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More examples of FB marking Mastodon related links as spam

55 points by ColinWright 5y ago

ColinWright 5y ago
And another: https://mastodon.social/@humanetech/106914332280931087 https://mastodon.social/@humanetech/106914332280931087 There is a discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28493823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28493823 These links (the submission and the one above) are to provide more examples, and might spark a different discussion.
- simias 5y ago
  I agree with the top post in the linked thread, in these situations I tend to assume incompetence rather than malice. Furthermore this type of censorship would actually be the best way to boost mastodon if only thanks to the Streisand effect. I could imagine in particular that alternative social networks would often be advertised by people who specifically tend to post content not allowed on Facebook, which may cause a poorly calibrated filter to see the correlation and decide to mark "mastodon" as a blacklisted keyword.
roenxi 5y ago
Reminds me of the takedown/assassination of Parler; the SV giants see themselves as a group of friends and don't play fair when they see competition. Given the stakes for control of the world's social data, I wouldn't even be surprised to learn one day there was a ring of product managers who were actively conspiring. Although that does seem unlikely.
- simias 5y ago
  Parler was a haven for hate speech, I don't have any problem if tech giants refuse to enable such applications (and would have a problem if they did nothing). If the parler devs were more competent they could've made their own website with their own infrastructure. There are many despicable websites that survive that way (the kiwi one comes to mind). But why bother when you can play the victim and not have to actually do anything complicated like hosting a website with your own resources.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    > Parler was a haven for hate speech Jan 8: Parler becomes #1 downloaded app in App Store Jan 8, night of: AWS legal compliance awakes in cold sweat, haunted by visions of hate Jan 9: On January 9, Amazon announced that it would suspend Parler from Amazon Web Services, effective at 11:59 p.m PST the next day. Now AWS obviously had this in the pipeline for a while, but I'm just saying, it isn't crazy to think that the final call was made after someone in AWS talked to someone at Apple and someone at Twitter. It looks like a political hit. I dunno, maybe Apple has a lot of hateful users.
    - blitzar 5y ago
      > App gets huge amounts of media coverage. > App gets lots of downloads. Hardly a shock. If there was a political hit, then I am sure you would start out by not letting it trend to #1 and market it for free on everyone’s screen.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Parler was openly welcoming hate speech while Facebook and similar garbage pretend to disallow it while secretly profiting off it. I don't like Parler nor the speech it wanted to allow but I don't think it's any worse than Facebook & co. FB is just better at hiding it and protecting their public image, but deep down all they care about is "engagement" and turns out divisive, outrageous and controversial content "engages" a lot more. Remember that the Capitol attacks were mostly orchestrated on Facebook and this disgusting company happily profited off the build-up to these attacks.
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      thank you facebook harbored a multitude of qanon “groups” of thousands of members each. it wasn’t hard to find them, if you interacted with one post in the genre you would get the groups recommended to you. the harm seemed obvious to me, you can’t let people speculate about who is and isn’t a child trafficker without expecting death threats and the occasional violent mob
    - atatatat 5y ago
anoncow 5y ago
I don’t see an end to the social networks of today. They have reached steady state. Twitter, FB/IG, TikTok, YouTube & Reddit will be leaders even 10 years down the line. Is there a scientific group that actively analyses the social media scene?
hownottowrite 5y ago
Maybe joinmastodon links are getting flagged as spam because people are actually spamming the crap out of discussion boards trying to “spark discussion.”

55 points by ColinWright 5y ago

And another: https://mastodon.social/@humanetech/106914332280931087 https://mastodon.social/@humanetech/106914332280931087 There is a discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28493823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28493823 These links (the submission and the one above) are to provide more examples, and might spark a different discussion.

simias 5y ago
I agree with the top post in the linked thread, in these situations I tend to assume incompetence rather than malice. Furthermore this type of censorship would actually be the best way to boost mastodon if only thanks to the Streisand effect. I could imagine in particular that alternative social networks would often be advertised by people who specifically tend to post content not allowed on Facebook, which may cause a poorly calibrated filter to see the correlation and decide to mark "mastodon" as a blacklisted keyword.

roenxi 5y ago

Reminds me of the takedown/assassination of Parler; the SV giants see themselves as a group of friends and don't play fair when they see competition. Given the stakes for control of the world's social data, I wouldn't even be surprised to learn one day there was a ring of product managers who were actively conspiring. Although that does seem unlikely.

simias 5y ago
Parler was a haven for hate speech, I don't have any problem if tech giants refuse to enable such applications (and would have a problem if they did nothing). If the parler devs were more competent they could've made their own website with their own infrastructure. There are many despicable websites that survive that way (the kiwi one comes to mind). But why bother when you can play the victim and not have to actually do anything complicated like hosting a website with your own resources.
- roenxi 5y ago
  > Parler was a haven for hate speech Jan 8: Parler becomes #1 downloaded app in App Store Jan 8, night of: AWS legal compliance awakes in cold sweat, haunted by visions of hate Jan 9: On January 9, Amazon announced that it would suspend Parler from Amazon Web Services, effective at 11:59 p.m PST the next day. Now AWS obviously had this in the pipeline for a while, but I'm just saying, it isn't crazy to think that the final call was made after someone in AWS talked to someone at Apple and someone at Twitter. It looks like a political hit. I dunno, maybe Apple has a lot of hateful users.
  - blitzar 5y ago
    > App gets huge amounts of media coverage. > App gets lots of downloads. Hardly a shock. If there was a political hit, then I am sure you would start out by not letting it trend to #1 and market it for free on everyone’s screen.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Parler was openly welcoming hate speech while Facebook and similar garbage pretend to disallow it while secretly profiting off it. I don't like Parler nor the speech it wanted to allow but I don't think it's any worse than Facebook & co. FB is just better at hiding it and protecting their public image, but deep down all they care about is "engagement" and turns out divisive, outrageous and controversial content "engages" a lot more. Remember that the Capitol attacks were mostly orchestrated on Facebook and this disgusting company happily profited off the build-up to these attacks.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    thank you facebook harbored a multitude of qanon “groups” of thousands of members each. it wasn’t hard to find them, if you interacted with one post in the genre you would get the groups recommended to you. the harm seemed obvious to me, you can’t let people speculate about who is and isn’t a child trafficker without expecting death threats and the occasional violent mob
  - atatatat 5y ago

anoncow 5y ago

I don’t see an end to the social networks of today. They have reached steady state. Twitter, FB/IG, TikTok, YouTube & Reddit will be leaders even 10 years down the line. Is there a scientific group that actively analyses the social media scene?

hownottowrite 5y ago

Maybe joinmastodon links are getting flagged as spam because people are actually spamming the crap out of discussion boards trying to “spark discussion.”