
Facebook blocks sharing of critical Guardian article - afandian
https://mobile.twitter.com/profcarroll/status/1045757268124467200
======
brianmcc
Whether malice or incompetence the key thing is that _it 's blocking a legit
post with no recourse_. That's a _serious problem_ given that it's such a core
sharing platform for so many people.

~~~
stcredzero
_Whether malice or incompetence the key thing is that it 's blocking a legit
post with no recourse._

Is The Guardian a legit source? What does legit source even mean? As far as I
can tell, it means, "Has a strong brand." Given what we know about brand decay
and bait and switch, are our criteria even remotely useful and valid? From
what I've seen, I don't think so. It seems like many "legit" news sources with
failing business models are cashing in their brand reputation, while it lasts,
for some link-baiting and public manipulation.

~~~
ahakki
It is deemed a legit source on the matter because the info in the article is
correct.

~~~
stcredzero
Then why not take the evaluation down to that level? Why do we even need brand
level proxies in 2018? It would probably be best if we evaluated down to the
article level of granularity, _at least_.

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CaliforniaKarl
Hilarious, but I bet it's Hanlon's razor at work again:

> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

~~~
worldsayshi
Yeah, if they actually wanted to censor something they would do it silently,
by not showing it in people's news feeds. Proving such practice exists would
probably be near impossible without having access to the source code or core
usage statistics.

~~~
dvtrn
Looking at some of the tweets it seems FB has a mechanism that autoflags
article links as spam if "too many people are trying to share" it.

This just makes me wonder exactly how automated that feature is, because
_surely_ a non-nominal number of people share current event links all the time
about something political, sporting event, natural disaster. I wonder if it
happens then, or is this a matter of recency....Streisand (there's got to be a
better word for it than that) following the news of those 50million accounts
being breached.

~~~
Splines
What I don't understand is why this is considered spam. Are lots of people not
allowed to talk about the same thing?

~~~
lozenge
I can think of a couple of possible explanations:

1\. Viral content like "share this or Facebook will delete your account" \-
may as well shut that down straight away.

2\. A security flaw in a Facebook site that lets malicious websites post to
your wall automatically from a webpage. In that case, the malicious website
will probably post a link to itself, so that it can collect more victims. In
this case, this limits the impact of the flaw. Look at the Samy worm as an
example.

3\. News feed algorithm "breaks" in some way when a lot of people are posting
the same thing, so they just prevent that from happening.

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wutbrodo
I'm surprised at how credulous everyone is being about this. Even assuming a
maximally evil Facebook (which they make pretty easy to do...), they'd have to
be incredibly stupid to be unaware of the Streisand effect and the fact that
this would take off even more (and much more negatively) if they tried
blocking it.

It seems a lot more plausible that this article is unusually widely shared,
which is obvious since everyone on Facebook has some interest in Facebook...

~~~
afandian
Despite the complete moral vacuum there seems to be a facebook, I do still
believe that this isn't deliberate. But big name companies do far worse
things, and Facebook themmselves have done worse. And stupider, since you
mention it. It is entirely plausible that they are intentionally suppressing
the news.

I find it a fascinating side of the human psyche that it finds it hard to
believe that "big brand name company" might be responsible for atrocities when
history is littered with examples. Companies are only staffed by humans, after
all.

~~~
wutbrodo
> But big name companies do far worse things, and Facebook themmselves have
> done worse.

.

> find it a fascinating side of the human psyche that it finds it hard to
> believe that "big brand name company" might be responsible for atrocities
> when history is littered with examples. Companies are only staffed by
> humans, after all.

I'm not sure why the majority of your comment is focusing on how plausible it
is that they would do something evil. It couldn't be less relevant to my
comment.

Like I said, my point doesn't rely on any assumptions about Facebook's
morality as an organization, just some baseline of competency. I know
organizations have done stupider things, but I can't think of a similar org
taking an action whose _first-order_ effect would so obviously be the opposite
of what they intended. It's far more common and far more plausible that they
didn't consider the second-order PR effects of an algorithmically-enforced
broad policy they have.

~~~
afandian
Ok, well maybe we're at cross purposes. You did use the word plausible
originally, and again in reply. It depends whether you bring any context to a
given judgment or rely on intuition on statistical distributions. I think that
when appraising the plausibility of bad faith you should take past behaviour
into account.

I can totally see a situation where a well meaning PR person says "what can we
do to slow down this story?" and some engineer says "we have this mechanism
but it wasnt designed for this purpose..."

Compare with yesterday's fun and games when the same metanarrative was
reported. "We could shift more units if we had phone numbers"."we do but they
were given to us for an expressly different purpose"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18082017](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18082017)

When you're in this position, ethics is a competence. They may be great at
shipping code but past experience suggests that there are deeply inadequate
decision making processes.

Apologies if this misses your point again.

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kerng
This is sadly funny. It's probably a legitimate feature to block spam - timing
and what it is about is just highlighting the issues with large scale
automation and data analysis. Must be a tough day and upcoming weeks at
Facebook....

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Rafuino
Wow, FB keeps shooting itself in the foot. They'll likely blame an algorithm,
not a deliberate human choice, but that's not a valid excuse.

~~~
whatever_dude
Not an "excuse", but a valid explanation, don't you think?

When we offload decisions to algorithms, that's wha you get.

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0xmohit

        Some users are reporting that they are unable to post today’s
        big story about a security breach affecting 50 million
        Facebook users. The issue appears to only affect particular
        stories from certain outlets, at this time one story from The
        Guardian and one from the Associated Press, both reputable
        press outlets.
        ...
        The situation is another example of Facebook’s automated
        content flagging tools marking legitimate content as
        illegitimate, in this case calling it spam.
    

[https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/28/facebook-blocks-
guardian-s...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/28/facebook-blocks-guardian-
story/)

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LinuxBender
Does FB have a team dedicated to responding on HN yet?

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wesleytodd
What is amazing to me is that twitter still does not have a solution for
sharing mobile links to desktop users. It is a really bad user experience.

~~~
onychomys
I realized the other day that wikipedia doesn't either. You'd think it
wouldn't be all that hard to redirect in the year 2018, but apparently it is.

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cwkoss
That is pretty Orwellian of them. Are we at 'peak' facebook, or will they be
able to continue growing from here?

Seems like trust and enthusiasm in their platform has been eroded to the point
that they are much more vulnerable to competition than they were a year or two
ago.

~~~
andybak
Could you explain what exactly is Orwellian here? Not meaning to pick on you
but you're currently the top comment that doesn't attempt to Chakrabarti
engage with the topic.

I don't see much evidence of anything other than a crap algorithm here as yet.

~~~
cwkoss
Orwellian is often used to describe deliberate and malicious censorship of
information, but I think perhaps this case is an even more accurate parallel:
creating a convoluted automated system where all participants can believe they
are acting ethically but the net effect is censorship of information which
would damage the system and restriction of individual expression.

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mic47
Aaaand it's back (just tried to share it and it worked).

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shortexpresso
The power and domination can not accept critics. All big companies are
involved in war communication on their own activities. FB just reacts as
Monsanto or Texaco/Chevron do with all possible means.

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ranranrun
So Facebook is trying to censor a story that _they themselves made public just
a few hours ago_? Guardian thinks a bit too much of itself.

~~~
calcifer
Guardian didn't say censor, they said block, which is factual.

Nice strawman though.

~~~
ranranrun
So Facebook is trying to block a story _that they themselves made public just
a few hours ago_?

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mklarmann
Wow. This is too much!

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debt
It's astounding that educated tech journalists think this is malicious.
Clearly, this is an algorithm.

Just like as a thought experiment, wouldn't it make more sense to allow the
post to go through and then prevent everyone on Facebook from seeing it?
Obviously, FB doesn't do that, but wouldn't that be a more sensible approach
if they did do that type of thing?

~~~
tmalsburg2
A spam-detection algorithm that doesn't whitelist pages like The Guardian? I
have to say I find it hard to believe that they would be so incompetent.

~~~
threeseed
Facebook can't be seen to be prioritising one news source over another.

So I can't imagine they have lists of any news sources and rely entirely on
user signals to determine the quality of a source.

~~~
_cereal
I second that.

An example: a few weeks ago I shared on my FB profile the Mozilla Foundation
petition link for the EU copyright reform[1] and it was removed with this
motivation:

"We removed this post because it looks like spam and doesn't follow our
Community Standards."

[1] [https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2018/09/07/eu-
copyright-r...](https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2018/09/07/eu-copyright-
reform-the-facts/)

