It's one thing to censor, but it's another to intentionally deceive your users into believing that they sent something.
This isnt anymore even about freedom of speech but about a product constantly and intently manipulating and deceiving its users. It must be pretty shitty people working there, who relish in playing games with humans as if they're monkeys. Even their automated systems sound like total crap. I have a game on facebook for a decade, where users sometimes try to send some link to their friend through messenger. FB blocks it every few weeks and users have to beg them to unblock it every time. What a terrible company to invest in
As another comment points out the screenshot clearly shows two red exclamation marks indicating it wasn’t delivered.
You can take issue with the censoring (and I do) but it’s not silently censoring which is much worse.
This has been happening for years. Just try sending a message containing the string `joebiden.info` and see what happens.
We’re way past the rubicon. Get your information as best you can and just hope you’re somewhat aligned with the mainstream.
I find it confusing that a community that frequently acknowledges that free services treat their users as the product simultaneously has expectations that the free service should amplify their speech.
This, like many similar posts here, isn’t censorship. If you want to spread your idea (any idea at all) without hindrance, don’t do it on an advertisement platform.
I’d prefer a more detailed analysis than two screenshots from a random conversation.
I just tried with the same url and there's a message telling me it won't send
That messenger is subject to facebook's community guidelines is nothing new, Zuckerberg said so himself publicly in an interview a few years ago
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-confirms-scans-mess...
Youtube does this with comments - your UI makes impression the comment is posted, but it actually is not.
(Sometimes the comment can also dissapear from your UI as well - I've tried editing a comment, but it fails saving and after page refreh the comment dissapeared. Reproduced that multiple times.)
Speaking of FB censoring. They now censor my ability to "Like" or react it is fairly random. I will click like on something then Facebook opens a popup that says that I cannot like or react to posts because they will my liking has been harmful to others. Facebook has become unusable. I haven't posted in over a year but they have found new ways to censor.
This is a form of shadow banning and it’s more common than you think. As a matter of fact, HN and Reddit do this too.
If HN/Reddit think that you are posting promotions, *HN silently censors your post, claims it was posted*
This is another reason to only use E2EE FOSS messengers, ever.
Why anyone should care if you can't send links to websites run by kooky nutjobs with false or highly questionable COVID information to other people via FB messenger?
Wow, people on HN are really downvoting posts that take a position against censorship on this thread.
Wait I thought this was known? I remember seeing this behavior with a friend when I had FB, and I haven't had FB for 3-4 year already.
Microsoft silently censored MSN chats 20 years ago. Couldn't talk about PHP programming easily because any message with 'index.php' was silently dropped. Blew my mind they would dare do that, but I've since learned this is common practice at all major chat apps.
If they don't like a message you are sending they are likely to silently drop it and let you think it was delivered. Just no care at all for the user experience at a base level.
My hope that future internet will be decentralized
Not surprising. If you were a bit imaginative in the old days, and put your power hungry psychopath hat on (which is a fair description of those in power), you could imagine the ways technology could be used to silently produce net effects and results without anyone really knowing to avoid any protest.
Here’s another one: Google can use your aggregate data along with other sources to determine whether you seem like someone favorable to the regime or not. If not, the probability distribution shifts in a way that directs you toward certain jobs and so forth that keep you from what the refine doesn’t want you near. It’s like a BigTech version of providence, except unlike divine providence, they don’t care about you.
Or if they don’t like you, reveal unflattering information about you to people you know in ways that look like search results.
Lots of possibilities. People are also too complaisant to protest things like these even when it’s made public.
If you’re trying to leave Facebook, going to WhatsApp might not be the best move.
MSN Messenger was censoring some words, if I remember correctly like "Summer Jam" and "papaz". I was unable to find those words but I have found a related news article https://circleid.com/posts/07080616_msn_messenger_censor_inf... Since Facebook was partially bought by Microsoft I believe Messenger is continuation of MSN Messsanger.
I abandon such applications without hesitation.
The censorship is intentional on the part of Facebook, but the "silent" part is a frontend bug on messenger.com (possibly also the app). Normally it shows you a red "error" indicator next to the message that says something like "this goes against our community guidelines.
The error can be seen in some of the screenshots. It briefly shows "couldn't send" and if you refresh the page the messages disappear forever.
There's a huge difference between shadowbanning users on a public forum and interfering with private chat. Network effects keep people on these shitty centralized plaintext messengers. The only way we'll put an end to this is to force Facebook to allow interop between Messenger and other services. Then at least people could gradually move to a more secure system without losing their whole network of friends.
What do the engineers who code stuff like this think? Do they not feel bad or is it masked by the salary they get paid?
No too silently - it didn't allow me to send JotForms to our school parents claiming those links are not safe.
The domain looks like fake new/sketchy to me (I could be wrong). Maybe there is a ban for the entire domain?
This is a bug. The intended behaviour is to notify the user that tried to send the link.
Doesn't make it okay.
This is why it is best to avoid centralized platforms like FB, Apple iMessage, Twitter DMs, etc.
It's been my experience that Google Voice also silences many of the links that I share with people.
Ultimately I stopped sharing links over several third party services that I've used for years and have transitioned to other services instead.
They've been doing this for years with porn, graphic shock sites, and conspiracy sites. Not sure why this needs to be reiterated, but if you even remotely value your freedom and privacy, never use Facebook again for any reason.
Isn’t messenger supposedly using “end-to-end encryption”? I honestly don’t know if I’m mixing this up with what’s app since I refuse to use either one. FB is a blight upon the world. Only a fool believes anything they say.
Facebook has been silently hiding messages containing targeted links for at least a decade.
I had multiple reports of censoring people discussing my depaywalling of a large cache of public domain historical scholarly papers [1], and went and checked for myself. Messages which included the link to the documents were reported as delivered but not actually delivered.
I believe they may have started it at the time of one of the high profile wikileaks document dumps.
This experiences is part of why I and my partner have since refused to use their services.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/swartz-supporter...
Carriers in the US do this everyday. They block URL from being sent under the "spam" claim but no notice or information is ever provided.
I've had this happen to me for years.
Sharing torrent links, pastebin and a few other sites that can be used for non-legal purposes.
Why is anyone still using FB? They've been arbitrarily censoring content for some time now. Back when the CoViD-19 lab leak theory was a "conspiracy theory" they actively removed that content. Now that it's no longer a "conspiracy theory" I guess it's okay to share links about it now. What has changed? The same goes for the Hunter Biden laptop story. Back when it was "Russian propaganda" it was censored. Now that it's been verified, I guess it's okay.
Honestly, do you want FB deciding what is "truth" for you?
Dump Facebook. Don't be a victim.
As a facebook and messenger user I'm fine with them censoring stuff. I use it to send holiday pics to friends and family etc. If idiots want to cause people to die by pushing covid misinformation then fine censor away. There are other forums if you want uncensored stuff.
Try posting anything from 4chan over messenger and see what happens
Don't worry, it's another 'accident' by the automated moderation systems; brought to you by Facebook. /s
Do you really think that these companies are on your side or are your friends?
looks like it’s changed now, saying “couldn’t send”
Just tried sharing one of the links and it worked
Serious question guys, please help me understand. Why are we still using Facebook services at all? How many more bad practices should all of us, and even me tolerate…
I get “couldn’t send” when I try that URL.
Likewise you just can't send any links with duckdns.org domain. BUT you will get (or would have gotten) a warning about that.
Would be great if someone reverse engineered the Messenger protocol and wrapped it with a better messenger.
For those looking for a no-censorship-ever-of-any-kind alternative, consider Status:
If you don't need or want a crypto wallet or dapp browser, then simply don't use those parts of the app.
Relevant specs:
Relevant repos:
https://github.com/status-im/status-react
https://github.com/status-im/status-desktop
There are trade-offs, for sure: since there's (deliberately) no integration with contact lists (address books) of the OS or other apps, your social circle probably isn't using the app already, or in any case isn't discoverable.
The public chats facility has turned out to be too spam-prone for "well known" / advertised chats, e.g. #status. However, if you create a public chat that has some unguessable component (e.g. #myfriends-a9e72ab5) and you share it with friends (even lots) in a reasonably private context, then the chances of it being spammed or randomly joined are quite low. Note that public chats, while "public", are still E2EE, using a chat's name as the basis for a symmetric key.
1-to-1 and private group chats are highly secure; the latter have a max size, and depending on their size and your device, sending messages can be a little slow.
Creating a robust alternative to the existing public chats facility has involved a lot of work: the forthcoming Communities feature provides a discord-like facility whereby founders/admins of communities can take advantage of various mechanisms for moderation and governing membership. The Communities feature can already be enabled in advanced preferences of both mobile and desktop apps, but note it's a WIP.
The moderation mechanisms for Communities don't undermine the no-censorship principle of Status because:
(1) Any user can create a community.
(2) A community's rules are managed by those with a stake in the community: there's no override by Status-the-org nor anyone else.
(3) The underlying nodes of the network form a decentralized p2p network, i.e. there's no central actor/authority that controls the flow of messages.
Re: (3), running a Status node should be simple and incentivized.
The "incentivized" aspect is a challenging problem and not solved yet. Long story short, engineering an incentivized decentralized messaging network (it's not a blockchain!) is harder than incentivizing a blockchain network.
That being said, the "simple" aspect isn't too difficult to solve, sneak peek:
https://github.com/status-im/status-node
Finally, with pertinent laws and regulations in flux across the globe, there could come a day when binaries aren't readily available (from app stores, GitHub, etc.), but thankfully there's always `git clone` and `make`.
Disclosure: I'm a core contributor at Status.
Meh, WeChat had been doing this for years.
Who in their right mind would say China is a dictatorship?
/s
dictators censor their people
In Australia the government's (dubious) re-opening plan is based upon modelling by the Doherty Institute.
Facebook censors anyone from sharing that report.
Here's the link to try yourself: https://www.doherty.edu.au/uploads/content_doc/DohertyModell...
The best thing about HN is https://news.ycombinator.com/newest ... where you can find the least censorship.
Hackernews also censors stuff that goes against the official covid narrative.
GNews is where you can see the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop so that's why it's banned. Had the contents of some Trump family member's laptop been leaked to the media, Facebook would have it trending. This technology is used to ensure that preferred candidates have an advantage.
What's more frustrating than Facebook doing this is that there are people who support this solely based on the the type of content that gets shadow-banned, censored, or penalized.
Even Tweet OP is trying to justify their opposition to this behavior by stating "im pro-science/vaccine/etc, but this not cool fb".
To reiterate the same freaking point that gets spelled out on every post:
IT'S NOT THE TYPE OF CONTENT THAT IS THE PROBLEM, IT'S THE METHOD. IF YOU'RE OK WITH THIS AGAINST ALEX JONES, YOU CAN'T COMPLAIN WHEN THEY START CENSORING ABORTION/LGBTQQIP2SAA HELP LINES.
It's amazing to me that some people -especially millennials/zoomers who are left-by-default (read: without thinking, leftists to fit the group)- don't see selective blocking by an authority (even the state) is no problem, as long as it fits their views and it's only problematic when it's against them. IMO these same people are the prime target to become archetype republican later on in life, after they get disillusioned with their group and slowly start to spot hypocrisy.
To be clear, both democrats and republicans are hypocrites.
Too many Facebook shareholders here that look the other way. Literal scums, the lot of them.
Australians are building concentration camps as we speak.
You sure you want to be on the wrong side of history?
Big tech is out of control and drunk on their own power.
Freedom of speech, even obnoxious, obscene, wrong, or even evil speech, has always been a core American value.
Now, we have young people running these companies who think that they are wise enough to discern “good” from “bad” speech, and that they have a moral right, nay, a moral duty, to “protect” people from bad speech.
Censorship has NEVER ended well. Anywhere. Anytime. Censors ALWAYS have the best of intentions, and always believe that they alone know the truth and that merely being exposed to contradictory ideas is harmful. And they always end up tyrants.
I don’t care about anti-monopoly or section 230 or whatever. I’m asking my representatives to pass legislation that requires any company with a nontrivial user base or size (eg 1 million monthly users or 50 million annual revenue, pick your own numbers if you have better ones), to act as common carriers.
That is to say, that they may not adopt TOS/TOU or preferential behavior that discriminates for or against any lawful activity or creed, period.
In case anyone is wondering what Pulitzer-prize winning piece she is attempting to share, check out her link yourself: https://gnews.org/1476750/, as well as a fact-check disproving all of the dangerous and false claims inside: https://www.techarp.com/science/greenlight-ivermectin-japan/
I, for one, am glad Facebook is censoring this baseless pseudo-medical advice being given which has been responsible for a massive increase in calls to poison control (https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/texas-s...)
Ivermectin causes “Nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain,” the director of the Texas Poison Center told TPR. “However, you can have further problems, including mental status changes, coma, even seizures… I haven’t seen any deaths here in Texas, but these are things that are reported by the manufacturer with people who use large doses.”
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/08/americans-poiso...
Seriously why is anyone still using FB, TW, etc.?
Facebook has been suppressing links and profiles that don't make them money for years.
This is exactly how chinese censorship works. https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/wechat-surveillance-explained/
The sooner the general public learns about steganography, the better. Unfortunately, the sentiment of anti-intellectualism and blissful ignorance propagated by corporate entities who realise knowledgeable users are more difficult to control and monetise will be a big hurdle against that happening.
Edit: steganography, not stenography.
Threads about censorship consistently remind me that HN is no different than any other social media platform, subject to users pushing various agendas and misinformation in support of those agendas.
There's nothing wrong with private businesses removing content they don't deem appropriate. There is also nothing wrong with silencing users obviously lying. Thinking differently totally misunderstands social media as a medium.
I'm going to go on out on a limb and guess that this isn't really a case of censorship, because it's not like Facebook to not tell you directly that they've removed your content. Or they go the other route and post a disclaiming "fact check" under it.. but so far as silently removing posts, and marking them as "sent", seems more likely to be a bug.
When I attempt to navigate to gnews.org the site is very slow, and I wonder if Facebook is having trouble assigning some kind of risk factor to it, then giving up, but ends up sending a "success" response anyway, whereby the front end just assumes the message was sent property and pushes it to your message cache without attempting to fetch it over the network.
edit: since this has been down voted, could you explain why you think I'm wrong?
Any user of any Facebook property needs to understand well in advance that the company engages in active psychological manipulation and experimentation on its users and then decide if this clashes with their personal autonomy.
Remember them talking about how they engaged in experiments on their users by trying to influence their mood via intentionally showing their various groups different types of content algorithmically on their news feed? Or when they intentionally kept crashing their Android app to see what’s their user retention rate even on faulty software? Or just open up the app on two phones of the exact similar make and model and see the app menu?
My personal anecdote and experience with this is that they also use random errors to disguise bans. I have a personal and a dev account which I made the first time I accidentally got banned for 24 hours because it also reset OAuth app keys, the next time I got banned I logged in to my dev acct. and tried to make a post, since they managed to associate the two accounts, I ended up banned on that one, too. But it didn’t say that, it kept throwing random errors as if it was only a backend issue. These disappeared once my main ban was gone.
So all in all my point is, people should understand that the platform outright does these kinds of things and use or find alternatives based on that