this is super frustrating, as platforms such as Facebook and Twitter claim to be the digital equivalent of the "public town square" yet take on none of the responsibilities and transparency that come along with it, just all the profits.

I would suspect something a bit more sinister: the very organizations you are targeting probably started a mass campaign to "report" your content, which triggered automated systems that caused your posts to disappear. A more cynical me would add in the fact that any manual review by Facebook staff would trigger even more aggressive moves to silence you, given that you're directly accusing them of inadequate moderation of their platform, which at best doesn't make them look good, and at worst, means they lose advertising $$ that those groups may be spending with Facebook to target those very victims.

Facebook is a cash machine. $62 billion net profit, from ads. Anything with that much revenue will attract fraud. Facebook will likely present themselves as victims, taken advantage of by organized criminals.

No, there is outright porn. They do this "trick" where they flash a nude photo for like 100ms on a 10s video and caption it with something like "pause it for the good part".

The sad thing is that I've reported these posts and they always say it doesn't violate their terms.

> The recommendation engine is unfortunately not able to distinguish between regular content and suggestive content, and no amount of reporting/blocking seems to change that.

Maybe currently... But you can definitely crowdsource / user generate some thumbs-up or thumbs-down mechanism whether something is "suggestive" content

Also, consider paying 404media the $100 for a year. It's just 4 people and I don't think they have many people actually paying. They're doing really good work. I paid.

They also have a podcast - basically the top stories they publish in a conversational format: https://www.404media.co/the-404-media-podcast/

There's this ongoing effort by HN user sirobg:

Ask HN: What should I do with meet.hn? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42410582 - Dec 2024 (168 comments)

Show HN: Meet.hn – Meet the Hacker News community in your city - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41539125 - Sept 2024 (372 comments)

I've been thinking for years about building support for offline meetups into HN itself somehow.

Side note...

Sometimes the sketchy ads are from account hacks. I've seen this happen a couple of times with business accounts. Hackers get access to a personal Meta account that has access to Ad Manager. They run a bunch of scam ads that go live because of the previous reputation of the ad account let's it slip by the AI moderation.

The scam ads will run for a few days or more before Meta gets around to human moderation triggered by users flagging the ads. This usually leads to the ad account getting banned.

There's a pretty huge ecosystem out there for hacking ad accounts. I would imagine it adds to the overall load on the human moderation process.

This ^^^ I often thought of creating my own Twitter clone, but the biggest problem/obstacle I keep envisioning in content moderation. At the very least it's required for legal reasons - no CSAM! However, if you want to have a platform that isn't a cesspool, but still respects diverse content - well, that's just not easy, even in offline gatherings.

> If you want Facebook to die, stop using it.

I don't use facebook and somehow facebook hasn't died yet. In fact, facebook is happy to create an account/profile for me since I refuse to and they populate it with data about me collected from anyone who mentions me on their platforms, as well as by scraping data posted to the web elsewhere and by buying up my information from data brokers. I said "No" to facebook, and facebook said "You don't get a choice".

There's no reason to think that if people stopped using facebook it would go away. Facebook has already demonstrated that they're willing to populate their site with shadow profiles and fake AI accounts to keep up the appearance of being filled with active users even as their real user count continues to decline. The AI they're using to make bots was (at least in part) trained on things I wrote, or were written about me, on sites other than facebook. When young people started leaving facebook for instagram facebook just bought instagram to keep them.

There is simply no way to for users to vote with their feet/wallet here. The best we can hope for is that advertisers will notice that AI bots viewing ads won't increase sales, finally get tired of all the other ad/click fraud going on and stop using the platform. Maybe then facebook will die, but even in that case I wouldn't hold my breath. Facebook will just keep trying to expand into other areas like healthcare, education, and shopping

Our company on Friday will be discussing the deletion of all META accounts. We're at the point where we no longer need them and it is a waste of resources, not to mention how horrible they've become.

I stopped using it about 12 years ago. So you can thank me for their number being 3,190,000 DAUs and not 3,190,001 DAUs. (point being, while individual action sounds like a nice solution, it certainly doesn't operate on "webscale")

> If you want Facebook to die, stop using it.

None of us have any power. Most people will continue using it.

Done. I also deleted Instagram. Meta is awful.

> Their engineers and scientists have invented digital cocaine

They bought Instagram and WhatsApp because they couldn't figure anything out.

Have Meta or Zuckerberg waived that flag recently?

There is no freedom freer than a techbro spitting out a venomous "freedom you're not gonna take my freedom just do what I fucking say and don't criticize me" between gritted teeth.

edit: said while writing a massive check to a politician, of course.

My Instagram feed just became smut for some reason, other things yes, but mostly just women doing yoga in a seemingly innocent yet suggestive way. Basically an onlyfans preview catalogue.

Yes, men look at this, yes I clicked on some of it because I like seeing attractive women doing yoga, yes it "drives engagement", but I just deleted the app instead. Life's to short to spend on that crap. I just don't see the use of any of it now. What's worse is, a lot of the content is now AI now too, so you're not even looking at "real content" anymore, what is the use of it?

I login once every few weeks to check my messages for people who can't workout how to use other apps or iMessage.

Our family uses the Apple Photos sharing exclusively and everyone absolutely loves it. It's what Facebook used to be.

At least they're adults. On my throwaway accounts feed, they're often not.

To my understanding, all the efforts to get people of Facebook/IG and others have failed, so people stopped preaching that. So we either have to get people addicted to something else (like TikTok but with even more dopamine hits) or keep complaining about it.

Anyone who wanted to get out has already done so. Others are stuck or have to use it for various reasons.

Seems like the most productive option.

Sometimes things I post get flagged by users and I get it, fair enough. This time I can only think of malicious reasons.

The only people who I can imagine flagging this post are Meta PR, or users who are bringing their politics into a non-political post. If anyone has any other reasonable explanations, I would love to hear them.

Looks like the title was edited, original title: Facebook Is Censoring 404 Media Stories About Facebook's Censorship

That's why following HN from a RSS feed is invaluable. You get to see everything, even the things groupthink filters out.

It’s on the front page for me.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...

So true. I mentioned this to a group of friends. The number of people saying this move is good news for speech just shows how people see free speech as being good only when it fills their pockets or aligns with their interests.

It seems like it's harder to be a billionaire if you're not an immoral opportunist...

Their shareholders don't care ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

> Good ole 'free speech' capitalism for ya.

People who say stuff like this somehow always want to give them more power to censor, not less.

Free speech does not include obscenity.

In any common usage I’m aware of.

You cannot have both free speech and free market. It’s one or the other.

I'm not sure if your comment is targeted towards the article. In any case, the article itself specifically says that it's not against the sex, but against Meta's hypocrisy most likely driven by ad revenue.

> I would totally support journalism targetted at exposing hypocrisy and authoritarian practices of big tech.

I’m not sure if you are referring to the original article, but that’s exactly what it’s about.

I have instagram to watch meals my friends eat and places they go, i don't need porn there.

If I want porn, i visit porhub.

You don't have to be a puritan to have those things separated, especially if scrolling in public.

Commoditization of sex is not equivalent to its liberation, and in fact sex has been cheapened and corrupted, resulting in a more poisonous vice than it’s ever been.

Pornography is about as good for society as alcohol.

I’m on social media to talk to my grandkids and former co workers.

I don’t want to see your hoo-ha on Meta while I’m eating my pancakes.

> they were extorted into doing political censorship

Please cite your sources.

From Zuck’s recent letter he says literally the opposite: “Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions”