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From a technical/operations perspective: That the police used her phone to delete it via vanilla facebook app is 100% plausible, but what's far more implausibl

by RickS 10y ago

From a technical/operations perspective: That the police used her phone to delete it via vanilla facebook app is 100% plausible, but what's far more implausible is whatever mechanism was used to restore it. What are the options? Facebook allows you to undelete a video an hour later? Not to my knowledge. Is there another automated/normal way for a video to undelete an hour later, especially with a modified content setting? Is there an option that means something other than "someone on facebook staff saw that it was deleted and explicitly restored it without instruction from the user"?

Illniyar 10y ago
If it was viral, maybe someone saved it before it was deleted and sent it to her to reupload?
- RickS 10y ago
  That's a good point. It's not clear yet if it's THE original video (same content ID, old comments/likes, etc)
craigvn 10y ago
What you can do and Facebook engineers can do are unrelated.
DougWebb 10y ago
To handle the huge amount of media it handles, Facebook has a content distribution network that stores many copies of the media in many places. When you upload it goes to an initial storage location, and when you view it the server you're talking to will fetch a copy if it doesn't already have it. (I don't work at Facebook, but this is a typical large-scale caching system.) When you delete a posting, nothing actually gets deleted, at least not right away. A flag is set which tells the system not to display the post anymore. The caches of the media files eventually expire and they get deleted. The initial storage location will probably stay until the posting is really deleted. That could be forever, not for any nefarious reasons but because of cross-referencing between database records. Your posting has a unique id, and when someone likes it, or adds a comment to it, or shares it, the id is used to cross-reference their action/content with yours. If your post is deleted there would be dangling cross-refefences, and database systems usually don't like that. It's often better to leave the record in the database but flag it as "deleted" so it won't be displayed to anyone (except maybe admins and you.)
- RickS 10y ago
  Right - that's a good explanation, but I'm clear on the persistence of the media after deletion. What I'm wondering about is how it explicitly became genuinely available (as opposed to a lingering cached copy here and there) after it was (allegedly) marked for deletion, in the absence of that functionality on facebook's front end.
  - ceejayoz 10y ago
    Facebook's deletions are surely soft-deletions, at least initially. You and I can't undo it, but Facebook undoubtedly can. Maybe it's purged for real after 90 days or something, but I'm sure they can provide deleted death threats against the President to the Secret Service and whatnot.

by RickS 10y ago

Illniyar 10y ago

If it was viral, maybe someone saved it before it was deleted and sent it to her to reupload?

RickS 10y ago
That's a good point. It's not clear yet if it's THE original video (same content ID, old comments/likes, etc)

craigvn 10y ago

What you can do and Facebook engineers can do are unrelated.

DougWebb 10y ago

To handle the huge amount of media it handles, Facebook has a content distribution network that stores many copies of the media in many places. When you upload it goes to an initial storage location, and when you view it the server you're talking to will fetch a copy if it doesn't already have it. (I don't work at Facebook, but this is a typical large-scale caching system.) When you delete a posting, nothing actually gets deleted, at least not right away. A flag is set which tells the system not to display the post anymore. The caches of the media files eventually expire and they get deleted. The initial storage location will probably stay until the posting is really deleted. That could be forever, not for any nefarious reasons but because of cross-referencing between database records. Your posting has a unique id, and when someone likes it, or adds a comment to it, or shares it, the id is used to cross-reference their action/content with yours. If your post is deleted there would be dangling cross-refefences, and database systems usually don't like that. It's often better to leave the record in the database but flag it as "deleted" so it won't be displayed to anyone (except maybe admins and you.)

RickS 10y ago
Right - that's a good explanation, but I'm clear on the persistence of the media after deletion. What I'm wondering about is how it explicitly became genuinely available (as opposed to a lingering cached copy here and there) after it was (allegedly) marked for deletion, in the absence of that functionality on facebook's front end.
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  Facebook's deletions are surely soft-deletions, at least initially. You and I can't undo it, but Facebook undoubtedly can. Maybe it's purged for real after 90 days or something, but I'm sure they can provide deleted death threats against the President to the Secret Service and whatnot.