11 ms·

Facebook blocks sharing of critical Guardian article

172 points by afandian 8y ago

sammydel 8y ago
You can't even imagine how tired I am of these anti-Facebook posts. It's almost as tiring as the anti-Google posts. Almost. Anti-spam system screws up, some blue checkmark dunce on Twitter whores himself for retweets. The cycle of life goes on.
Rafuino 8y ago
Wow, FB keeps shooting itself in the foot. They'll likely blame an algorithm, not a deliberate human choice, but that's not a valid excuse.
- whatever_dude 8y ago
  Not an "excuse", but a valid explanation, don't you think? When we offload decisions to algorithms, that's wha you get.
- snaky 8y ago
  They don't need any excuse.
cwkoss 8y ago
That is pretty Orwellian of them. Are we at 'peak' facebook, or will they be able to continue growing from here? Seems like trust and enthusiasm in their platform has been eroded to the point that they are much more vulnerable to competition than they were a year or two ago.
- andybak 8y ago
  Could you explain what exactly is Orwellian here? Not meaning to pick on you but you're currently the top comment that doesn't attempt to Chakrabarti engage with the topic. I don't see much evidence of anything other than a crap algorithm here as yet.
  - cwkoss 8y ago
    Orwellian is often used to describe deliberate and malicious censorship of information, but I think perhaps this case is an even more accurate parallel: creating a convoluted automated system where all participants can believe they are acting ethically but the net effect is censorship of information which would damage the system and restriction of individual expression.
mklarmann 8y ago
Wow. This is too much!
wutbrodo 8y ago
I'm surprised at how credulous everyone is being about this. Even assuming a maximally evil Facebook (which they make pretty easy to do...), they'd have to be incredibly stupid to be unaware of the Streisand effect and the fact that this would take off even more (and much more negatively) if they tried blocking it. It seems a lot more plausible that this article is unusually widely shared, which is obvious since everyone on Facebook has some interest in Facebook...
- mrob 8y ago
  Facebook is made up of individual people. Incompetent evil could be the protest of an employee who doesn't want to be evil but also doesn't want to get fired for obviously refusing an order.
- afandian 8y ago
  Despite the complete moral vacuum there seems to be a facebook, I do still believe that this isn't deliberate. But big name companies do far worse things, and Facebook themmselves have done worse. And stupider, since you mention it. It is entirely plausible that they are intentionally suppressing the news. I find it a fascinating side of the human psyche that it finds it hard to believe that "big brand name company" might be responsible for atrocities when history is littered with examples. Companies are only staffed by humans, after all.
  - wutbrodo 8y ago
    > But big name companies do far worse things, and Facebook themmselves have done worse. . > find it a fascinating side of the human psyche that it finds it hard to believe that "big brand name company" might be responsible for atrocities when history is littered with examples. Companies are only staffed by humans, after all. I'm not sure why the majority of your comment is focusing on how plausible it is that they would do something evil. It couldn't be less relevant to my comment. Like I said, my point doesn't rely on any assumptions about Facebook's morality as an organization, just some baseline of competency. I know organizations have done stupider things, but I can't think of a similar org taking an action whose _first-order_ effect would so obviously be the opposite of what they intended. It's far more common and far more plausible that they didn't consider the second-order PR effects of an algorithmically-enforced broad policy they have.
CaliforniaKarl 8y ago
Hilarious, but I bet it's Hanlon's razor at work again: > Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
- worldsayshi 8y ago
  Yeah, if they actually wanted to censor something they would do it silently, by not showing it in people's news feeds. Proving such practice exists would probably be near impossible without having access to the source code or core usage statistics.
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    Looking at some of the tweets it seems FB has a mechanism that autoflags article links as spam if "too many people are trying to share" it. This just makes me wonder exactly how automated that feature is, because surely a non-nominal number of people share current event links all the time about something political, sporting event, natural disaster. I wonder if it happens then, or is this a matter of recency....Streisand (there's got to be a better word for it than that) following the news of those 50million accounts being breached.
    - Splines 8y ago
      What I don't understand is why this is considered spam. Are lots of people not allowed to talk about the same thing?
      - lozenge 8y ago
        I can think of a couple of possible explanations: 1. Viral content like "share this or Facebook will delete your account" - may as well shut that down straight away. 2. A security flaw in a Facebook site that lets malicious websites post to your wall automatically from a webpage. In that case, the malicious website will probably post a link to itself, so that it can collect more victims. In this case, this limits the impact of the flaw. Look at the Samy worm as an example. 3. News feed algorithm "breaks" in some way when a lot of people are posting the same thing, so they just prevent that from happening.
mic47 8y ago
Aaaand it's back (just tried to share it and it worked).
debt 8y ago
It's astounding that educated tech journalists think this is malicious. Clearly, this is an algorithm. Just like as a thought experiment, wouldn't it make more sense to allow the post to go through and then prevent everyone on Facebook from seeing it? Obviously, FB doesn't do that, but wouldn't that be a more sensible approach if they did do that type of thing?
- 394549 8y ago
  > It's astounding that educated tech journalists think this is malicious. Clearly, this is an algorithm. Who's claiming this is malicious? In the first couple of replies to the tweet, there's talk about how this is probably due to a poorly designed anti-spam algorithm that's badly in need of a whitelist. That said, Facebook is responsible for the actions of their algorithm. If their algorithm starts blocking critical articles, it's still egg in their face.
  - yuliyp 8y ago
    > Who's claiming this is malicious? brianmcc, afandian, mrob, shortexpresso, cwkoss, golemiprague in this discussion at least
    - 394549 8y ago
      >>> > It's astounding that educated tech journalists think this is malicious. Clearly, this is an algorithm. >> Who's claiming this is malicious? In the first couple of replies to the tweet, there's talk about how this is probably due to a poorly designed anti-spam algorithm that's badly in need of a whitelist. > brianmcc, afandian, mrob, shortexpresso, cwkoss, golemiprague in this discussion at least That's nonsense; those are just HN commenters. It's clear from the context of my comment that the "who" I was referring to was "educated tech journalists" and the people in the twitter thread. The great-grandparent comment was basically criticizing a straw-man, and I was only pointing that out.
- tmalsburg2 8y ago
  A spam-detection algorithm that doesn't whitelist pages like The Guardian? I have to say I find it hard to believe that they would be so incompetent.
wesleytodd 8y ago
What is amazing to me is that twitter still does not have a solution for sharing mobile links to desktop users. It is a really bad user experience.
- onychomys 8y ago
  I realized the other day that wikipedia doesn't either. You'd think it wouldn't be all that hard to redirect in the year 2018, but apparently it is.
LinuxBender 8y ago
Does FB have a team dedicated to responding on HN yet?
kerng 8y ago
This is sadly funny. It's probably a legitimate feature to block spam - timing and what it is about is just highlighting the issues with large scale automation and data analysis. Must be a tough day and upcoming weeks at Facebook....
brianmcc 8y ago
Whether malice or incompetence the key thing is that it's blocking a legit post with no recourse. That's a serious problem given that it's such a core sharing platform for so many people.
- lgeorget 8y ago
  On the other hand, Facebook is not a soapbox on a public place, it's a website owned and hosted by a private company which has precise criteria to decide which publications are more desirable than others.
  - noobiemcfoob 8y ago
    Where is this precise criteria? Can anyone explain it for a layperson? While we all know it is the aggregation of many different algorithms at work, the results of those algorithms have consequences. Claiming that it's fine because the algorithm exists is begging the question.
    - lgeorget 8y ago
      If they have decided (consciously or not, because sometimes algorithms have unpredicted consequences) to not have something published then they are free not to publish it. It's not like it's a public service run by the government.
  - stale2002 8y ago
    If Facebook is a publishing company, then they should be treated as such. They should lose their immunity to lawsuits for user created content on their publishing platform.
    - lgeorget 8y ago
      They should be liable for what is published on their platform but they certainly cannot be guilty of _not publishing_ something.
mmmmmmmmm 8y ago
If the Guardian is going to be horribly slanted against Facebook, it's only fair that Facebook is biased against them as well. If the Guardian wants fair treatment, they should write fair articles.
golemiprague 8y ago
First they came for Alex Jones and I didn't say anything... It is what it is, if you don't object to them banning people because they don't like their politics why are you surprised when they ban an article which attack them directly? The only solution is to declare those companies as monopolies and critical infrastructure and force them to service everybody with no discrimination, exactly like water or electricity. If someone is doing something against the law by publishing something that is not allowed by law, let the law enforcement deal with it.
tenfold 8y ago
Calm down, people.
ranranrun 8y ago
So Facebook is trying to censor a story that they themselves made public just a few hours ago? Guardian thinks a bit too much of itself.
- calcifer 8y ago
  Guardian didn't say censor, they said block, which is factual. Nice strawman though.
  - ranranrun 8y ago
    So Facebook is trying to block a story that they themselves made public just a few hours ago?
0xmohit 8y ago
Some users are reporting that they are unable to post today’s big story about a security breach affecting 50 million Facebook users. The issue appears to only affect particular stories from certain outlets, at this time one story from The Guardian and one from the Associated Press, both reputable press outlets. ... The situation is another example of Facebook’s automated content flagging tools marking legitimate content as illegitimate, in this case calling it spam. https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/28/facebook-blocks-guardian-story/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/28/facebook-blocks-guardian-s...
shortexpresso 8y ago
The power and domination can not accept critics. All big companies are involved in war communication on their own activities. FB just reacts as Monsanto or Texaco/Chevron do with all possible means.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

172 points by afandian 8y ago

You can't even imagine how tired I am of these anti-Facebook posts. It's almost as tiring as the anti-Google posts. Almost. Anti-spam system screws up, some blue checkmark dunce on Twitter whores himself for retweets. The cycle of life goes on.

Rafuino 8y ago

Wow, FB keeps shooting itself in the foot. They'll likely blame an algorithm, not a deliberate human choice, but that's not a valid excuse.

whatever_dude 8y ago
Not an "excuse", but a valid explanation, don't you think? When we offload decisions to algorithms, that's wha you get.
snaky 8y ago
They don't need any excuse.

cwkoss 8y ago

That is pretty Orwellian of them. Are we at 'peak' facebook, or will they be able to continue growing from here? Seems like trust and enthusiasm in their platform has been eroded to the point that they are much more vulnerable to competition than they were a year or two ago.

andybak 8y ago
Could you explain what exactly is Orwellian here? Not meaning to pick on you but you're currently the top comment that doesn't attempt to Chakrabarti engage with the topic. I don't see much evidence of anything other than a crap algorithm here as yet.
- cwkoss 8y ago
  Orwellian is often used to describe deliberate and malicious censorship of information, but I think perhaps this case is an even more accurate parallel: creating a convoluted automated system where all participants can believe they are acting ethically but the net effect is censorship of information which would damage the system and restriction of individual expression.

mklarmann 8y ago

Wow. This is too much!

wutbrodo 8y ago

I'm surprised at how credulous everyone is being about this. Even assuming a maximally evil Facebook (which they make pretty easy to do...), they'd have to be incredibly stupid to be unaware of the Streisand effect and the fact that this would take off even more (and much more negatively) if they tried blocking it. It seems a lot more plausible that this article is unusually widely shared, which is obvious since everyone on Facebook has some interest in Facebook...

mrob 8y ago
Facebook is made up of individual people. Incompetent evil could be the protest of an employee who doesn't want to be evil but also doesn't want to get fired for obviously refusing an order.
afandian 8y ago
Despite the complete moral vacuum there seems to be a facebook, I do still believe that this isn't deliberate. But big name companies do far worse things, and Facebook themmselves have done worse. And stupider, since you mention it. It is entirely plausible that they are intentionally suppressing the news. I find it a fascinating side of the human psyche that it finds it hard to believe that "big brand name company" might be responsible for atrocities when history is littered with examples. Companies are only staffed by humans, after all.
- wutbrodo 8y ago
  > But big name companies do far worse things, and Facebook themmselves have done worse. . > find it a fascinating side of the human psyche that it finds it hard to believe that "big brand name company" might be responsible for atrocities when history is littered with examples. Companies are only staffed by humans, after all. I'm not sure why the majority of your comment is focusing on how plausible it is that they would do something evil. It couldn't be less relevant to my comment. Like I said, my point doesn't rely on any assumptions about Facebook's morality as an organization, just some baseline of competency. I know organizations have done stupider things, but I can't think of a similar org taking an action whose _first-order_ effect would so obviously be the opposite of what they intended. It's far more common and far more plausible that they didn't consider the second-order PR effects of an algorithmically-enforced broad policy they have.

CaliforniaKarl 8y ago

Hilarious, but I bet it's Hanlon's razor at work again: > Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

worldsayshi 8y ago
Yeah, if they actually wanted to censor something they would do it silently, by not showing it in people's news feeds. Proving such practice exists would probably be near impossible without having access to the source code or core usage statistics.
- dvtrn 8y ago
  Looking at some of the tweets it seems FB has a mechanism that autoflags article links as spam if "too many people are trying to share" it. This just makes me wonder exactly how automated that feature is, because surely a non-nominal number of people share current event links all the time about something political, sporting event, natural disaster. I wonder if it happens then, or is this a matter of recency....Streisand (there's got to be a better word for it than that) following the news of those 50million accounts being breached.
  - Splines 8y ago
    What I don't understand is why this is considered spam. Are lots of people not allowed to talk about the same thing?
    - lozenge 8y ago
      I can think of a couple of possible explanations: 1. Viral content like "share this or Facebook will delete your account" - may as well shut that down straight away. 2. A security flaw in a Facebook site that lets malicious websites post to your wall automatically from a webpage. In that case, the malicious website will probably post a link to itself, so that it can collect more victims. In this case, this limits the impact of the flaw. Look at the Samy worm as an example. 3. News feed algorithm "breaks" in some way when a lot of people are posting the same thing, so they just prevent that from happening.

mic47 8y ago

Aaaand it's back (just tried to share it and it worked).

debt 8y ago

It's astounding that educated tech journalists think this is malicious. Clearly, this is an algorithm. Just like as a thought experiment, wouldn't it make more sense to allow the post to go through and then prevent everyone on Facebook from seeing it? Obviously, FB doesn't do that, but wouldn't that be a more sensible approach if they did do that type of thing?

394549 8y ago
> It's astounding that educated tech journalists think this is malicious. Clearly, this is an algorithm. Who's claiming this is malicious? In the first couple of replies to the tweet, there's talk about how this is probably due to a poorly designed anti-spam algorithm that's badly in need of a whitelist. That said, Facebook is responsible for the actions of their algorithm. If their algorithm starts blocking critical articles, it's still egg in their face.
- yuliyp 8y ago
  > Who's claiming this is malicious? brianmcc, afandian, mrob, shortexpresso, cwkoss, golemiprague in this discussion at least
  - 394549 8y ago
    >>> > It's astounding that educated tech journalists think this is malicious. Clearly, this is an algorithm. >> Who's claiming this is malicious? In the first couple of replies to the tweet, there's talk about how this is probably due to a poorly designed anti-spam algorithm that's badly in need of a whitelist. > brianmcc, afandian, mrob, shortexpresso, cwkoss, golemiprague in this discussion at least That's nonsense; those are just HN commenters. It's clear from the context of my comment that the "who" I was referring to was "educated tech journalists" and the people in the twitter thread. The great-grandparent comment was basically criticizing a straw-man, and I was only pointing that out.
tmalsburg2 8y ago
A spam-detection algorithm that doesn't whitelist pages like The Guardian? I have to say I find it hard to believe that they would be so incompetent.

wesleytodd 8y ago

What is amazing to me is that twitter still does not have a solution for sharing mobile links to desktop users. It is a really bad user experience.

onychomys 8y ago
I realized the other day that wikipedia doesn't either. You'd think it wouldn't be all that hard to redirect in the year 2018, but apparently it is.

LinuxBender 8y ago

Does FB have a team dedicated to responding on HN yet?

kerng 8y ago

This is sadly funny. It's probably a legitimate feature to block spam - timing and what it is about is just highlighting the issues with large scale automation and data analysis. Must be a tough day and upcoming weeks at Facebook....

brianmcc 8y ago

Whether malice or incompetence the key thing is that it's blocking a legit post with no recourse. That's a serious problem given that it's such a core sharing platform for so many people.

lgeorget 8y ago
On the other hand, Facebook is not a soapbox on a public place, it's a website owned and hosted by a private company which has precise criteria to decide which publications are more desirable than others.
- noobiemcfoob 8y ago
  Where is this precise criteria? Can anyone explain it for a layperson? While we all know it is the aggregation of many different algorithms at work, the results of those algorithms have consequences. Claiming that it's fine because the algorithm exists is begging the question.
  - lgeorget 8y ago
    If they have decided (consciously or not, because sometimes algorithms have unpredicted consequences) to not have something published then they are free not to publish it. It's not like it's a public service run by the government.
- stale2002 8y ago
  If Facebook is a publishing company, then they should be treated as such. They should lose their immunity to lawsuits for user created content on their publishing platform.
  - lgeorget 8y ago
    They should be liable for what is published on their platform but they certainly cannot be guilty of _not publishing_ something.

mmmmmmmmm 8y ago

If the Guardian is going to be horribly slanted against Facebook, it's only fair that Facebook is biased against them as well. If the Guardian wants fair treatment, they should write fair articles.

golemiprague 8y ago

First they came for Alex Jones and I didn't say anything... It is what it is, if you don't object to them banning people because they don't like their politics why are you surprised when they ban an article which attack them directly? The only solution is to declare those companies as monopolies and critical infrastructure and force them to service everybody with no discrimination, exactly like water or electricity. If someone is doing something against the law by publishing something that is not allowed by law, let the law enforcement deal with it.

tenfold 8y ago

Calm down, people.

ranranrun 8y ago

So Facebook is trying to censor a story that they themselves made public just a few hours ago? Guardian thinks a bit too much of itself.

calcifer 8y ago
Guardian didn't say censor, they said block, which is factual. Nice strawman though.
- ranranrun 8y ago
  So Facebook is trying to block a story that they themselves made public just a few hours ago?

0xmohit 8y ago

Some users are reporting that they are unable to post today’s big story about a security breach affecting 50 million Facebook users. The issue appears to only affect particular stories from certain outlets, at this time one story from The Guardian and one from the Associated Press, both reputable press outlets. ... The situation is another example of Facebook’s automated content flagging tools marking legitimate content as illegitimate, in this case calling it spam. https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/28/facebook-blocks-guardian-story/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/28/facebook-blocks-guardian-s...

shortexpresso 8y ago

The power and domination can not accept critics. All big companies are involved in war communication on their own activities. FB just reacts as Monsanto or Texaco/Chevron do with all possible means.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]