19 ms·
It's one thing to censor, but it's another to intentionally deceive your users into believing that they sent something.
by blunte 5y ago
It's one thing to censor, but it's another to intentionally deceive your users into believing that they sent something.
- edoceo 5y agoMalicious?
- malwarebytess 5y agoSort of. It's like shadowbanning/hellbanning. It solves a lot of problems for moderators and prevents angry people from escalating the situation into actually being banned. I've used it before as a moderator. For the above reasons, but mostly because I'm lazy and don't want to deal with angry people. Still censorship though. I think that ideally censorship ought to be communicated.
- lmilcin 5y ago>because I'm lazy Yeah, you described it well. Start by understanding, Mr Moderator, there is a hell of a lot of difference between public posts and private messages.
- cronix 5y agoNot if your goal is to censor a viewpoint. They are one in the same whether it's a viewpoint made in public or private - the main point of censorship is to not allow you to communicate certain thoughts. It amazes me that some posts here (not yours, but like the one you're responding to) have already seeded the censorship ground. For them it seems the question isn't whether it's ok to censor opposing viewpoints, but whether they should be told they've been censored. The censorship part is a-ok, but not if you're not informed?
- ericbarrett 5y agoI've moderated a forum before. Some people on the Internet are just crazy. If you ban them, they will come after you—maybe even in person. Shadowbanning on forums (setting aside the FB case) is sometimes abused, but it serves a vital purpose: preserving the time and safety of volunteer moderators.
- pseudo0 5y agoDon't they just get twice as annoyed when they realize that not only were they banned, but they were silently banned and wasted time writing posts that went straight to /dev/null? The only time shadowbanning seems like a good solution is outright commercial spam and link farming, where slowing them down is a win in itself.
- wvenable 5y agoThey get annoyed but not in the same way; the craziest want an audience and if you don't give it to them they generally move on.
- hutzlibu 5y ago"They get annoyed but not in the same way" I would be carefuly about that. "and if you don't give it to them they generally move on." The craziest has lots of stuff going on. Lots of anger and hate. So if they decide, that you are their mortal enemy for shadow banning them, they might not move on.
- wvenable 5y agoIt's not worse than just directly modding them -- that gives them more direct rage fuel.
- prawn 5y agoI’ve run a forum for 15+ years and found shadowbanning vital in dealing with nutbags. As OP said, some people will pursue you personally and get obsessive. They have one forum they are obsessed with. You have thousands of users that are potentially like this.
- swayvil 5y agoFor another example of such totalitarian shenanigans consider the practice of "shadowbanning" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning Ostensibly used for spam/troll countermeasures. In practice used to dick with whoever they choose for whatever reasons please their black little hearts. Reddit and Twitter are notorious for it. Other "social media" organisms too. AND ANOTHER MORE IMMEDIATE EXAMPLE Consider the way that downvotes progressively remove a post from view. It's a way of crowdsourcing the task of censorship. Many hands make light work. And the blame is neatly spread around. And the actual shape of the censorship, the form being conformed to, is only indirectly controlled by the admins. Thus more blame neatly escaped. It's goddamn elegant is what it is!
- krastanov 5y agoHow is this different from booing you for saying something stupid/wrong (or otherwise disliked even when smart/true) in a public venue. If anything, downvoting seems more honest and less "censorish" than booing, because you still get a chance to respond.
- seattle_spring 5y agoModeration is not the same as censorship.
- rnd0 5y ago
- yellow_lead 5y agoWhen sending torrent links (Ubuntu / Arch iso even), FB blocks it. Usually they show a red exclamation point on the message for me so this is quite weird. Of course, this is one of the reasons I don't use FB anymore.
- mgraczyk 5y agoThis one also shows a red exclamation point, but because of a bug the exclamation point goes away after you send more messages. You can see it in the twitter screenshots or replicate yourself by sending any gnews link on messenger
- graeme 5y agoHacker News does it. Reddit does it sitewide. Individual moderators do it sitewide. Shadowbanning is an essential tool for moderation, for dealing with trolls, spammers, abusive people. You can argue the tool is being used too widely by Facebook, but it is silly to pontificate against the practice as a whole. You reaaaaallly would not like the uncensored internet.
- omginternets 5y ago>You reaaaaallly would not like the uncensored internet. Respectfully, speak for yourself.
- lmilcin 5y agoPeople don't seem to understand the ramifications. I prefer truth to being enslaved into conformance by "the algorithm".
- strictfp 5y agoI think the anonymous internet was way better. People tend to group anyway, so it's not like everyone is forced into the same room.
- seattle_spring 5y agoIf the_donald proved anything in 2015 and 2016, the loudest most malicious folks intentionally ram themselves into all communities. The suggestion that bad actors will keep to themselves is the absolute opposite of reality.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rtkwe 5y agoEvery platform that tries "we're 100% free speech no censorship or moderation" winds up learning the same lesson which is that their problem isn't with moderation it's that you don't like the kind of moderation decisions that are being made. Parler ran this gauntlet on fast forward [0], Gettr did it too [1], places that have tried holding on to the free speech absolutist position eventually burn to the ground in one way or another like the various children of 4chan. [0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200630/23525844821/parler-speedruns-content-moderation-learning-curve-goes-we-allow-everything-to-were-good-censors-days.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200630/23525844821/parle... [1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210825/17204647438/trumpist-gettr-social-network-continues-to-speed-run-content-moderation-learning-curve-bans-then-unbans-roger-stone.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210825/17204647438/trump...
- systemvoltage 5y ago> It's one thing to censor !!! Are we nonchalantly accepting its OK to censor and moving on to the argument about deceiving users? Edit: should add more context to this. I don't think we should be casually OK with censorship. Next thing you know, FB will silently(or not) start censoring political opponents, activists they don't like, etc. I am quite unsettled by how the west is doing the same as China. Censorship is just casually taken as granted now. I don't think counter arguments hold for "private platforms". At some point, it becomes public square when a billion+ people use your platform.
- rnd0 5y ago>Are we nonchalantly accepting its OK to censor and moving on to the argument about deceiving users? Personally I'm disturbed at the non-chalant attitude taken towards shadow moderation in this thread. Shadow banning and shadow moderation may make one's job easier but it has a disastrous effect on the forum or community by injecting a definite level of deceit into the moderator/poster relationship. Any forum where shadow bans /shadow moderation are practiced the moderators by definition can not be trusted.
- bopbeepboop 5y agoOn HN, shadowbans are implemented via automatic flagging.
- rtkwe 5y agoI've got bad news for you about HackerNews then, HN has 'dead' users who can post but are only shown if you specifically opt-in and they can't be replied to at all.
- rnd0 5y agoI'm not even remotely surprised, and that doesn't really change my point.
- kbenson 5y agoBut those comments from dead useres can be "vouched" for if they appear to be in good faith, and one or more of those seems to take people out of dead status, I think. I'm not sure what points threshold grants that ability, or how long it has existed, but I do it every few month or so when I see a comment that seems to be perfectly fine but the comment is dead. I think that might be a pretty good mechanism, all said and done. Someone acts in a way the community doesn't accept enough times they go dead, and then if they act acceptably they start getting people responding and participating to them as they come out of dead status. They only get attention, and positive attention, from acting responsibly.
- twirlock 5y agoTell dang.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mgraczyk 5y agoThe censorship is intentional, but the silence is a bug in the react code. You can look at the console in chrome devtools to see. There is an error message informing the viewer that their message was censored. The message is incorrectly hidden when you send additional message. Also refresh the page and the messages disappear from the viewer.
- shadowgovt 5y agoAs good as they are at 99.99% of what they do, almost every time a friend brings an example to me of Facebook doing something malicious, it turns out to be simple implementation error.
- ddalex 5y agoSo that got winners of the C Underhanded Contest working there?
- 838812052807016 5y agoHow do you know the bug is unintentional?
- Leparamour 5y agoBut it's that silence which deceives the user into thinking that the message never arriving is a technical malfunction and not intentional censoring. How many times, do you think the user would see the censoring message and be cool with it? Maybe once or twice, then they will stop using FB likely forever and tell all their friends. But does FB want that? Hell no, they want to retain the user for data collection and ad showing purposes. So how about just not showing the censoring message, make the user believe there was just a technical glitch and not insidious shadowbanning? I think this "bug" is intentional and done for plausible deniability in case of a lawsuit: "See, there is transparence. It was just a bug in the code. Human error."
- amanaplanacanal 5y agoRe your last paragraph. Would that really work though? You subpoena the person who wrote the code and ask them under oath. I wouldn’t perjure myself to protect the company, would you?
- dheera 5y agoIt seems to me FB has been doing this a long time with news feed posts. Often I'll post something and my friends who I check with don't see it in their feed. Posts with links tend to be censored out more often. For example if I post a link to a charity donation website often my friends don't see it in their feed, but if I don't post the link and only state the name, they see it.
- upbeat_general 5y agoThe screenshots show two red exclamation points showing it wasn’t delivered
- scottydelta 5y agoYou just defined shadow banning.
- seaourfreed 5y agoIt is censorship. Calling it shadow banning doesn't make it okay. Bigger and bigger groups of citizens are revolting over censorship: Bill Maher and tons of Americans. This builds a revolt against Facebook
- bagels 5y agoRight or not, I think charitably, the person you are responding to is pointing out that this is not a new thing in social media sites. It's a decades old technique at this point.
- bobthechef 5y agoShadow banning isn’t really something used in private messages, no?
- atatatat 5y agoApparently by Facebook.
- kaladin-jasnah 5y agoWeChat does it (as well) [0]. [0] https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/wechat-surveillance-explained/ https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/wechat-surveillance-explained/
- mgiampapa 5y agoHackernews does shadowbanning as well.
- bagels 5y agoIt was done at the unnamed social network I worked at, over 10 years ago. To combat spam, mostly. People posting links to scam sites to watch sports games.
- otterley 5y agoThey do it because it is effective. Otherwise people would be more likely to try to circumvent it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- TroisM 5y agoHN does that a lot too... using shadow bans and other techniques...
- NewNewGuy123 5y agoTry posting anything from 4chan over messenger and see what happens.
- globular-toast 5y agoIt's a normal part of censorship. During wars some countries have employed sensors to intercept letters from soldiers. The soldiers will never know what was censored en route or indeed if the letter made it at all.