Comment by msm_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by msm_ | Hacker News Reader

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Unrelated but similar story: my company (a Polish national CERT) published a technical blog post about how ad fraud proliferates on large online platforms, featuring Meta and Google [1]. Then a magic thing happened: facebook posts that linked to our publication started disappearing within a minute of publication. Including journalists and newspapers. Then posts about how the posts were removed started disappearing. Then facebook accounts - including journalists - writing about this were banned.

Sounds like a fairy tale, but it actually happened [2]. I suspect a human overreaction and then automated systems taking over. Anyway, eventually it was escalated really high up and resolved. I can't share any more details unfortunately, even though I'd like to write more about this.

[1] English translation: https://cert.pl/en/posts/2024/12/Ad-fraud-on-large-online-pl...

[2] Our reaction post about this, in Polish: https://cert.pl/posts/2024/11/blokada-na-meta-stanowisko/.

this is super frustrating, as platforms such as Facebook and Twitter claim to be the digital equivalent of the "public town square" yet take on none of the responsibilities and transparency that come along with it, just all the profits.

I would suspect something a bit more sinister: the very organizations you are targeting probably started a mass campaign to "report" your content, which triggered automated systems that caused your posts to disappear. A more cynical me would add in the fact that any manual review by Facebook staff would trigger even more aggressive moves to silence you, given that you're directly accusing them of inadequate moderation of their platform, which at best doesn't make them look good, and at worst, means they lose advertising $$ that those groups may be spending with Facebook to target those very victims.

They claim to be the public square because they don't want you building your own square along side them.

The next time you hear them claiming to be a public square ask them if they're like to be regulated like a public utility. I think we all know how they'd answer that one.

i almost want to run for public office in canada, to push the CBC to run a set of social media sites that act as a proper public square for canadians

Have you read the comments sections on CBC articles?

Oooooof.

> platforms such as Facebook and Twitter claim to be the digital equivalent of the "public town square"

Our government also claims to serve the people, while bending over to the first one who pays well.

if you start saying bad things about the mayor/police in a lot of town squares, you won’t have a good time either.

Facebook is a cash machine. $62 billion net profit, from ads. Anything with that much revenue will attract fraud. Facebook will likely present themselves as victims, taken advantage of by organized criminals.

Sure, but prior to FB style ads, newspaper humans reviewed the ads prior to publishing them in the newspaper. They did things that didn't scale.

FB, Google, YouTube, and other ad markets don't give a crap about any of that, and print money by not giving a crap. Most of the those newspapers are out of business now, and/or were bought by special interests. This appears to me to be a clear net loss for humanity.

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