81–90 of 196 posts
The same thing happened to my domain name about a month ago. (I also posted about it here.) This is happening more and more frequently, and the fact they block entire domains rather than a specific subdomain is really poor design. I finally got it unblocked, but only thanks to a former colleague (engineer) who now works at Facebook. If that didn't work, my next step was going to be filing a lawsuit, just to try to ge…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
any government? Tell that to people who live in China, N. Korea, or any country controlled by a theocracy. Even in the US some states ban doctors from talking about abortion and/or force doctors to give women seeking an abortion false information.
China has 1.4 billion people. Facebook has over 3 billion users. Gmail has over 2 billion active users. All their products combined probably have more than 3 billion. US has 350 million people. By those numbers alone, aren't tech companies more powerful arbitrators? But that's a bad metric. We should talk about enforcement rather than raw numbers. Government's interest and design won't allow it to censor expressions…
You don’t have to tell 1 billion people in China not to say F%%% China”. You just punish a few and the rest fall in line.
Once you punish a few, the rest self censor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
any government? Tell that to people who live in China, N. Korea, or any country controlled by a theocracy. Even in the US some states ban doctors from talking about abortion and/or force doctors to give women seeking an abortion false information.
Yes, any government when you account for overall reach. Just because some governments have censored more content to date, doesn’t mean they’re more powerful than the US tech monopolies. If a link can’t be shared on Facebook, Google, or Twitter, it may as well not exist in most of the world.
Heck when you can literally close off entire markets, private corporations censor themselves.
This is why I'm so cynical about the Zuckerberg's stated stance on “free expression”. You can't go around positioning yourself as if you're the last bastion of free speech online[1] and then turn around and block large swathes of indie content because they are hosted on a particular domain. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerb...
Those are different things though. You can most likely write whatever you want to link to on Facebook, so they're not really censoring speech. They censor some off-platform links.
1. They limited themselves to blocking content that was decidedly harmful (phishing sites, malware, etc.), AND
2. They were transparent about what links they blocked and why.
It seems that neither was the case here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
China has 1.4 billion people. Facebook has over 3 billion users. Gmail has over 2 billion active users. All their products combined probably have more than 3 billion. US has 350 million people. By those numbers alone, aren't tech companies more powerful arbitrators? But that's a bad metric. We should talk about enforcement rather than raw numbers. Government's interest and design won't allow it to censor expressions…
Enforcement offline is hard to scale and limited even for china. You don’t have to tell 1 billion people in China not to say F%%% China”. You just punish a few and the rest fall in line. Once you punish a few, the rest self censor.
It's less severe, sure.
Dreamwidth is a blogging site, an offshoot of Livejournal, I would expect content on it to be across the full spectrum of both opinions and quality. Banning it as a domain makes about as much sense as banning Wordpress or Blogspot.
The same thing happened to my domain name about a month ago. (I also posted about it here.) This is happening more and more frequently, and the fact they block entire domains rather than a specific subdomain is really poor design. I finally got it unblocked, but only thanks to a former colleague (engineer) who now works at Facebook. If that didn't work, my next step was going to be filing a lawsuit, just to try to ge…
It seems likely that what's happening here is some combination of: 1) Spammers using one domain and multiple sub-domains 2) A poorly calibrated ML model for spam. It is worth noting that FB get probably the world's largest amount of spammers, fraudsters and general bad people due to the fact that they have an absurd amount of users. Honestly, though, if this stays on HN it will get fixed, but it's deeply concerning t…
The same thing happened to my domain name about a month ago. (I also posted about it here.) This is happening more and more frequently, and the fact they block entire domains rather than a specific subdomain is really poor design. I finally got it unblocked, but only thanks to a former colleague (engineer) who now works at Facebook. If that didn't work, my next step was going to be filing a lawsuit, just to try to ge…
It seems likely that what's happening here is some combination of: 1) Spammers using one domain and multiple sub-domains 2) A poorly calibrated ML model for spam. It is worth noting that FB get probably the world's largest amount of spammers, fraudsters and general bad people due to the fact that they have an absurd amount of users. Honestly, though, if this stays on HN it will get fixed, but it's deeply concerning t…
Yes, and they make a ton of money from those users as well. So the question is why the Facebooks and Googles of this world don't have proper procedures in place to deal with these things in a sensible way.
If a decision gets reversed only after exploding on Hacker News or Reddit it should be considered a bug.
@AndrewDucker: I’m curious to know why you picked the “eye in the pyramid” as the icon of your post, which is also known as the symbol of the Illuminati.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Dreamwidth [is] what's known as a "code fork" of LiveJournal: the software that runs LiveJournal was free and open source software, licensed under the GNU GPL, which meant anyone could copy it and improve it. Sounds like Dreamwidth is an entirely different site from Livejournal, it just uses the same open source code. How does dubious fanfic on Livejournal relate to the banning of Dreamwidth? If that fanfic migrate…
Many users migrated wholesale.