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Deleted message contained more text than only the link. The event was quite small and local (social event with <200 participants). The organizer (a friend of mi
by Legogris 5y ago
Deleted message contained more text than only the link. The event was quite small and local (social event with <200 participants). The organizer (a friend of mine) had asked people to not share the link via social media.
While what you're saying is theoretically possible, I find it such a stretch that the only reasonable explanation save for some very unlikely bug is that message contents are indeed accessed in some form outside of our own devices.
- cantrevealname 5y agoIt would be terrific to find a way to reproduce this. What do you believe is the likely reason for the link to be deleted? Do you think that the organizer (your friend) did something at his end that caused the link to be deleted everywhere? I.e., he wanted to delete the link. In that case, it should be possible to reproduce this. Or do you think Facebook or WhatsApp disapproved of the link and therefore deleted it? Was it something controversial or against Facebook rules? It could be possible to reproduce that as well if a group of users shares an equally controversial link.
- Legogris 5y agoI agree. It really beats me. The organizer did write on the event info page something like "don't share on SNS". While it's a curious coincidence that it's specifically this link that gets deleted, AFAIK there's no way for an organizer to prevent sharing apart from making the event private and requesting attendees in free-text to keep it to themselves. The only thing that I think could potentially be controversial would be that it was a social gathering during the pandemic. The event page itself was and still is up. If it was deemed against FB rules I'd expect it to be reflected in some way on FB, and not just by deleting WhatsApp messages refering it. I really can't give a good reason apart from "some ML model got triggered somehow, which prompted a human somewhere to look at it for a couple of seconds and click the delete button"
- StavrosK 5y agoWhatsApp visits links to generate a preview, so presumably FB knows the content of your message because at least the link is leaked.
- rapnie 5y agoYes indeed, to request the OpenGraph metadata. Though technically not needed I assume that any hyperlink will be readable by WA/FB. Anyone knows if these requests go via their own servers?
- StavrosK 5y agoI just checked the web UI by pasting a link and didn't see a request go out to the domain, so I assume it went through the websocket to FB.