8 ms·

More Information About Last Week’s Takedowns

35 points by infodocket 8y ago

bigmonads 8y ago
I remember when Facebook censored my communications with friends and family about the Snowden documents, Bernie Sanders, and Mayday Protests. This was before the current trend of labeling the justification "Russian propaganda" - it was just part of the routine American censorship.
djsumdog 8y ago
Facebook took down the pages of a lot of legit people I know and follow. So did Twitter. The solution is not better AI or blocking, it's for people in tech to start encouraging others to go back to the way we use to find data. Are you using an RSS reader? If not, you should be. Don't use those useless YouTube subscriptions, but use the RSS channel feed. Tell people about RSS. "You remember Google reader, well there are some great alternatives like Feedly and Newsblur .. and you can export all your feeds if you ever want to switch and they never block anything or change the order in which you view things like Facebook/Twitter." Are you on Mastodon or run an instance? You should and encourage other people to find an instance. If you know how, you can run your own for your friends and family. The solution is for people in tech that know how to latch onto, run and encourage more distributed systems of getting our news, blogs and entertainment that don't filter things for us.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  Some links that might be useful in this context: https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/redecentralize/alternative-internet https://github.com/redecentralize/alternative-internet https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
- badsectoracula 8y ago
  I thought about running a Mastodon instance in my VPS since i do not really like the idea of relying on others to decide what i should or should not be able to see, but i ended up changing my mind once i saw what it actually needs to run... for a service that is essentially flinging short pieces of text around every now and then, it has way too high requirements and too many dependencies. I run a web site, a bunch of repositories, email, gopher, ssh and a bunch of other stuff on my VPS yet i barely scratch 200MB of RAM use (and most of it is spamassasin) whereas i'm not even sure it fits Mastodon's minimum requirements. If i try it i have a feeling it'll take over the entire thing. If there was a server-only (no web-based client), super lightweight version that talked the Mastodon protocol and didn't require much in terms of functionality, i might have tried it. It kinda sounds like Go was made for projects like this, so i hope someone eventually makes one :-P.
  - ar0 8y ago
    There is Pleroma, which aims to be a Mastodon-compatible platform which will run even on a Rasperry Pi: https://pleroma.social https://pleroma.social It also separates front- and back-end, so it might come close to your „server-only“ idea.
    - badsectoracula 8y ago
      Looks interesting, thanks. I'll try to check it later.
  - djsumdog 8y ago
    Mastodon is really easy to run via Docker containers. I use the official container with three instances (web, streaming, sidekiq), a postgres container, an elastic search container and a redis container. I wrote these scripts to help bring it up, but you could do the same thing with Terraform + docker-compose: http://github.com/sumdog/bee2 http://github.com/sumdog/bee2 It's super easy to run compared to Plreoma (which took me forever to Dockerize, the dockerfiles are in the same project). Years ago this was the problem with Diaspora too, but Docker has made this problem a lot easier. I even have a container that backs up my volumes and database to Backblaze. If you want easy, cheap hosting, there's Masto.host. Edit: I run on a $10 Vultr instance with some additional block storage and currently support <10 users without issue.
    - badsectoracula 8y ago
      I already have a VPS, i do not really want to use another one just for a single program (imagine if everything i wanted to run needed its own VPS). Also i do not really want to run docker in there... aren't dockers VMs themselves? Isn't this running a VM in a VM? Doesn't that kill any sort of performance? TBH as i wrote above what i'd prefer is some self-contained binary i drop somewhere in my VPS and have it work automatically. See Fossil SCM and Gogs as a couple of examples for what i'm looking for.
      - djsumdog 8y ago
- tptacek 8y ago
  What's an example of a page Facebook took down, or an account Twitter took down, where you think they were in the wrong?
  - purple-dragon 8y ago
    Punk Rock Libertarians is a group a colleague of mine ran for many years. They live-streamed video/podcasts every week and had an active posting and discussion-based community. They were removed without notice and for seemingly ambiguous reasons. Their group was a community in the vein of what, in my opinion, is not much different than a particular dog breed community group I belong to on Facebook. Meanwhile, I have made numerous requests for Facebook to remove a clearly non-existent person claiming to work for my company who regularly attempts to connect with me and other employees. Facebook does not respond and no action has been taken.
    - tptacek 8y ago
      Is that group different from the large-seeming Punk Rock Libertarians group that is currently on Facebook?
      - purple-dragon 8y ago
        It is the same; they were “re-instated” after a lot of complaining and media interviews, but had to start again from zero followers. The 5k followers they have now is from the last few weeks and is orders of magnitude fewer than what they had prior to deletion. Their content was not restored either. I can’t tell if your question is based in simple curiosity or implies some form of skepticism that mistakes were made or that problems actually exist.
  - djsumdog 8y ago
    Carey Wedler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4zu_QS6hK4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4zu_QS6hK4
    - tptacek 8y ago
vorpalhex 8y ago
What is interesting about these posts is how diffuse the messages are - it's more about causing divisions then pushing any single cause.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- tarnz 8y ago
  It's cool that accounts that want to sow discord and divide our society are being taken down. But I would also like to see the same standard applied to the media. Dividing society and causing pain is how they made their millions.
  - ar0 8y ago
    These accounts are not being taken down because „they want to sow discord“, though, and rightly so: what „sows discord“ is highly subjective and not a good criteria to take anything down. They are being taken down because they are (allegedly) faking who is behind those accounts (i.e. they are fraudsters with political instead of financial motives).
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - tarns 8y ago
      If those accounts were "authentic" they would also have political motives behind. The only reason they are taken down is that they are funded by an adversary power, but the American media is controlled by adversaries of the American public too.
  - dragonsky67 8y ago
    How do you define sowing discord or dividing society? If you look at most of the social advances hard won over the last twenty years, they have always caused discord and challanged society. In America, the right to bear arms has caused massive discord, same with same sex marrage, leagal marijuana, black lives matter... not to mention discussions about political leaders. In other countries similar discord is sown regarding Brexit in the UK, Aslyim seekers in Australia, Climate change. Each of these debates have been accompanied on both sides by a range of discussions with debatable facts. At what point does the carrier of the message become the legitimate editior or even worse censor of that information. Who decides what is a fact? The winner? The CEO? As far as I'm aware there is only one disicipline that is considered to have proof of facts, the rest is either best guess that meets the evidence or simply opnion. Allowing the messenger to chose what is and is not a fact removes the massive benefit provided by the internet, the ability for everybody to have a voice. I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. We have just celebrated the anaversery of the end of the First World War, lets not have this date be celebrated in the future as being the start of the loss of freedoms that millions died for.
cvwright 8y ago
I understand that Facebook is in a very tough position, trying to deal with very sophisticated and well-resourced propaganda organizations out of Russia and who-knows-where-else. But still, I find this post more than a little creepy. It's mostly, I think, because you could change a few names and this post would sound very much like a press release from state-owned Chinese media, about how they shut down the Falun Gong or some dissident group in the interest of national harmony. Maybe it's the Orwellian language. "Inauthentic"? If Facebook banned everyone who's inauthentic on their site, they would be left with hardly any users at all.
- wmf 8y ago
  Good point; can they remove all the "influencers" from Instagram?
- tptacek 8y ago
  Is it all that complicated, or is this another case where HN has a blind spot about the concept of "intent"? The issue with Russian troll accounts is that the accounts are created and driven specifically to deceive other users. You can't say that about Falun Gong.
  - someguydave 8y ago
    Can you show me how to derive the "intent" bits from some pictures and text?
    - erikpukinskis 8y ago
      literary analysis, communications studies, sociology, anthropology, forensic science, etc
    - rspeer 8y ago
      The social context of computing is not a computable function of its inputs. Fortunately, decisions can be made by humans who understand social context. Not everything has to be reduced to a machine-learning classifier.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
prolikewh0a 8y ago
How is this different than this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18439175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18439175 It's government instructing Facebook to remove pages. This only provides a few examples, and someone else in this very thread said they took down legit pages of legitimate people they know and follow, presumably also at the FBI's request. Is this not government censorship? Does the FBI get to start taking down legitimate left wing organizing as they've done in the past with cointelpro?
- tzs 8y ago
  According to the FB article, they took down the pages because the pages violated FB policy. The FBI's involvement was merely to call FB's attention to the existence of the pages. From the article, it seems that FB takes down such pages regardless of who happens to call their attention to them.
  - prolikewh0a 8y ago
    What is Facebook's exact policy for removing legitimate accounts with real American citizens behind them just posting political memes and organizing?
yters 8y ago
It'd be interesting to see a list of what exactly they took down.
dreta 8y ago
So, a government organisation is openly telling Facebook how to moderate speech now, and they're complying? I know Facebook's a private company, so they don't have to uphold the 1st amendment, I'm just wondering how far do we have to go down this rabbit hole before people wake up.
- omegaworks 8y ago
  People are waking up, but what they're waking up to is the fact that platforms like Facebook have been used to spread propaganda that villainizes marginalized communities. This has spurred hate crimes and fanned the flames of genocide. Facebook is directly implicated in the purge of Rohingya muslims in Myanmar. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/myanmar-hria/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/myanmar-hria/
- GhostVII 8y ago
  If the government is telling Facebook how to moderate their platform, wouldn't that be a violation of the 1rst amendment? Since it would be the government actively trying to restrict what someone else can say?
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  Exactly. This is government censorship, they're just using the facade of Facebook to do it. COINTELPRO is a good read, the FBI is untrustworthy and works against American interests when it comes to foreign and domestic politics and political organizing (please notice the specifics of this, I am not saying FBI is untrustworthy in all aspects). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
- cronix 8y ago
  Which gov't org TOLD them how to moderate? All I really saw was the FBI alerted them to some suspicious activity linked to foreign entities, which FB investigated and agreed that the acct's violated FB's policies and so they removed them. Did I miss something? The most interesting thing about that article to me was discovering FB uses WordPress to publish them.
goduxheueh 8y ago
Oh how the intelligensia of HN will applaud and rationalize censorship. Anyone who knows a lick or history understands that every era had some backwards unethical belief. You're no different. Fuck your moderation.
timbit42 8y ago
Vague headline not appreciated. Put the word Facebook in there at least so I can know whether I'm interested.
- colejohnson66 8y ago
  You can see that it’s on fb.com next to the title

35 points by infodocket 8y ago

I remember when Facebook censored my communications with friends and family about the Snowden documents, Bernie Sanders, and Mayday Protests. This was before the current trend of labeling the justification "Russian propaganda" - it was just part of the routine American censorship.

djsumdog 8y ago

Facebook took down the pages of a lot of legit people I know and follow. So did Twitter. The solution is not better AI or blocking, it's for people in tech to start encouraging others to go back to the way we use to find data. Are you using an RSS reader? If not, you should be. Don't use those useless YouTube subscriptions, but use the RSS channel feed. Tell people about RSS. "You remember Google reader, well there are some great alternatives like Feedly and Newsblur .. and you can export all your feeds if you ever want to switch and they never block anything or change the order in which you view things like Facebook/Twitter." Are you on Mastodon or run an instance? You should and encourage other people to find an instance. If you know how, you can run your own for your friends and family. The solution is for people in tech that know how to latch onto, run and encourage more distributed systems of getting our news, blogs and entertainment that don't filter things for us.

PavlovsCat 8y ago
Some links that might be useful in this context: https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/redecentralize/alternative-internet https://github.com/redecentralize/alternative-internet https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
badsectoracula 8y ago
I thought about running a Mastodon instance in my VPS since i do not really like the idea of relying on others to decide what i should or should not be able to see, but i ended up changing my mind once i saw what it actually needs to run... for a service that is essentially flinging short pieces of text around every now and then, it has way too high requirements and too many dependencies. I run a web site, a bunch of repositories, email, gopher, ssh and a bunch of other stuff on my VPS yet i barely scratch 200MB of RAM use (and most of it is spamassasin) whereas i'm not even sure it fits Mastodon's minimum requirements. If i try it i have a feeling it'll take over the entire thing. If there was a server-only (no web-based client), super lightweight version that talked the Mastodon protocol and didn't require much in terms of functionality, i might have tried it. It kinda sounds like Go was made for projects like this, so i hope someone eventually makes one :-P.
- ar0 8y ago
  There is Pleroma, which aims to be a Mastodon-compatible platform which will run even on a Rasperry Pi: https://pleroma.social https://pleroma.social It also separates front- and back-end, so it might come close to your „server-only“ idea.
  - badsectoracula 8y ago
    Looks interesting, thanks. I'll try to check it later.
- djsumdog 8y ago
  Mastodon is really easy to run via Docker containers. I use the official container with three instances (web, streaming, sidekiq), a postgres container, an elastic search container and a redis container. I wrote these scripts to help bring it up, but you could do the same thing with Terraform + docker-compose: http://github.com/sumdog/bee2 http://github.com/sumdog/bee2 It's super easy to run compared to Plreoma (which took me forever to Dockerize, the dockerfiles are in the same project). Years ago this was the problem with Diaspora too, but Docker has made this problem a lot easier. I even have a container that backs up my volumes and database to Backblaze. If you want easy, cheap hosting, there's Masto.host. Edit: I run on a $10 Vultr instance with some additional block storage and currently support <10 users without issue.
  - badsectoracula 8y ago
    I already have a VPS, i do not really want to use another one just for a single program (imagine if everything i wanted to run needed its own VPS). Also i do not really want to run docker in there... aren't dockers VMs themselves? Isn't this running a VM in a VM? Doesn't that kill any sort of performance? TBH as i wrote above what i'd prefer is some self-contained binary i drop somewhere in my VPS and have it work automatically. See Fossil SCM and Gogs as a couple of examples for what i'm looking for.
    - djsumdog 8y ago
tptacek 8y ago
What's an example of a page Facebook took down, or an account Twitter took down, where you think they were in the wrong?
- purple-dragon 8y ago
  Punk Rock Libertarians is a group a colleague of mine ran for many years. They live-streamed video/podcasts every week and had an active posting and discussion-based community. They were removed without notice and for seemingly ambiguous reasons. Their group was a community in the vein of what, in my opinion, is not much different than a particular dog breed community group I belong to on Facebook. Meanwhile, I have made numerous requests for Facebook to remove a clearly non-existent person claiming to work for my company who regularly attempts to connect with me and other employees. Facebook does not respond and no action has been taken.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    Is that group different from the large-seeming Punk Rock Libertarians group that is currently on Facebook?
    - purple-dragon 8y ago
      It is the same; they were “re-instated” after a lot of complaining and media interviews, but had to start again from zero followers. The 5k followers they have now is from the last few weeks and is orders of magnitude fewer than what they had prior to deletion. Their content was not restored either. I can’t tell if your question is based in simple curiosity or implies some form of skepticism that mistakes were made or that problems actually exist.
- djsumdog 8y ago
  Carey Wedler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4zu_QS6hK4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4zu_QS6hK4
  - tptacek 8y ago

vorpalhex 8y ago

What is interesting about these posts is how diffuse the messages are - it's more about causing divisions then pushing any single cause.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tarnz 8y ago
It's cool that accounts that want to sow discord and divide our society are being taken down. But I would also like to see the same standard applied to the media. Dividing society and causing pain is how they made their millions.
- ar0 8y ago
  These accounts are not being taken down because „they want to sow discord“, though, and rightly so: what „sows discord“ is highly subjective and not a good criteria to take anything down. They are being taken down because they are (allegedly) faking who is behind those accounts (i.e. they are fraudsters with political instead of financial motives).
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - tarns 8y ago
    If those accounts were "authentic" they would also have political motives behind. The only reason they are taken down is that they are funded by an adversary power, but the American media is controlled by adversaries of the American public too.
- dragonsky67 8y ago
  How do you define sowing discord or dividing society? If you look at most of the social advances hard won over the last twenty years, they have always caused discord and challanged society. In America, the right to bear arms has caused massive discord, same with same sex marrage, leagal marijuana, black lives matter... not to mention discussions about political leaders. In other countries similar discord is sown regarding Brexit in the UK, Aslyim seekers in Australia, Climate change. Each of these debates have been accompanied on both sides by a range of discussions with debatable facts. At what point does the carrier of the message become the legitimate editior or even worse censor of that information. Who decides what is a fact? The winner? The CEO? As far as I'm aware there is only one disicipline that is considered to have proof of facts, the rest is either best guess that meets the evidence or simply opnion. Allowing the messenger to chose what is and is not a fact removes the massive benefit provided by the internet, the ability for everybody to have a voice. I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. We have just celebrated the anaversery of the end of the First World War, lets not have this date be celebrated in the future as being the start of the loss of freedoms that millions died for.

cvwright 8y ago

I understand that Facebook is in a very tough position, trying to deal with very sophisticated and well-resourced propaganda organizations out of Russia and who-knows-where-else. But still, I find this post more than a little creepy. It's mostly, I think, because you could change a few names and this post would sound very much like a press release from state-owned Chinese media, about how they shut down the Falun Gong or some dissident group in the interest of national harmony. Maybe it's the Orwellian language. "Inauthentic"? If Facebook banned everyone who's inauthentic on their site, they would be left with hardly any users at all.

wmf 8y ago
Good point; can they remove all the "influencers" from Instagram?
tptacek 8y ago
Is it all that complicated, or is this another case where HN has a blind spot about the concept of "intent"? The issue with Russian troll accounts is that the accounts are created and driven specifically to deceive other users. You can't say that about Falun Gong.
- someguydave 8y ago
  Can you show me how to derive the "intent" bits from some pictures and text?
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    literary analysis, communications studies, sociology, anthropology, forensic science, etc
  - rspeer 8y ago
    The social context of computing is not a computable function of its inputs. Fortunately, decisions can be made by humans who understand social context. Not everything has to be reduced to a machine-learning classifier.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

prolikewh0a 8y ago

How is this different than this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18439175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18439175 It's government instructing Facebook to remove pages. This only provides a few examples, and someone else in this very thread said they took down legit pages of legitimate people they know and follow, presumably also at the FBI's request. Is this not government censorship? Does the FBI get to start taking down legitimate left wing organizing as they've done in the past with cointelpro?

tzs 8y ago
According to the FB article, they took down the pages because the pages violated FB policy. The FBI's involvement was merely to call FB's attention to the existence of the pages. From the article, it seems that FB takes down such pages regardless of who happens to call their attention to them.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  What is Facebook's exact policy for removing legitimate accounts with real American citizens behind them just posting political memes and organizing?

yters 8y ago

It'd be interesting to see a list of what exactly they took down.

dreta 8y ago

So, a government organisation is openly telling Facebook how to moderate speech now, and they're complying? I know Facebook's a private company, so they don't have to uphold the 1st amendment, I'm just wondering how far do we have to go down this rabbit hole before people wake up.

omegaworks 8y ago
People are waking up, but what they're waking up to is the fact that platforms like Facebook have been used to spread propaganda that villainizes marginalized communities. This has spurred hate crimes and fanned the flames of genocide. Facebook is directly implicated in the purge of Rohingya muslims in Myanmar. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/myanmar-hria/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/myanmar-hria/
GhostVII 8y ago
If the government is telling Facebook how to moderate their platform, wouldn't that be a violation of the 1rst amendment? Since it would be the government actively trying to restrict what someone else can say?
prolikewh0a 8y ago
Exactly. This is government censorship, they're just using the facade of Facebook to do it. COINTELPRO is a good read, the FBI is untrustworthy and works against American interests when it comes to foreign and domestic politics and political organizing (please notice the specifics of this, I am not saying FBI is untrustworthy in all aspects). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
cronix 8y ago
Which gov't org TOLD them how to moderate? All I really saw was the FBI alerted them to some suspicious activity linked to foreign entities, which FB investigated and agreed that the acct's violated FB's policies and so they removed them. Did I miss something? The most interesting thing about that article to me was discovering FB uses WordPress to publish them.

goduxheueh 8y ago

Oh how the intelligensia of HN will applaud and rationalize censorship. Anyone who knows a lick or history understands that every era had some backwards unethical belief. You're no different. Fuck your moderation.

timbit42 8y ago

Vague headline not appreciated. Put the word Facebook in there at least so I can know whether I'm interested.

colejohnson66 8y ago
You can see that it’s on fb.com next to the title