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I doubt anyone at Facebook is freaking out about Mastodon and setting out to censor all mention of it. It's probably just a keyword or link that tends to co-ap
by Imnimo 5y ago
I doubt anyone at Facebook is freaking out about Mastodon and setting out to censor all mention of it. It's probably just a keyword or link that tends to co-appear with other, actually rule-breaking content, and some automated system has learned to block it.
Still, it does seem like the sort of thing that could get Facebook in trouble with a regulator if you squint at it.
- theknocker 5y ago>I either have no idea how the world works or I want you to have no idea how the world works
- stncls 5y agoYes, Facebook's upper management is definitely not freaking out about Mastodon. However, from my own experience working at a large, somewhat ethically-challenged organisation (not fb), it would not surprise me in the least if they gently yet actively pushed down a competitor, provided it can be done discreetly.
- whimsicalism 5y agoDoubt it, not worth the liabillity risk.
- flatline 5y agoWhat liability? A few million dollar fine? Look at what Microsoft did to numerous competitors over decades: Borland, Mozilla, etc. FB squelching Mastodon is minor league.
- yaacov 5y agoYes, Microsoft has famously never had any major issues with antitrust
- DamnYuppie 5y agoWhile they have run afoul of the government a few times the penalties and "negative press" ever amounted to anything that slowed down their growth or revenue. So to the OP's point if you can afford the fine it doesn't really matter?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jhasse 5y agohttps://techcrunch.com/2015/12/01/whatsapp-is-blocking-links-to-rival-app-telegram-on-android/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/12/01/whatsapp-is-blocking-links...
- artiszt 5y agorecalled that too. so far for Zuckerboi not known to 'be evil' when it comes to competition and/or what one may think of in context of so-called 'opponent research'. and, seemingly not beeing 'known-for' doesn't necessarily mean seriously not-involved and not-guilty. Epstein, Prince Andrew and the Weinstein creep too were not known -- however, turned out, eventually, there were and there are some who knew and appear to know ..
- jrm4 5y agoI would love to live in the world in which there were some actual liability risk to facebook on this (or for that matter, on anything important to it.) I genuinely am curious, in Facebook's world today, how do you see this playing out in a way that actually hurts Facebook. I legit want to know so I can actively work toward making it happen.
- spoonjim 5y agoMastodon is a “competitor” to Facebook the way a grandma doing middle school tutoring in her backyard is a competitor to Harvard.
- smolder 5y agoYes, of course, at least now. Yet, it does present a non-negligible risk, in the same way that some startups can become unicorns, or some college kids web project can become a global giant.
- rkk3 5y ago> Yet, it does present a non-negligible risk, Negligible: so small or unimportant as to be not worth considering; insignificant. The first page of search Mastodon results for me are all about a heavy metal band from Atlanta. Sounds like a negligible risk to me.
- jrm4 5y agoBut when you have near-infinity resources, everything is technically "non-negligible," and that's the case here. Let's say there's a 0.01% chance that Mastodon beats Facebook. Okay, what's 0.01% of however much Facebook makes? That's how much they should spend on it, and I'd bet that amount of money is nothing to scoff at.
- alisonkisk 5y agoThis is the fallacy of ignoring the existence of extremely small numbers. if mastodon had a 0.01% chance of "beating" facebook, it would have many $millions in funding.
- rkk3 5y agoIt sounds like you are arguing that there is no level of risk low enough to be ignored, and that there is no such thing as negligible risk. So if there is 2^-500 chance of an alien invasion, lets put a team on it!
- rapnie 5y agoThere may be more reasons to see Mastodon as a potential threat. There's something of a different paradigm to it. First of all it is decentralized (federated), and anyone can spin up servers for themself or a community of users, set their own topic and rules (CoC, ToS) and connect with the larger social network (the Fediverse). Second of all this fediverse is based on open-standards and anyone can develop their own social apps and integrate them with others. Mastodon just happens to be the most popular / well-known. Other apps, such as Pixelfed and Peertube offer nice, ad-free, and 'calmer' experiences to their large-scale social media alternatives (Instagram and Youtube). See https://fediverse.party/ https://fediverse.party/ Also note that Twitter has taken an interest in decentralized protocols with Bluesky project.
- tentacleuno 5y agoWhat happened to Bluesky? They made a bunch of promises and it sort of... disappeared after that.
- rapnie 5y agoThey recently hired Jay Graber as project lead: https://twitter.com/arcalinea/status/1427314482154414080 https://twitter.com/arcalinea/status/1427314482154414080
- kixiQu 5y agoThey've also started setting up community working groups -- the whole thing's coordinated in a Discord server, which is very weird to me, but you can see what they're up to.
- rictic 5y agoCurrent hypothesis is that they're just moving slowly, there are signs of life
- dragonelite 5y agouuhm going back to a time before the algos took over my timeline would be awesome.
- cowsandmilk 5y agoThere are far more discreet approaches than marking these messages as spam and notifying users. My guess is that an actual person reported this as spam and Facebook automatically accepted the report.
- heavenlyblue 5y agoSpam is an easy plausible deniability
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoRe: discreet, how true.. since their news feed prioritization algorithm is a black box they can just rank posts about Mastodon very low, so low they'd probably show your American contacts ads about monkey-proofing your house (something relevant for India) before showing that post...
- eterevsky 5y agoYou can't do such a thing discreetly, since people will notice if you take down their posts, and Facebook is not known to ban mentions of their actual competitors like YouTube, Twitter or TikTok.
- swayvil 5y agoAnd if you believe that then I have a nice bridge I'd like to sell you. --- Look at those downvotes. You people are so protective of your little social media nipple.
- evgen 5y agoIf you think that Mastadon is in any way a 'competitor' to FB or anyone at FB gives a shit about Mastadon I think that the bridge you are trying to sell only exists in your mind. Programmers are lazy and almost always breaking shit; the probability that this is anything more than some sloppy code somewhere pruning an offending URL in a way that blocks more than it should is so remote as to be laughable.
- swayvil 5y agoAmazon will delete a review if it mentions alternative-to-amazon ways to acquire the product. It's a known tactic among our cybernetic overlords. Because they feel threatened by your neighbor's garage sale? Of course not. I imagine it's like squashing the ants in your kitchen. We aren't really afraid that one of them is gonna make off with the milk jug. But all the same we don't like them touching our stuff. So we implement that policy. Almost unconsciously.
- thinkloop 5y agoI have personally never heard of, or seen, any scams or malware related to mastadon - aren't you giving too much benefit of the doubt? My best guess is that their lists of competitors to keep an eye on got mixed up with other stuff. Or, of course, that they simply don't want to promote competitors on their platform, which would be normal for any non-monopoly.
- chucky_z 5y agoThere are a number of extremely poorly moderated Mastodon instances with a large amount of hateful and hurtful content. I’d imagine they’re automatically blocking a lot of these sites. Source: I used and helped maintain one of the “don’t federate with these instances” list.
- uselesscynicism 5y agoOh, Fediblock! The list of based instances. It's amazing to me that the people who maintain these lists don't seem to realize that they're maintaining a useful directory for all the people they don't like to help them find places to congregate, meanwhile isolating them from more moderate influences.
- kixiQu 5y agoI mean, sure, but the post content doesn't mention `examplebarelylegal.moe` or `exampleviolenceagainst.gay` or some such domain -- it's just the project's main instance list, which lists only instances intended to be compliant with a moderation standard.
- ma2rten 5y agoI could imagine that the wording regarding corporate control could have erroneously triggered a filter because that phrase appears for example in anti-wax and conspiracy theory posts. It would be interesting to do some experiments here: post the same text to see if it gets removed again, and then repost it and remove sentences to see which one triggered the filter.
- Barrin92 5y ago
- whoknowswhat11 5y agoWhat is the violation? I'm serious. If I post a link to a target product page on walmart it will be taken down. I'm sure amazon does the same. Do business have to allow you to promote their competitors? Such a weird thing for regulators to be chasing - there seems to be so many more obvious issues than this. Is this a political winner - in other words, does the average person think I can put of Burger King flyers in a McDonalds store?
- Eighth 5y agoSounds anti-competitive in the UK. Using dominant market power to censor.
- whoknowswhat11 5y agoThat is a weird UK rule then. In the US the common issues are things like tying, predatory pricing, exclusive dealing, loyalty discounts, bundling etc. Allowing competitors onto your own platform is an unusual requirement in UK I think - I haven't seen a case like that in US but don't follow closely.
- nitrogen 5y agoCommunication platforms are a bit different. Nobody would be okay with Comcast blocking the signup page or mentions of Google Fiber or your municipal broadbrand network, or Verizon disconnecting your call if you mention AT&T.
- whoknowswhat11 5y agoI think folks really do not understand the difference between Verizon calls (regulated under common carrier rules) and Facebook (a social network). Facebook claims to be a social network. Those types of networks normally DO NOT allow you to promote other social networks. Even review platforms which are a bit more communication in nature block posting other sites reviews.
- 5faulker 5y agoIt's probably an AI thing. When these things occur it's a good idea not to presumptively jumping to attributing to human interference until more evidence surface.
- shkkmo 5y agoI would argue the opposite. We should not allow companies to use "AI" as an excuse to avoid responsibility. I think it is perfectly reasonable to hold Facebook directly responsible for this.
- MereInterest 5y agoExactly. Delegating decisions does not reduce responsibility.
- zeruch 5y ago" it does seem like the sort of thing that could get Facebook in trouble with a regulator if you squint at it." Oh, I hope so...
- type0 5y ago> could get Facebook in trouble with a regulator if you squint at it. How could it?
- jdavis703 5y agoI think congressional Republicans might hold a hearing about this… But I don’t think this runs afoul of mainstream interpretations of current regulations. Happy to stand corrected if someone has a plausible explanation for what agency would bring what kind of action on this.
- ThrowAway145 5y agoCongressional Republicans? Lina Khan from the FTC who is personally taking up targeting FB as her claim to fame is a Democrat. Rep. Mike Doyle, chair of the House subcommittee on Communications and Technology, who grilled FB in 2020 on mis-information and Section 230 is also a Democrat. Make no mistake, this is bi-partisan. Both sides have their own agendas against Big Tech.
- baby 5y agoBut… it makes for great publicity for Mastodon.
- ssivark 5y agoWell, Facebook bought the Israeli startup Onavo explicitly so they could track which new social apps are starting to become popular on user phones, so they could quickly acquire those or copy their features and kill the competition.
- sergiomattei 5y agoBut Mastodon isn't becoming popular (and likely won't be).
- artiszt 5y agoand that 'kill' fo 'the competition' in essence is what it's all about. no matter what's obvious or not, seems likely or not -- given FB's history, Zuckerboi's history ..
- takeda 5y agoGiven the date of the post, the content and that it happened with delay, I am quite sure his friends who disagreed with him politically reported it as a spam. Perhaps after certain number of people report it, it automatically will be marked as one (such logic would be more reliable on FB, than for example reddit or HN, since most FB users have a single profile tied using their real name)
- xtat 5y agoAs we say in crypto "its probably nothing"