Facebook must be destroyed.
21st-century Carthage
Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages
111–119 of 119 posts
Re: Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages
#112This going to encourage dark patterns like asking for Facebook username and password for apps that want to support automation.
Re: Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
A big part of anti-trust law in the US is that natural monopolies are permitted - you can build a business that dominates your market segment and not be subject to anti-trust proceedings, but you cannot use that natural monopoly to advantage your other lines of business by providing them with exclusive, preferred or other special treatment in said natural monopoly. This was the crux of US vs. MSFT. The argument here…
What does Facebook have a monopoly on? Microsoft had a monopoly on the retail operating system space and leveraged that monopoly to force vendors into bad positions that excluded other operating systems a shot on a fair market. They also used their position to push their products to the detriment of other competitors. As far as I can tell, Facebook just has a monopoly on Facebook. Which is to be expected since Facebo…
I should have included this in my parent comment: this is the argument regarding facebook's activities being anti-competitive; I don't necessarily believe this argument to be true. I really don't have a position on it in either direction at this time.
Re: Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages
#114Re: Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does Facebook have a monopoly on? Microsoft had a monopoly on the retail operating system space and leveraged that monopoly to force vendors into bad positions that excluded other operating systems a shot on a fair market. They also used their position to push their products to the detriment of other competitors. As far as I can tell, Facebook just has a monopoly on Facebook. Which is to be expected since Facebo…
I should have included this in my parent comment: this is the argument regarding facebook's activities being anti-competitive; I don't necessarily believe this argument to be true. I really don't have a position on it in either direction at this time.
Then that doesn't really help anything here.
I asked how would this trigger anti-trust proceedings because Facebook is not abusing a monopoly position, they're just not letting other services post to their site.
You responded by basically saying "Yeah, but people think they are". Which really doesn't address anything. So I asked more directly what do they have a monopoly on.
I know people think they're a monopoly. I think those people are wrong. At least until they can tell me a monopoly on what.
Re: Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages
#116I'm surprised at the almost universal outrage over this. I assumed this was in response to the whole election interference campaign and related issues, i.e. preventing bots from blasting out content and predetermined times or in response to specific keywords in the news, things like that. So this seems like a step in the direction of ensuring actual humans are doing these things (or at least make it slightly more dif…
I don't really get the hate, either - but then again, I was one of the people who was generally annoyed by friends filling their profiles and feeds with all kinds of auto-shared stuff from every other service... I like to imagine everybody would curate a little bit more on their own. Important stuff will still get shared, and if it isn't worth sharing if you have to do it manually instead of using an app or checkbox…
You may have different followers on each platform. Your Instagram followers and your twitter followers and your Facebook friends are all slightly different groups. So to reach all of them, you need to post to all of these platforms.
Re: Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
A big part of anti-trust law in the US is that natural monopolies are permitted - you can build a business that dominates your market segment and not be subject to anti-trust proceedings, but you cannot use that natural monopoly to advantage your other lines of business by providing them with exclusive, preferred or other special treatment in said natural monopoly. This was the crux of US vs. MSFT. The argument here…
What does Facebook have a monopoly on? Microsoft had a monopoly on the retail operating system space and leveraged that monopoly to force vendors into bad positions that excluded other operating systems a shot on a fair market. They also used their position to push their products to the detriment of other competitors. As far as I can tell, Facebook just has a monopoly on Facebook. Which is to be expected since Facebo…
Facebook has a monopoly on social networks used to communicate with people you know IRL.
Re: Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why couldn't they blanket-deauth all Facebook apps (or maybe just ones authed before this year, or sth.) instead? People would fix the apps they still use. And really, publishing apps on FB is not a real problem; apps exfiltrating data is.
Apps exfiltrating is one problem. Bots posing as real people to rile up racial/political/etc. tensions is another, and this approach helps a bit there.
And conflating the two problems really doesn't help.
Simply: Apps exfiltrating data can be prevented almost entirely using sane permissions, sufficient security, oh and not willingly turning a blind eye, helps. That is about read permissions and entirely not what this news is about.
Bots and troll-armies posting to polarise and increase tensions, are indeed a write permission problem, and superficially appear to be what this news is about. Except that as long as humans can post on FB, so can troll armies and bots. This only takes away capability for the small to medium scale ease of use. Any determined adversary wouldn't have been using these capabilities anyway because it's too easy to detect as not organic.
Surely the automated blackhat and/or psy-op bot farms use automated browsers, headless browsers, key macro scripts, or whatever to simulate an actual human user interacting at human speed--just 1000s in parallel. I mean it's not rocket science and as soon as you're running a slightly larger operation it pays to just do it properly right away.
This news changes nothing for the bot farms on missions that had to fly below the radar already anyway.
Re: Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, this was part of their "security" change after the Cambridge Analytica debacle. Although, any site using their JS API can still get your name, email and a unique ID, posting is now restricted via a FB modal or pop-up (which is blocked by more recent browsers). I think this happened in May/June of this year, IIRC.
The change went live on August 1, where they deprecated the "publish_actions" permission.
They stopped new app approval for awhile, prior to the official deprecation announcement.