Unrelated but similar story: my company (a Polish national CERT) published a technical blog post about how ad fraud proliferates on large online platforms, featuring Meta and Google [1]. Then a magic thing happened: facebook posts that linked to our publication started disappearing within a minute of publication. Including journalists and newspapers. Then posts about how the posts were removed started disappearing. Then facebook accounts - including journalists - writing about this were banned.
Sounds like a fairy tale, but it actually happened [2]. I suspect a human overreaction and then automated systems taking over. Anyway, eventually it was escalated really high up and resolved. I can't share any more details unfortunately, even though I'd like to write more about this.
[1] English translation: https://cert.pl/en/posts/2024/12/Ad-fraud-on-large-online-pl...
[2] Our reaction post about this, in Polish: https://cert.pl/posts/2024/11/blokada-na-meta-stanowisko/.
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.
They claim to be the public square because they don't want you building your own square along side them.
The next time you hear them claiming to be a public square ask them if they're like to be regulated like a public utility. I think we all know how they'd answer that one.
i almost want to run for public office in canada, to push the CBC to run a set of social media sites that act as a proper public square for canadians
Have you read the comments sections on CBC articles?
Oooooof.
> platforms such as Facebook and Twitter claim to be the digital equivalent of the "public town square"
Our government also claims to serve the people, while bending over to the first one who pays well.
if you start saying bad things about the mayor/police in a lot of town squares, you won’t have a good time either.
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.
Sure, but prior to FB style ads, newspaper humans reviewed the ads prior to publishing them in the newspaper. They did things that didn't scale.
FB, Google, YouTube, and other ad markets don't give a crap about any of that, and print money by not giving a crap. Most of the those newspapers are out of business now, and/or were bought by special interests. This appears to me to be a clear net loss for humanity.
Not sure about ads, but things are definitely getting worse in terms of health first at FB and now at Instagram. It seems like sex workers (onlyfans models) seemed to have realized the way to skirt the FB community guidelines. There’s no straight porn, but when cooking videos and reels about cute animals suddenly starts morphing into cooking videos but with someone wearing suggestive clothes and animal videos centered around an attractive person doing suggestive things, things go downhill real fast.
Recommendation takes higher precedence over your network. And then nefarious actors take over the recommendations. That’s how these products die. 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. Plus almost all the reports are reviewed and are determined to have not broken any community rules.
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 sad thing is that I've reported these posts and they always say it doesn't violate their terms.
I'll just quote an experiment conducted by my colleague, where they tracked the outright malicious (porn, malware or fraud) ads they reported from a regular user account: "from January to November 2024, we tested (...) 122 such malicious ads (...) in 106 cases (86.8%), the reports were closed with the status “We did not remove the ad”, in 10 cases the ad was removed, and in 6 cases, we did not receive any response". That's not very encouraging.
> The sad thing is that I've reported these posts and they always say it doesn't violate their terms.
Nothing I reported on FB was ever removed, even obvious spam (e.g. comments in different language than the rest of the thread, posted as a reply to every top-level comment in the thread). I think this message is most likely just generated automatically. And maybe, if hundred people report the same thing, someone will review it. Or it will be automatically deleted.
> 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
Bad for Parents: It won't catch people failing to be sensitive enough or favoring their own network with less stringent oversight.
Bad for Content Creators: It won't be consistent, so largely it will be harsh to established players in predicable and game-able ways, while new market entrants will experience either statistical randomness (influenced by time and geographic demographics) or a bias against them in favor of established content.
Still, SOME of that would help a little, if only as a second sort of data channel to compare to other effects.
AI moderation will continue to be game-able garbage until true AI, at which point, please just plug me into the matrix and give me the pill.
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/
It's interesting that they offer advertising, but all of their content is behind paywalls.
It's not a paywall, just a sign-in wall.
They were having trouble with getting scraped. The email sign-in is enough of a barrier to stop most scrapers. https://www.404media.co/why-404-media-needs-your-email-addre...
They didn't in the beginning. I think they realized that it wasn't sustainable with not enough people paying (pure speculation).
$100/year is too much for an article on their complaints about Facebook.
Believe it or not, $100 provides a wealth of journalism for the year, not just the single article!
What about:
* Government to Name ‘Key Witness’ Who Provided FBI With Backdoored Encrypted Chat App Anom
* Secret Service Admits It Didn’t Check if People Really Consented to Being Tracked
* Telegram Hands U.S. Authorities Data on Thousands of Users
* DHS Says China, Russia, Iran, and Israel Are Spying on People in US with SS7
* Congress Pushes Apple to Remove Deepfake Apps After 404 Media Investigation
* Hackers Claim Massive Breach of Location Data Giant, Threaten to Leak Data
the reason I paid is they kept coming up over and over again and I want to support their model: https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/404-media-and-the-hopes...
also traditional media are using them as a source, such as forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidphelan/2024/11/12/no-your-...
I really don't like Zuckerberg a lot of the time and "if you need info on people at Harvard just ask" ought to have been the biggest red flag of all time
People struggle so much using Facebook with its feed randomness and now Instagram too (and them arguably engaging in antitrust with Whatsapp, they promised not to share data and immediately broke that promise)
All I'll say is that moderation is a nightmare. I wish we all gathered offline more.
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.
Could be!
Apropos of absolutely nothing, Facebook accounts have proven very easy to hack so that's yet another argument for probably breaking the company up into little pieces
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.
Its literally impossible to create an online social media platform that wont degenerate into a cesspool. Neil Postman essentially said as much in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. The very nature of the medium makes it impossible.
Why are you participating in a cesspool? Sounds pretty gross.
Truly the plebs cannot look after themselves with such a mindset and the yoke of Zuckerberg, HN, reddit and their crud-brethren must be smashed before the altar of progress. Rise up from your leet gamer chairs, those of you whose spines still have some shape to them. I shall retrieve my bagpipes.
Network effects - the more people use Facebook, the valuable it becomes.
If you want Facebook to die, stop using it.
Meta makes 98% of its revenue from advertising, and that segment grew 25% last quarter YoY.
Meta has 3.19 billion DAUs and 3.9 billion MAUs (Almost everyone connected to internet not in China). Their engineers and scientists have invented digital cocaine and they've got very little push back.
They keep on printing more billions every quarter.
> 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")
You left off 3 zeros those numbers!
> 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.
Not true, they bought the growing competition -- in the case of Instagram, digital crack cocaine.
Right because Facebook was such a miserable failure before those acquisitions.
If you knew Facebook people, they were super super scared. They literally bought those apps out of pure fear.
It was a failure at acquiring young users.
Are you familiar with the origins of Facebook?
Yes. And they were petrified of becoming not cool/population aging out/etc from day one.
Which some extent, it has. My 14 year old describes Facebook as "the app for boomers."
Instagram today is effectively a totally different app than what they bought.
Usual technofeudalist "free speech", nothing to see here.
Have Meta or Zuckerberg waived that flag recently?
Zuck was in a video stating exactly this:
https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/meta-more-speech-fewer-mis...
Quite a bit, associated with the moderation change. Zuckerberg criticized the EU, someone at Facebook said how great Trump is for free speech, a justification for the moderation changes is 'free speech', ...
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.
When I sometimes check into facebook.com, it feels like 80% of the reels are beautiful women taking off their panties, posted by people I've never interacted with
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.
Where archive.is is blocked:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250108140722if_/https://www.40...
why complain when we can just stop using facebook?
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.
The problem is quitting and saying it's hopeless, the standard response from a certain political grouping to lots of problems.
It’s been more than a decade since people started trying to get others off Facebook. It clearly hasn’t worked.
> It’s been more than a decade since people started trying to get others off Facebook. It clearly hasn’t worked.
That's called "quitting". It hasn't worked yet, and people widely began the quitting years ago, so it's not going to work until they actually work hard with commitment, passion, creativity, confidence. If they don't do that, if they don't believe in it, certainly nobody else will.
And look how you've derailed the actual work. Instead of talking about how to solve the problem, we're talking about whether we should quit like you have - a conversation that accomplishes absolutely nothing for anyone. Who invited you to this meeting?
Fair, I totally get your point and I’m definitely a part of the problem. But I operate in a way that if something doesn’t work for a given period of time (like asking people to quit FB products because X, Y, Z reasons), I move on from that idea. We’re clearly a tiny minority, if you look at their userbase.
Lots of minorities have eventually persuaded majorities to follow them - that's how most of history works. A few people think something up - it's not like 60% of the country have the same novel idea at the same time.
> if something doesn’t work for a given period of time (like asking people to quit FB products because X, Y, Z reasons), I move on from that idea.
Those minorities didn't succeed on their first attempt - possibly that has never happened. You should move on from the idea, and try another idea. Do not abandon the goal; lots of first iterations and second ones and nth ones fail. That's how success works, almost every time. There is no success in anything without all those failures.
The quote displays the victim perspective that is guaranteed to end in failure. The idea didn't fail, you did; you failed to make it work, to find the right idea, the right language, the right whatever. The idea and the outcome isn't the weather, something that happens to you. You are the agent, the mover and shaker, or your will certainly fail.
Yeah, I failed, I moved on and have different goals in my life. That's nature of life. Getting people off social media wasn't important enough to me to pursue it in a longer term. Most people I know who were anti social media are in their 30s now, they share stuff on Instagram, are part of school parental school groups of FB and etc. It's kinda hard without it as well, because if you're not part of those groups you just never hear about half of the group-based events.
It is what it is, oh well.
Yes, that's why it isn't happening. It's not that it's hopeless; it's that many people quit and, here, even mock responsibility or seriousness.
In a democracy, if you and I don't do it, nobody will. If you are in your 30s, it's on you. There's no cavalry; there's nobody coming to the rescue; it's your country. If you don't fix the problem, you'll have the consequences.
Seems like the most productive option.
Now immediately flagged off the front page.
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
I didn't see any such pattern in the data. It was flagged by quite a few users, none of whom showed any obvious pattern like affiliation with a company or a political slant. (Edit: I mean none of the ones I looked at. There were too many to look at them all.)
We can only guess why users flag things. In this case, I don't have a good guess, other than that the article title is baity, so I replaced it with more neutral language from the subtitle, and (partly) rolled back the flags.
The flaggers may be correct, in any case, because this thread is noticeably terrible.
> We can only guess why users flag things.
I'm sure you've considered this feature, but since flagging is such a heavyweight (in terms of ranking impact) activity, shouldn't a flagger need to at least articulate (via text or a drop-down menu) why they are flagging it? Even vague choices like "Site guideline violation," "Spam," "Astroturfing," "Political flame bait" might offer some of the missing insight.
I've always resisted that, but could be persuaded. Not sure we'd get the true reasons though.
What are your concerns with that?
If it's overhead for the flagger, they could be presented with a single multi choice question, eg:
What most deserves flagging: a)item title b) item content c) hn discussion d) something else
With different users presented with different questions to build up a picture.
Flags could be recorded even if the question isn't answered, but with you reserving the right to weight ones without answers less.
Mainly the bureaucratic nature of it. Preserving HN's minimalism has been a priority because it's the kind of thing that's so easily lost; like a frog boiling itself.
Yea, I get the hesitance to invest in this. Nobody is going to select/admit reasons like "Because flagging is a mega-downvote and I don't like this story getting attention," even if it's the real reason. We don't know how accurate or actionable Slashdot's drop-down choice moderation was, either. Even if people are honest about their intentions, what is actionable? Not much I guess.
my guess would be that it's because you have to sign up to read the article.
Yes, although it's strangely inconsistent. Usually I see that but occasionally I don't.
(nice to see you still commenting here btw!)
hey, thanks for remembering the oldtimers!!
I check in often, but don't comment much anymore.
That's actually a fair point. The good thing is that archive.is works on their site now.
Thanks for looking into it.
And yeah, I thought that this topic would have garnered a better discussion.
I'm surprised you'd think that - Facebook moderation changes and the same tired back and forth about 'free speech' have been some of the worst threads for me.
That's why following HN from a RSS feed is invaluable. You get to see everything, even the things groupthink filters out.
There’s quite a lot of trash flagged for very good reasons, though. I cannot keep up with the full feed.
I can usually power through the RSS feed pretty quickly. My reader shows only titles, so I swipe on a lot of stuff that doesn’t seem relevant. I can then take my time with the good stuff.
Indeed. Some of the most interesting stories on HN never make it past the initial filter. I've seen great posts slip by in obscurity only to get hundreds of votes and hit the front page weeks or months later. There's a lot indeterminism in what makes it to the front page(s) and what doesn't.
Keep in mind this wonderful alternate HN front-send site - it's pretty much taken over for me vs hitting HN's main page: https://hckrnews.com/
This site displays the posted links in chronological order which means stuff that suddenly got booted off the front page still shows up.
That's what I use as well. I wish I could find a good iOS client that supports that style of chronological, but front page posts.
It’s on the front page for me.
Whose salary in this case?
I was cheekily implying that the well paid Facebook developers flagged this article as it forces them to confront the issue that their employer is generally a bad actor, and their employment contributes to that.
Hardly a new take but I think this being flagged so quickly is a concerning problem.
I'll confess to taking it personally; apparently I still need to work on that!
Don't know if you saw my other post about this, but the flagging behavior looked normal to me. I didn't see any patterns in the flagging history of those users, such as flagging posts about FB or some political position.
> the flagging behavior looked normal to me
I believe it, I think it's clear tensions are high on these topics.
I appreciate what you do to keep us all in check so please forgive any offense my teasing caused.
Nothing to forgive, but thanks for the kind reply.
And yet there were loads of chumps here on HN praising Zuck for "upholding the western democratic values of freedom of speech" and other such nonsense. Truly rules for thee but not for me.
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.
[flagged]
It seems like it's harder to be a billionaire if you're not an immoral opportunist...
> if you're not an immoral opportunist...
"amoral" might be a better fit there given how they'll happily swing in whichever direction they think the power/money wind is blowing.
Their shareholders don't care ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
But society and voters do.
Do you want to live in a Putin-esuque society?
Shh, please, hush. The temporarily-impoverished billionaires don't want you picking on their brethren.
What about my comment makes you think I'd like to "live in a Putin-esuque society?"
[flagged]
[flagged]
> 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.
That's a huge assumption without knowing anything about me.
Free speech does not include obscenity.
In any common usage I’m aware of.
The news stories, which are being removed from Facebook, are not pornographic or obscene.
The stories are about pornographic ads on Facebook, which are obscene, and which are not being removed.
All of the ads mentioned in this article have been removed, though?
Regardless if they all have, that's irrelevant to the point being argued. The articles themselves are not obscene.
What is that germane to?
The second sentence of the 2-sentence post I replied to.
Do you mean that you disagree with the article itself or with my summary of it?
You said the article was about ads which are not being removed. So I disagree with this assessment (and the article which also makes that false claim).
Depends who you ask, but regardless, free speech protects you form the state, not form private companies
so restricted speech then? who is deciding what is “obscene”? we form a committee and then vote on this? we elect people in government to make this determination? … we either have free speech or we don’t - everything else is anything but free…
You cannot have both free speech and free market. It’s one or the other.
[flagged]
I do agree that Facebook are assholes, but then I'm not sure I want to support journalists who are bashing sex, pornography and prostitution. There is nothing wrong with those things. We are not living in the Medieval times any more, maybe it's finally time to stop being puritans and stop believing that sex is somehow fundamentally sinful or wrong. Those beliefs don't make any sense and they look absolutely ridiculous.
I would totally support journalism targetted at exposing hypocrisy and authoritarian practices of big tech.
It's finally time to liberate society and to stop demonise sex and sex-related topics. Healthy views on sex would make the society a better place, and sex ads on Facebook would stop containing only scam.
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.
Social media sites might be the easier option for some people!
Map of porn restrictions in the US: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/sx8Ji/2/
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.
That sure reads like a personal opinion and not a fact. I think the passion of your response is the problem pointed out in the article as well as the general problem of freedom of speech. Everyone thinks they know where the "obvious" line is.
I do not believe that statements which are obviously opinions need or ought be prefaced with “in my opinion”. I feel that that is poor style. The irony that I’ve done that in this comment (I do not believe…; I feel…) is not lost on me.
That’s not the point of the article though. It’s that Facebook is banning the same content when posted organically but allowing it in ads.
Sex has always been a commodity. There's a reason why we call sex workers "the oldest profession".
What more, the societies that talk the most about vices and crack down on them tend to be the ones where the actual sexual abuse flourishes behind the scenes (e.g. Victorian England).
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.
The point is not "This is fine" vs "This is not", it's that the exact same images are allowed by advertisers, but not allowed from users. It is a blatant, damning example of who the customers are, and who matters, advertisers or users.
If you don't want it, that's reasonable. If you think we should be less strict, you can make that argument too. It's a personal choice, a line each user has to decide for themselves (which is why centralized and centrally-moderated social media can't really work: we all draw different lines, and few of us agree with where Facebook's line is).
Right now though, nobody wins: advertisers are given one set of rules, and users another, so under the current system, most parties lose. Advertisers could be banned if they draw too much heat. Users bristle under the hypocrisy. Facebook comes out ahead though, with that sweet ad revenue
[flagged]
Ok coomer
I've said this too many times, but Facebook only did political censorship because they were extorted into doing political censorship, so "it's not censorship because they're a private company," whatever you believe about the principle, is factually wrong.
Facebook only wants to censor stories about Facebook, just like Musk is only interested in censoring stories about Musk. This is the natural state of these companies. They were never actually interested in being moral arbiters for the government, they were just used as proxies because of their self-interest, through the leverage that the people who regulate them and pay them have over them.
> 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”