9 ms·

Mozilla sending political ads via Firefox push notification

99 points by paulcarroty 6y ago

Arnavion 6y ago
Previous submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23946568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23946568
donatj 6y ago
Using their privileged position of being able to push any message they want to millions of people to promote a pro-censorship message. Classy.
- gmb2k1 6y ago
  I've lost all respect for Mozilla by now. They're still vital for the web ecosystem as a whole. But they turned into a polititcal party and I don't like.
rjeli 6y ago
...how does this kind of crap get approved? i use Firefox to avoid advertising and harassment from big companies.
- iTOlduSO 6y ago
  Moz://a has joined the moral authority camp for a long time now, consequently "this kind of crap" are considered by Moz://a as a moral obligation hence perfectly normal. [0]: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-digitized-culture-wars https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-digitized-cul...
  - jerome-jh 6y ago
    Considering how IT is increasingly used to make people's life miserable (part accidentally, part intentionally) I actually find this is a good thing they take a moral stance.
    - alpaca128 6y ago
      Everyone is free to take a moral stance. Just don't push it in my face. I'll look at it myself if I'm interested.
      - jerome-jh 6y ago
        Although a user of Firefox on PC and mobile, I have not received that notification. So maybe there was an opt-in/out somewhere to which we answered differently. As just about every editor of a free (as in beer) product, maybe the Mozilla foundation is also expecting something from you? That would not be your data, but you spreading awareness in your circle.
        Macha 6y ago
        Apparently it's tied to the product tips opt out from the reddit thread.
magnusmagnusson 6y ago
The spread of totalitarian State religion demanding active participation in the new religion. No longer merely authoritarian.
bachmeier 6y ago
The actual title is "Why did I just receive an ad for Mozilla's blog via push notification?" Edit: The blog post in question is actually about Facebook.
sputr 6y ago
Had to click through a few links to get to the campaign page that explains what this is about. Noticed the '... American values...' in the campaign page title and facepalmed. I got the ad and am European. They did not think this through to catch that... I doubt they thought about consiquances of politicising the browser.
- paulcarroty 6y ago
  Here's the #StopHateForProfit campaign: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/zuck/?utm_source=leanplum-push-notification&utm_medium=android https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/zuck/?utm_source=leanplum-p...
luckylion 6y ago
When they remotely installed add-ons for an ad deal and it blew up in their face, they promised "we've changed". I don't think they have. I did not receive the notification despite using Firefox on mobile, but a friend did. Maybe because he uses Facebook, and I don't. But that's unthinkable, a Browser claiming to be pro-privacy sniffing around in your web-history to target you for political ads. But then again, you'd also not expect a Browser to send you push notifications for their latest blog post.
rbecker 6y ago
> Facebook is still a place where it’s too easy to find hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and calls to violence. What an odd claim, coming from Mozilla - it's ultimately Firefox that displays all that hate and racism. If they think it should be censored, they can add a filter to the browser itself. Why leave censorship to Facebook, when clearly Mozilla is the more moral corporation, and knows better which content their users should be allowed to see?
- mrkeen 6y ago
  It's the platform-vs-publisher distinction. Firefox the browser doesn't push you towards or away from any particular content, with maybe a few caveats (default search engine, etc.) Facebook (employees & algorithms) decide what you will see on their site.
  - fk6aaa545c 6y ago
    With this campaign they are actively pushing you away from facebook arent they?
- iTOlduSO 6y ago
  > If they think it should be censored, they can add a filter to the browser itself. Don't give them ideas
allendoerfer 6y ago
Mozilla, please get your shit together. We like you. We want you to succeed. I don‘t get how you don’t get us. I thought you are basically us. I half-seriously suggest fireing everyone, who was not a developer at some point. If people who‘s background suggests they truly get your importance actually come up with stuff like this, I have no hope. Everyone grab your kids and run! We were doomed all along!
- Macha 6y ago
  Yeah, Cliqz, Mr Robot, Pocket, Fenix having no extensions in the original roadmap, this, there's just a continuous trend of poor judgement from Mozilla. I wish there wasn't.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
Mozilla is using their Firefox browser to support their political censorship message. What's next? Are we sure in the future that Firefox won't decide that certain sites espouse dangerous opinions and block these sites. Mozilla's actions go against all their rhetoric about supporting the open web. They have no commitment to free speech nor any qualms about using Firefox to advance their political goals.
pornel 6y ago
It's not a random ad, it's Mozilla's own campaign: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/zuck/ https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/zuck/ > Facebook is still a place where it’s too easy to find hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and calls to violence. What a fucked-up politics we have this is not a neutral stance, but a polarizing "political view".
- bauerd 6y ago
  What you quote is not a stance, merely an observation. One can agree there's lots of socially undesirable speech (call it whatever you want) on Facebook, yet at the same time disagree Facebook ought to take their desired actions [0]. Besides, why my browser should send me a push notification for this particular campaign is beyond me. Even if I agree with the political contents this time, should I expect more push notifications of this kind in the future? [0] https://www.stophateforprofit.org/productrecommendations https://www.stophateforprofit.org/productrecommendations
darthrupert 6y ago
Is being anti-violence/hate a political stance now? Fuck.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  For me the political part isn't the issue - the push notification itself is. I can't stand browser desktop notifications and similar useless distractions and have blocked every kind of ad and popup in Firefox. Now the browser itself circumventing this to push some stupid blog article to me that I never asked for is unacceptable to me. Would you be fine with your image viewer, video player or file browser to push messages and suggest blog articles to you without asking? Then why should a website viewer do it? I just want web browsers to display content I requested, block ads and otherwise just don't try to do anything clever. Which worked pretty nicely in Firefox so far.
- fk6aaa545c 6y ago
  Is supporting HK against violence violence political? Is supporting Uyghurs against china violence political? Yes, being anti-violence is political. We can all agree that being anti-violence is a good cause but everyone seems it little bit differently. Someone sees the CCP violence in HK as "liberation" just as someone sees this Mozilla campaign as bullying facebook. Web browser should be neutral and trustworhy don't bother the users with any agenda, however this campaign from mozilla is no surpirse, Mozilla has been like that for a long time.
- TheOperator 6y ago
  The campaign espouses it's "American Values", they specifically talk about US electoral interference, they specifically want to remove exemptions for politicians from censorship rules, and they also want to ban groups of anti-vaccers and "climate denialists" however those are defined from their platform. You're badly representing what's actually going on here in an effort to sound pithy.
as1mov 6y ago
It's a bit ironic, considering a vanilla installation of Firefox has Facebook as one of the default "Top Sites"
- alpaca128 6y ago
  Money does not stink after all
- pixxel 6y ago
  They tweeted out in May a list of video call apps that they had curated, when everyone was stuck indoors. Usual suspects at the top (Facebook), with trusted apps (Signal) near the bottom. It made me rethink my browser choice.
- Markoff 6y ago
  their moral stance ends in their wallet
xacky 6y ago
Why hasn't Firefox been forked yet? Not a spin off like Pale Moon or Waterfox but an actual fork of the entire codebase. With only two real browser engines remaining the potential for an independent policitally neutral browser is high. I don't know why people haven't done it yet.
- lxeiqr 6y ago
  Why do you think that Pale Moon is not an "actual fork" though? They've forked off a rather old version of Firefox and kept updating and maintaining it for quite some time now, barely integrating new things from newer Firefox versions.
- solarkraft 6y ago
  People are forking. The project with currently the most traction seems to be LibreWolf: https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ However the development of such a program takes a massive amount of work (and money), which is something Mozilla still offers and any fork probably doesn't have. It generally doesn't make sense to do so even with the resources, because you'd be duplicating a lot of work, so the "spin-off"s prefer to keep merging the original code, just excluding changes they don't like.
127 6y ago
Free means free. It doesn't mean free only to a certain groups of people.
slap 6y ago
Today I learned that Mozilla was pro-censorship, and using their install base to promote this message. We're living in an intesting time.
- dencodev 6y ago
  Asking platforms to not host and promote violent and racist content is hardly censorship.
  - lostmsu 6y ago
    What's wrong with violence? Do you propose to remove accounts of violent protests from Facebook now?
    - dencodev 6y ago
      People promoting violence usually means targeted violence. Proposing violence against a specific person or group of people. A protest that happens to have people in that become violent and then those some people posting online is a completely different situation than a bunch of Nazis saying we need to exterminate the Jewish people.
      - lostmsu 6y ago
        Aka let's ban promoting bad violence. Who decides bad or good?
        dencodev 6y ago
        Maybe I'm making my point poorly. Allowing violent people to post online is fine. Allowing them to post violent content is bad. I don't care who the person is. I care what they post. As long as they're not advocating harm to a specific person or group of people it's fine. I'm okay with people saying racist things from a free speech perspective (it's still despicable). I'm not okay with them saying people should go burn down the synagogue in downtown Seattle.
andor 6y ago
I can see that people feel bothered by push messages they didn't ask for, but... "political ads"? Anyone who feels offended by "stop hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and calls to violence" needs to urgently figure out where their emotions come from.
- s9w 6y ago
  I preferred when Mozilla made browsers
  - ta17711771 6y ago
    Secure ones, too.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
kemonocode 6y ago
I don't really care about their political stance or what they support (as many people claiming themselves to be slightly right of center seem to be so offended by) but using push notifications to shove that to my face is one step too far. They should just have stuck to their blog and social media. Reminder this is the same company who have partnered with proprietary service companies to put on first-party functionality on their browsers (hi Pocket) and also used undocumented functionality to push ads on people before (the Black Mirror promo fiasco).
- m-p-3 6y ago
  > Reminder this is the same company who have partnered with proprietary service companies to put on first-party functionality on their browsers (hi Pocket) They didn't partner with Pocket, they own Pocket.
  - kemonocode 6y ago
    This came later [0] as originally Mozilla had partened with Pocket while they were still an independent entity as early as 2015 [1] [0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/27/14752590/mozilla-acquires-pocket-read-it-later https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/27/14752590/mozilla-acquires... [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172126 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172126
Markoff 6y ago
brought to you by company not willing to implement even optional pull down to refresh for 5+ years one of the reasons why U don't use their buggy slow browser on Android (use outdated Kiwi Browser, since it's only non shady browser with extensions support)
zanmat0 6y ago
This pushed me to give Edge a try and I was very pleasantly surprised so I'm going to be sticking with that.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
thiht 6y ago
They've got to stop pulling this kind of crap again and again. They should not use their position to promote their political agenda.

99 points by paulcarroty 6y ago

Previous submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23946568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23946568

Using their privileged position of being able to push any message they want to millions of people to promote a pro-censorship message. Classy.

gmb2k1 6y ago
I've lost all respect for Mozilla by now. They're still vital for the web ecosystem as a whole. But they turned into a polititcal party and I don't like.

rjeli 6y ago

...how does this kind of crap get approved? i use Firefox to avoid advertising and harassment from big companies.

iTOlduSO 6y ago
Moz://a has joined the moral authority camp for a long time now, consequently "this kind of crap" are considered by Moz://a as a moral obligation hence perfectly normal. [0]: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-digitized-culture-wars https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-digitized-cul...
- jerome-jh 6y ago
  Considering how IT is increasingly used to make people's life miserable (part accidentally, part intentionally) I actually find this is a good thing they take a moral stance.
  - alpaca128 6y ago
    Everyone is free to take a moral stance. Just don't push it in my face. I'll look at it myself if I'm interested.
    - jerome-jh 6y ago
      Although a user of Firefox on PC and mobile, I have not received that notification. So maybe there was an opt-in/out somewhere to which we answered differently. As just about every editor of a free (as in beer) product, maybe the Mozilla foundation is also expecting something from you? That would not be your data, but you spreading awareness in your circle.
      - Macha 6y ago
        Apparently it's tied to the product tips opt out from the reddit thread.

magnusmagnusson 6y ago

The spread of totalitarian State religion demanding active participation in the new religion. No longer merely authoritarian.

bachmeier 6y ago

The actual title is "Why did I just receive an ad for Mozilla's blog via push notification?" Edit: The blog post in question is actually about Facebook.

sputr 6y ago

Had to click through a few links to get to the campaign page that explains what this is about. Noticed the '... American values...' in the campaign page title and facepalmed. I got the ad and am European. They did not think this through to catch that... I doubt they thought about consiquances of politicising the browser.

paulcarroty 6y ago
Here's the #StopHateForProfit campaign: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/zuck/?utm_source=leanplum-push-notification&utm_medium=android https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/zuck/?utm_source=leanplum-p...

luckylion 6y ago

When they remotely installed add-ons for an ad deal and it blew up in their face, they promised "we've changed". I don't think they have. I did not receive the notification despite using Firefox on mobile, but a friend did. Maybe because he uses Facebook, and I don't. But that's unthinkable, a Browser claiming to be pro-privacy sniffing around in your web-history to target you for political ads. But then again, you'd also not expect a Browser to send you push notifications for their latest blog post.

rbecker 6y ago

> Facebook is still a place where it’s too easy to find hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and calls to violence. What an odd claim, coming from Mozilla - it's ultimately Firefox that displays all that hate and racism. If they think it should be censored, they can add a filter to the browser itself. Why leave censorship to Facebook, when clearly Mozilla is the more moral corporation, and knows better which content their users should be allowed to see?

mrkeen 6y ago
It's the platform-vs-publisher distinction. Firefox the browser doesn't push you towards or away from any particular content, with maybe a few caveats (default search engine, etc.) Facebook (employees & algorithms) decide what you will see on their site.
- fk6aaa545c 6y ago
  With this campaign they are actively pushing you away from facebook arent they?
iTOlduSO 6y ago
> If they think it should be censored, they can add a filter to the browser itself. Don't give them ideas

allendoerfer 6y ago

Mozilla, please get your shit together. We like you. We want you to succeed. I don‘t get how you don’t get us. I thought you are basically us. I half-seriously suggest fireing everyone, who was not a developer at some point. If people who‘s background suggests they truly get your importance actually come up with stuff like this, I have no hope. Everyone grab your kids and run! We were doomed all along!

Macha 6y ago
Yeah, Cliqz, Mr Robot, Pocket, Fenix having no extensions in the original roadmap, this, there's just a continuous trend of poor judgement from Mozilla. I wish there wasn't.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

Mozilla is using their Firefox browser to support their political censorship message. What's next? Are we sure in the future that Firefox won't decide that certain sites espouse dangerous opinions and block these sites. Mozilla's actions go against all their rhetoric about supporting the open web. They have no commitment to free speech nor any qualms about using Firefox to advance their political goals.

pornel 6y ago

It's not a random ad, it's Mozilla's own campaign: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/zuck/ https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/zuck/ > Facebook is still a place where it’s too easy to find hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and calls to violence. What a fucked-up politics we have this is not a neutral stance, but a polarizing "political view".

bauerd 6y ago
What you quote is not a stance, merely an observation. One can agree there's lots of socially undesirable speech (call it whatever you want) on Facebook, yet at the same time disagree Facebook ought to take their desired actions [0]. Besides, why my browser should send me a push notification for this particular campaign is beyond me. Even if I agree with the political contents this time, should I expect more push notifications of this kind in the future? [0] https://www.stophateforprofit.org/productrecommendations https://www.stophateforprofit.org/productrecommendations

darthrupert 6y ago

Is being anti-violence/hate a political stance now? Fuck.

alpaca128 6y ago
For me the political part isn't the issue - the push notification itself is. I can't stand browser desktop notifications and similar useless distractions and have blocked every kind of ad and popup in Firefox. Now the browser itself circumventing this to push some stupid blog article to me that I never asked for is unacceptable to me. Would you be fine with your image viewer, video player or file browser to push messages and suggest blog articles to you without asking? Then why should a website viewer do it? I just want web browsers to display content I requested, block ads and otherwise just don't try to do anything clever. Which worked pretty nicely in Firefox so far.
fk6aaa545c 6y ago
Is supporting HK against violence violence political? Is supporting Uyghurs against china violence political? Yes, being anti-violence is political. We can all agree that being anti-violence is a good cause but everyone seems it little bit differently. Someone sees the CCP violence in HK as "liberation" just as someone sees this Mozilla campaign as bullying facebook. Web browser should be neutral and trustworhy don't bother the users with any agenda, however this campaign from mozilla is no surpirse, Mozilla has been like that for a long time.
TheOperator 6y ago
The campaign espouses it's "American Values", they specifically talk about US electoral interference, they specifically want to remove exemptions for politicians from censorship rules, and they also want to ban groups of anti-vaccers and "climate denialists" however those are defined from their platform. You're badly representing what's actually going on here in an effort to sound pithy.

as1mov 6y ago

It's a bit ironic, considering a vanilla installation of Firefox has Facebook as one of the default "Top Sites"

alpaca128 6y ago
Money does not stink after all
pixxel 6y ago
They tweeted out in May a list of video call apps that they had curated, when everyone was stuck indoors. Usual suspects at the top (Facebook), with trusted apps (Signal) near the bottom. It made me rethink my browser choice.
Markoff 6y ago
their moral stance ends in their wallet

xacky 6y ago

Why hasn't Firefox been forked yet? Not a spin off like Pale Moon or Waterfox but an actual fork of the entire codebase. With only two real browser engines remaining the potential for an independent policitally neutral browser is high. I don't know why people haven't done it yet.

lxeiqr 6y ago
Why do you think that Pale Moon is not an "actual fork" though? They've forked off a rather old version of Firefox and kept updating and maintaining it for quite some time now, barely integrating new things from newer Firefox versions.
solarkraft 6y ago
People are forking. The project with currently the most traction seems to be LibreWolf: https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ However the development of such a program takes a massive amount of work (and money), which is something Mozilla still offers and any fork probably doesn't have. It generally doesn't make sense to do so even with the resources, because you'd be duplicating a lot of work, so the "spin-off"s prefer to keep merging the original code, just excluding changes they don't like.

127 6y ago

Free means free. It doesn't mean free only to a certain groups of people.

slap 6y ago

Today I learned that Mozilla was pro-censorship, and using their install base to promote this message. We're living in an intesting time.

dencodev 6y ago
Asking platforms to not host and promote violent and racist content is hardly censorship.
- lostmsu 6y ago
  What's wrong with violence? Do you propose to remove accounts of violent protests from Facebook now?
  - dencodev 6y ago
    People promoting violence usually means targeted violence. Proposing violence against a specific person or group of people. A protest that happens to have people in that become violent and then those some people posting online is a completely different situation than a bunch of Nazis saying we need to exterminate the Jewish people.
    - lostmsu 6y ago
      Aka let's ban promoting bad violence. Who decides bad or good?
      - dencodev 6y ago
        Maybe I'm making my point poorly. Allowing violent people to post online is fine. Allowing them to post violent content is bad. I don't care who the person is. I care what they post. As long as they're not advocating harm to a specific person or group of people it's fine. I'm okay with people saying racist things from a free speech perspective (it's still despicable). I'm not okay with them saying people should go burn down the synagogue in downtown Seattle.

andor 6y ago

I can see that people feel bothered by push messages they didn't ask for, but... "political ads"? Anyone who feels offended by "stop hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and calls to violence" needs to urgently figure out where their emotions come from.

s9w 6y ago
I preferred when Mozilla made browsers
- ta17711771 6y ago
  Secure ones, too.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

kemonocode 6y ago

I don't really care about their political stance or what they support (as many people claiming themselves to be slightly right of center seem to be so offended by) but using push notifications to shove that to my face is one step too far. They should just have stuck to their blog and social media. Reminder this is the same company who have partnered with proprietary service companies to put on first-party functionality on their browsers (hi Pocket) and also used undocumented functionality to push ads on people before (the Black Mirror promo fiasco).

m-p-3 6y ago
> Reminder this is the same company who have partnered with proprietary service companies to put on first-party functionality on their browsers (hi Pocket) They didn't partner with Pocket, they own Pocket.
- kemonocode 6y ago
  This came later [0] as originally Mozilla had partened with Pocket while they were still an independent entity as early as 2015 [1] [0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/27/14752590/mozilla-acquires-pocket-read-it-later https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/27/14752590/mozilla-acquires... [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172126 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172126

Markoff 6y ago

brought to you by company not willing to implement even optional pull down to refresh for 5+ years one of the reasons why U don't use their buggy slow browser on Android (use outdated Kiwi Browser, since it's only non shady browser with extensions support)

zanmat0 6y ago

This pushed me to give Edge a try and I was very pleasantly surprised so I'm going to be sticking with that.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

thiht 6y ago

They've got to stop pulling this kind of crap again and again. They should not use their position to promote their political agenda.