Gregory's ServerI'm a firm believer of Hanlon's Razor, but over a week, Facebook has flagged a post and a comment of mine, both about Mastodon (and including a link to joinmastodon.org)
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49 comments
Hypolite Petovan
@yhancik Here's another example for you from Canada: octodon.social/@kingu_platypus…
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8 Sep 2021 at 20:51 | Open on friendica.mrpetovan.com
Victor Venema
@yhancik Before I was banned by Twitter (their AI thought I was a conspiracy theorist for making fun of them), I also had the impression that Tweets linking to joinmastodon.org did less well than expected. So I mostly linked to a blog post of mine, which linked to joinmastodon.org. If true that would be anti-competitive behavior, which is officially illegal. I find it hard to believe they would risk that. If someone sings that can cost them a lot of money. 
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
Facebook and Youtube actively discourage external links (to anything) in posts/comments, there are also settings on YT where the channel owner can choose whether or not to allow external links (not sure whether FB allows community mods to decide this or applies its own automatic policies as I've never used it). I noticed this when trying to comment on YouTube with a link to the Dutch public news service; in this case the comment simply disappeared without any warning >>
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
I suspect the corporate social networks aren't singling out Mastodon as such, but discouraging *any* site that could lead the discussion elsewhere (as they are losing out on traffic and potential viewers of ads), a link to an old style forum about pets, cars, electronics would be quite likely to also trigger this (even on those forums if you make lots of links in your first few posts they are usually flagged up for the moderators to check)
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
there's also marketing tactics of startup social networks (including LinkedIn at one point) where they try and email all of your contacts to get them to join.. there may be is a case to use legislation against this, but it will vary between countries and there would need to be proof found that GAFAM are colluding to only share links amongst themselves (YT links on Facebook groups seem to get through) and its not local moderators leaving default setting active..
YHANCI~1.TXT
@vfrmedia @msh @VictorVenema and there's Instagram simply not supporting any link, giving us the cursed "link in bio" thing. I think there's definitely a certain hostility toward hypertext in their algos, and I suspect there is valid concerns for spam & malware, meeting their own interests in keeping people on their app. Spam is actually the argument used by Pixelfed for copying the anti-link approach of Instagram. And I was just thinking the other day... spam really does ruin a lot of things
YHANCI~1.TXT
@vfrmedia @msh @VictorVenema it's an irrelevant anecdote, but I noticed last week that the newsletter of the non-profit where I work gets a high amount of hard bounces from mail providers whenever I've used an harmless unicode character in the subject. And of course, that's all because spammers have been abusing unicode characters to, among other things, circumvent spam filters. 
smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)
The other day there was a Hacker News post of some FOSS project thrown from Google Play because the website link they referenced contained a link to Patreon.. i.e. the indirect link cause the ban. What I find most worrying: the extent to which people may be 'shadow suppressed' on a social media network by the AI/ML algorithms, based on undesirable keywords and other text analysis of your content. That kind of suppression requires algorithmic transparency to detect.
Victor Venema
@humanetech Apple and Google demand something like 30% of all app earnings. Which is a ridiculous amount they can only demand because they build a closed monopoly. They naturally do not want app makers to circumvent this and do not care about FOSS projects, so then you get such rules. Also the control these two companies have on which apps are allowed in destructive and is power corporations should not have. The fight against monopolies is important to make digital spaces livable.
Dam
@VictorVenema @humanetech @yhancik indeed. Do you think that fdroid could have more weight than it currently has ?
Victor Venema
@damko It seems reasonable to me to require fdroid to be preinstalled, or at least to give people the option to choose it like Microsoft was required to give people choice of web browsers.
Dam
@VictorVenema @humanetech @yhancik totally agree. Also it would be fair that fdroid offers a payment gw for apps. I'm not sure if it's currently possible
YHANCI~1.TXT
@VictorVenema @humanetech that's one of the things that always put me off smartphones, they're ecosystems that seem to have been built from the ground-up to give these companies an amount of power that just felt incredibly backward to me.
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@humanetech 
🦆 Νησσοτροφεῖον 🦆
@yhancik yeah, one of my private (friends only, audience of like 40 people) FB posts from almost two years ago got flagged this week. It linked to joinmastodon because I was letting my friends know where I was spending my time; there's no conceivable way that an actual person reported it.
hmm_sh*t :verified:
@nessotropheion @yhancik in reality i dont think theres much of an overlap between the core audiences of the two, and in the case of ppl using both im guessing theyre using them for completely different purposes
YHANCI~1.TXT
@hmilles yes, I understand these moderation systems are imperfect, but that means they should be even more careful and not rely on some automatic flagging without (apparently) human intervention. It's been more than I week since I reported the incorrect flagging of the first post and i still haven't received any reply.
hmm_sh*t :verified:
@yhancik indeed it is flawed, i got muted on messenger without a warning or any option to appeal, twice now. my humor was somewhat edgy back then but nothing serious or guideline violating, and not even having any idea what couldve gotten me banned made it just the more frustrating
YHANCI~1.TXT
@nessotropheion so i guess something happened recently (like the link has just been marked as spam by their algo or something) and they've been going through all the posts containing the links in the past couple of weeks 🤔
YHANCI~1.TXT
@antijingoist @g I guess the joinmastodon domain is flagged as harmful somewhere in their poorly designed system :p
YHANCI~1.TXT
@londubh I thought of doing that, but then again I'm successfully not using my real name on Facebook and I don't want to tease their moderation team too much :p How did the test go?
Justinas Dūdėnas
@yhancik I had the same situation - the post openly criticizing fb and promoting mastodon was taken down. Numerous other posts with external links, even to mastodon, remain. 
Tribbick
@yhancik I heard about this, so I made redirects in case there were filtering Mastodon specifically
YHANCI~1.TXT
@makarygo What I meant is that I don't believe Facebook is blocking joinmastodon.org because it believes it's a threat to its business, but that it's more likely that it's been incorrectly flagged for some silly reason. They're smart enough to not make themselves look *too* evil, no matter how much they are ;)
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@makarygo But probably not that much, I think not frontally attacking alternatives is mostly PR and still profit-driven ;) 
Blort™ 🐀Ⓥ🥷☣️
@yhancik It would be interesting to experiment with this... like take a post on Facebook that's been super popular, inoffensive and around for a long time so you know it *shouldn't* break any FB ToS stuff, then just post it again with something like "I also posted this over at JoinMastodon.org" so if the post does get banned, you know it's not for the content (other than the Masto link)
YHANCI~1.TXT
@Blort there was at least one person getting their post flagged as soon as they made it, so i feel might be more about the link. But then again, reading your comment I made a Fb post saying "Go Facebook!" with a joinmasto link and nothing happened. uhhhm |
