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.
Yes, 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.
There 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/
Also note that Twitter has taken an interest in decentralized protocols with Bluesky project.
For those innocent days of Usenet k00ks, crapfloods, MAKEMONEYFAST, sockpuppets, crossposts, GREEN CARD, spam, warez, pr0n, Serdar Argic, and Hasan Mutlu.
And the ~100,000 or so people who actually used that network.
More than just that. Mastodon is one of multiple microblogging apps on the fediverse that can seamlessly interact, and get gradually more integrated with other types of application e.g. for blogging, media publishing, livestreaming, podcasting, event planning, etc.
They'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.
There 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.
Re: 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...
Yes, 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.
But 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.
It sounds like you're missing the point of this entire thread's argument.
Does the team cost about 2^-500 of your resources and attention? Then, YES, do it. That's my point.
I'm not saying that this is what you SHOULD do all of the time, I'm saying that it is entirely plausible, even likely, that Facebook might deliberately "go after" Mastodon because it very very easily can.
Loving, LOVING this fantasy world you're living in, in which a primary driver of a person's behavior at a big company is the esteem of friends and family, and, you know, not because the boss said so and/or ruthless thirst for profit and domination.
I was saying what is the impact (damages) if this guy can't post about his software on facebook to his friends and family. Do you even think this would be in the top 100 ways to crush the competition???
Yeah, we're missing each other somewhere. I'm just talking about Facebook's incentives here. It makes sense for someone who works for Facebook to try to deliberately crush Mastodon, because even if the risk of Mastodon beating Facebook is very low, it's not zero, and Facebook's pockets are so deep that it might as well, even if the risk is low. I'm not sure what individual guy you're talking about?
Grandmas don't tend to undergo exponential growth.
Networks can.
Whether or not Mastodon will is another question. (I've been on it since ~2016.) But in FB's position, paranoia pays, and is worth throwing billions at, if deemed a sufficient threat.
Yes. It doesn't cost them anything to censor simply mentioning the word 'Mastodon' since they can do it anyway and it sounds like a weak version of anti-competition.
What you're really looking for is what happened to Parler which looked like a serious act of anti-competitive behaviour which showed the true brutish nature of these large companies destroying an alternative social network.
That was a much worse form of 'anti-competitive behaviour' than this.
you dont know that theyre censoring mentions of it. You have one post that got removed that happened to have it in it. And an article trying to be a victim and jump on the facebook is evil bandwagon. Do you have proof of a trend?
Same reason the above comment mentions. It's a wild west, and while that brings freedom it also brings cowboys (i.e. people using it to post dangerous links or whatever - is the reasoning).
You 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.
What 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.
While 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?
I 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.
recalled 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 ..
Well, 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.
and 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 ..
Given 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)
It'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.
I 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.
I 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.
Congressional 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.
I 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.
I 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.
the largest mastodon instance has 500k users. Facebook has two billion users. If you can post twitter and tiktok and tumblr links on facebook, do you seriously think there's someone sitting at facebook taking names and making lists about a social network that practically nobody even uses
there are competitors a hundred times as large you can link too. My first guess is it probably tripped some NSFW filter because on some mastodon instances there's quite a lot of porn.
> do you seriously think there's someone sitting at facebook taking names and making lists about a social network that practically nobody even uses
Yes, when I worked at a 500-person startup there was an employee who’s sole task was to stay aware of our established competitors and nimbler startups. It was jokingly nicknamed the “office of paranoia.”
That said, I highly doubt FB is using their list of competitors to block posts mentioning them.
There 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.
I 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.
Oh, 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.
The explanation is much simpler, look at the date, text of the post and that it was removed with a delay. His friends who disagreed with him politically must reported it as a spam. Since FB accounts are tied to real names, FB unlike other social sites can trust reports more and start blocking automatically.
If 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.
Amazon 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.
What 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?
Walmart is not a site devoted to helping users created and share their content, and they are open about their moderation rules, a good ethical standard.
Walmart's legalese:
> C. Prohibited Content
> * contains advertisements, solicitations, or spam links to other web sites or individuals, without prior written permission from Walmart;
Facebook on the other hand, promotes itself for creating and sharing user content. If it then moderates in ways that are not disclosed, opaque, and with little recourse, their deceptive behavior is neither ethic or in line with how they promote themselves as a service.
Facebook is an entirely different kind of business than Walmart or Amazon.
Facebook (and social media in general) is essentially a public forum and comes with the expectations of such since these companies control such a large part of internet discourse.
If all of them said "we won't allow anyone to talk about any of our competitors on our site" then it strikes me as a company using their dominance to silence other players in the market, i.e. anti competitive behavior.
That 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.
Communication 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.
> Facebook claims to be a social network. Those types of networks normally DO NOT allow you to promote other social networks.
I don't see how that makes it legal.
Herey other examples of potential actions that would also clearly qualify as illegal anti-competive behavior:
Microsoft could decide to block the download pages for Chrome and Firefoz from being shown in IE.
Google could block results related to Bing in their search engine or browser.
I don't see how this behavior by Facebook is any different. If it can be shown that this was done deliberately by Facebook, I have little doubt that it would also qualify as anti-competive behavior.
When you first search on bing for chrome downloads they will put up a big edge promo above the result. After you download they will pop up a box asking if you are sure you want to switch as edge is "Faster and more secure".
The problem for mastadon is it has a TON of content that is against facebook policies. So facebook can simply say - users are reporting this crap as spam - we've blocked it. Done.
It's always worth remembering that the European and American legal philosophy on anticompetitive markets are different, and lead to different conclusions.
European law tends to favor maximizing competitors. American law tends to favor maximizing consumer value. At first glance, these can be considered equivalent, but they differ at the margins (which is why, for example, Amazon keeps getting hit with antitrust in France but not in the US).
No doubt - but there was also a big move of Gab and some other more right wing communities to Mastodon I think at one point - be curious to know if the Mastodon links are all showing as high scoring in whatever generic facebook system is being used. Could easily imagine some involve links to stuff facebook isn't interested in pushing.
Well they already realised that early and so they built their own social networks and they are still up and running today. This 'censoring' should be unsurprising to everyone here.
I thought what happened to alternative social networks was a warning to show that not only they can do it to anyone but it shows how anti-competitive they really are.
What happened here to this person mentioning Mastodon is no different but was like 1% of what Facebook and many other private platforms can really do.
I remember reading an article about censorship in China, someone talking to his friend on the phone mentioned a particular term that the government didn't like, and the line got disconnected a second later. Was it a coincidence, or was someone listening, or was it computers?
Nowadays most of our communication channels are owned by corporations. Are you okay that they get to decide what we're allowed to talk about? Zoom for example banned meetings talking about the Tiananmen Square massacre; You can't post links to The Pirate Bay in private chats on Facebook... on private chat!
And this coming from me who's quite okay with Twitter banning Trump and other idiots off their platform.
Still, it does seem like the sort of thing that could get Facebook in trouble with a regulator if you squint at it.