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Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

Facebook has been blocking distrowatch at least part of the time for three years now, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29529312

I've been perplexed for years, I wonder if it went unnoticed all this time or they reverted then reimplement the ban.

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It's probably a recurrence of the same issue.

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...

Right, a proxy focused on privacy and removing ads. Of course that's "malware" to Facebook, a site recommending devilry such as this must be silenced at all cost...

Buddy. Not everything is a conspiracy theory.

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/c08e2ba0049307017bf9d8a6...

It's either intentional, which would be puzzling and unsettling, or it's a bug which has gone unnoticed. In any case it is proof that big tech is in no shape to take on the responsibility for moderating discourse on the internet. This reminds me of the bug that falls into a typewriter in the beginning of the movie "Brazil" which causes a spelling error and the arrest and execution of a random innocent person. Granted, this type of automated banning without any ability to involve a real human is not costing any lives (yet), but I am increasingly worried about how big tech is becoming a Kafkaesque lawnmower. One thing is to deliberately censor speech that you do not like, another is to design a system where innocent and important speech is silently censored and noone in charge even notices.

> It's either intentional, which would be puzzling and unsettling, or it's a bug which has gone unnoticed.

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.

There's a rumor that an unnamed ISP did exactly that - overcharged a large portion of its customers due to a software bug. Then decided to not fix the issue instead relying on customers to call support and have the charge fixed.

This has been going on for years. There are no humans to review your ban appeal. Tech companies don't want to spend money on customer service.

And what are you going to do about it? Get into a lawyer slap fight with a foreign trillion dollar corporation?

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