former, I don't know how you get to a "pure" platform like that where you can communicate & share experiences/photos with each other without also letting meme-ish "lol this person of <political affiliation I hate> is an idiot"> posts through, but at the very least it could avoid surfacing them algorithmically and rewarding them with "internet points".

The big problem I have with Mastodon is that it has a culture of censorship equivalent to Facebook. My recollection is that to be listed in their directory of instances, you need to abide by the content rules created by key Mastodon people, and those instances in turn are required to only peer with other instances that follow the same rules. Those rules basically include moderation based on various progressive political stances, so you can’t honestly discuss controversial topics from different perspectives. It creates a federated network that is still an echo chamber rather than a platform for civil discourse and free thought. And if that’s the case I am not sure why I need Mastodon or why I would lend it attention or credence.

Censorship being “worse than misinformation” seems like whataboutism, given that FB has serious problems with both.

I'm not sure it's worse than misinformation. In my field, bad data often has a more damaging impact than no data.

But I suppose it will depend on the circumstances, and I'd honestly be interested to hear your thoughts on why censorship is worse.

As for the inevitability of abuse? When it comes to corporate interests, that seems to be nearly axiomatic. The Verge's list of fascinating & horrifying exchange at Apple about app approvals & secret deals makes for a great case-study in this. [0]

[0] https://www.theverge.com/22611236/epic-v-apple-emails-projec...

Censorship is the sloppiest possible solution to the epistemological crisis. I thought we figured this out during the Enlightenment.

If my kids were late coming home from school, and I asked you if you know what has happened, and you either:

1. Don't say anything because my neighbour tapes your mouth shut

2. Lie and say, "They were brutally murdered by your neighbour", resulting in a dead neighbour followed by my kids showing up unharmed from school

...can you explain in this scenario how censorship is worse than misinformation.

I'm not trying do be a jerk. I hear your argument a lot (especially on tech-heavy web sites) and I want to understand it.

Buddy Buddy WAKE UP, Facebook is not a public service, it's not there to serve a nobody like you, it's a private company that exist to make money. You can't use their service to trash them and promote their competition, that is not a reasonable business model for them. To finance you by giving you a free platform to promote their competition and trash them is not a good trade for them. DO YOU UNDERSTAND???

Any platform where people can speak to an audience needs some kind of 'censorship', otherwise you'll quickly find it's a platform solely for trolls and the like.

Or delete your account

Tell me more about what happened at your Facebook interview

The naivety in here is astonishing. "The AI just messed up". Facebook's entire existence is 1) identifying the smallest details in information 2) buying up small competitors before they are an issue.

Haven't used Facebook in years. Only reason I ever access it is to see some business info. As for some stupid reason they don't have proper internet presence with up to date information.

Did that a long time ago cant recommend it enough, you have a calendar to keep up with birthdays..

Hey, I'm a contributor to Mastodon and while I can only answer for myself, and not the project, here are my current thoughts:

* What aspects are currently priority for improvements?

I really want to see better authorization & authentication features across different instances. Right now, a really high priority feature for users is "Disable replies", but the way replies work, anyone can construct an activity that is set as "replying" to whatever posts they want to reply to, just by linking to those posts. Figuring out some way to "authorize" those replies (we have a few ideas, but need to work out a lot of the details) is important for us. Additionally, we've been thinking for a while about implementing more group-focused experiences, something kind of like old LiveJournal comms or the new Twitter Communities, and now that there are a few different projects looking into similar things, and we think it's an idea whose time has come. And of course, improving on-boarding and general user experience are always at the top of our priority list.

* What are lower priority problems or features that could be started now and worked on at a slower pace?

Interoperable clients. When the ActivityPub network was first envisioned, the idea was that servers would be completely generic, like email servers, and users could connect multiple different, opinionated "clients" to get different UI experiences of the same inbox. However, most of the current fediverse projects implement only the server-to-server federation experiences, and use more standard, domain-specific REST APIs for client communication. I think

* Where is a good place for someone with programming, networking, and/or engineering skills to start getting involved with development?

It depends on your inclination! My perspective is that you should always write code that you know you yourself are going to use, because that's the best way to ensure that you're going to stick to it long term.

As a more practical suggestion, https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-bas... and https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/07/how-to-make-friends-an... are still the two best tutorials out there on how to implement the basic ActivityPub protocol.

* What can someone with little-to-no programming/networking or related "technical" skills do to further the development and uptake of decentralized social media?

Use it! Invite your friends to use it. There are lots of non-programming technical skills that are always in demand for these types of projects—UX, design, product management, support, fundraising, comms—but besides those the biggest way you can support decentralized social media is simply by using it! The more people who are part of the community, the more vibrant, stable, and welcoming its going to be for new members.

* Are there any suggestions for good reading on this topic, both technical and non-technical? Websites, books, people/groups to follow?

There's a lot of good writing out there, but it's hard to recommend anything that I would regard as really authoritative and summing things up. I think we're kind of in a place where we need less people writing about possible futures, and more people building them. As a comparison, you can write all you want about possible startups people could make, but the thing that's really valuable is going to be going out there and trying them. Execution, as always, is 99% of the game.

This is not surprising as there is no such thing as 'free speech' on private platforms like Facebook.

I thought that the author of this post knew this given the mass de-platforming going on throughout the years.

This shows once again that it can happen to anyone. Facebook and the rest of them will never change.

How does that work when the government admits to directly working with that private company to ask for specific posts and people to be censored? Is that still not a violation of 1A?

One can dream. That's still free.

"practice" assumes a lot here.

Definitely agree that the first assumption you should jump to re FB is that the algorithm is bad, or something broke. Of course FB knows this, so their lack of investment in people who could clean up after these repeated errors is damning.

Political affiliation is a protected class where FB and TWTR are headquartered. Considering the overwhelming majority of Republicans remain on the platform, it seems the removal had nothing to do with class.

Weird take. People's concern here is that this sort of behavior is anti-competitive, enforcing rules that applied to everyone re: inciting violence is pretty different.

Seems odd to think that folk have to support a generic action rather than how that action is done. Like, there are people who like baseball but would probably be a bit upset if you randomly threw a ball at them at 90mph in the middle of the street despite them being really supportive of it in a different context.

I don't have either, could you just tell us what happens?

It’s actually outsourced to Accenture.

It seems perfectly plausible that the reviewers they do have are busier right now, because more people are using and abusing facebook, so they have "fewer available".

There was a long article about how they have to do it in an office, and how you can't bring any electronics with you, and how you have to click a special button when you go to pee, and there's a daily limit on how much you can use it.

edit: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo... it was probably this one

I believe that using the line 'our lines are busy right now' cuts down on complaints. I assume this was A/B tested and found that it has the same effect.

Until very recently, Google Play also had a similar notice without mentioning COVID when an app was in for review.

Covid is just a convenient excuse that people somehow still keep swallowing. If 2 years on covid is still a problem for you, that's less the fault of covid and more that you are incompetent at running your business.

Surprisingly enough I've had more "our response to covid-19" and similar crap from tech companies that would be near-immune to it than from companies that would legitimately be impacted by it (those whose business requires on-site staff, etc).

I know someone who works in content moderation at Google and they said the company requires them to come in to the office for data security reasons. They even have to put their phone in a locker while they are actually reviewing content. I think it makes sense considering the kind of content they review (including CSAM).

The biggest unreported scandal in big tech is the 100s of 1000s of contractors that work exclusively for these companies. Accenture provides thousands of content moderators to FB, none of whom have any recourse to FB HR or rights to pursue union status at FB. Google is the same.

It's joinmastOdon.org, not joinmastAdon.org. We don't own the misspelled domain. I wonder how many people fall prey to it though.

That's what he was doing?!??! (And yes, promotion is a big part of making a product)

If the article is correct, that’s what they are doing and Facebook is using their market and financial dominance to stop it.

How is “they’re a private company, make your own” still being used as an argument when situation is obviously beyond that? We have conclusive evidence from FAANG and Governments that they work together.

You practically CAN’T make your own Facebook. Facebook will stop you one way or another. Google who has a dollar or two, tried and failed spectacularly. Do you know how much better an organic startup would need to be to rival Google’s Day1 investment in Plus?

If this is the case its actually anti-competitive and supposed to be against the law. Obviously there is a difference between braking the law and getting caught though.

Given the number of articles from Facebook saying how they won’t censor speech (doing a basic Google search here) that all seems like false advertising.

Note: I don’t use Facebook so perhaps I’m missing something.

Facebook isn't just a "private business" or just a "free platform", they're a gigantic global entity that have integrated their product into the lives of billions of people.

If it was a free service by a mom and pop shop with "use at your own risk" in the agreement, then yes, it would be entitlement.

However, there exist people, for whom 90% of their communication happens via Facebook or social media. And it's not even by choice, kids are born into it being the status quo, and if 100% of your friends are using it while you're growing up, chances that you won't use it too are slim to none.

Thus, the company needs to hold responsibility for providing open communication. Censoring posts about their competitors goes against that.

Well maybe the big powerful corporation should be up front about what it moderates and what it doesn't, and changes in policy as it learns. Then abide by and reference that.

That way people can understand why their post was removed without having to speculate.

Maybe filtering changes should be rolled out slowly at first, with every customer complaint analyzed, to catch these bugs you speak of before they are widespread, frustrating and look obviously suspicious.

Maybe the big powerful corporation should hire staff in proportion to their mistakes, instead of blaming a pandemic for its record profits, er ..., I mean lack of interest in finding ethical solutions to problems.

Maybe if the company made good faith explanations of mistakes, and actually fixed them, instead of letting them fester, or continually playing hide and seek with information, speculation would not be necessity.

Your attitude about your company's customers is equally disappointing.