top | item 42839502

Facebook ban on discussing Linux?

874 points| rogerthis | 1 year ago |distrowatch.com

388 comments

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Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.

polotics|1 year ago

I do confirm that i explicitly tested this with my super unused facebook account, just stating that i was testing restrictions on talking about Linux, the text was: """I don't often (or ever) post anything on Facebook, but when I do, it's to check if they really, as announced on hckrnews, are restricting discussing Linux. So here's a few links to trigger that: https://www.qubes-os.org/downloads/ ... https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/""" and indeed within seconds I got the following warning: """ We removed your post The post may use misleading links or content to trick people to visit, or stay on, a website. """. This is one massive wow considering how much Facebook runs on Linux.

krisoft|1 year ago

A user who never posts anything suddenly posting a message containing urls might in itself be a signal that something is weird. It would be an interestint test to post something not linux related and see how that fares.

zdp7|1 year ago

I just tried the same two URLs. I also got a message saying the post was removed.

ashoeafoot|1 year ago

Relicense the kernel with license that prevents usage for dystopiadistros?

amatecha|1 year ago

I'd be curious if it's blocked if someone links just debian.org . I can definitely see a [totally overzealous] "security filter" blocking Qubes, but Debian is one of the most popular Linux distros in the world, so that would be especially ridiculous.

richrichardsson|1 year ago

Opposite anecdata point: posted a link to DistroWatch and mentioned Linux without issue.

lemper|1 year ago

giving you another confirmation, mate. zuck removed my post about qubeos.

boomboomsubban|1 year ago

Facebook has been blocking distrowatch at least part of the time for three years now, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29529312

I've been perplexed for years, I wonder if it went unnoticed all this time or they reverted then reimplement the ban.

loeg|1 year ago

It's probably a recurrence of the same issue.

If your domain links to content that AVs flag as malware, it gets blocked on FB. Distrowatch is likely uniquely susceptible to this because they're constantly linking to novel, 3rd-party tarballs (via the "Latest Packages" column).

In this case, it was the Privoxy 4.0.0 release from the 18th. You can see it linked in this Jan 19 snapshot of the site: https://web.archive.org/web/20250119125004/https://distrowat...

ulrikrasmussen|1 year ago

It's either intentional, which would be puzzling and unsettling, or it's a bug which has gone unnoticed. In any case it is proof that big tech is in no shape to take on the responsibility for moderating discourse on the internet. This reminds me of the bug that falls into a typewriter in the beginning of the movie "Brazil" which causes a spelling error and the arrest and execution of a random innocent person. Granted, this type of automated banning without any ability to involve a real human is not costing any lives (yet), but I am increasingly worried about how big tech is becoming a Kafkaesque lawnmower. One thing is to deliberately censor speech that you do not like, another is to design a system where innocent and important speech is silently censored and noone in charge even notices.

loeg|1 year ago

Distrowatch was blocked for linking to an AV-flagged privoxy 4.0.0 tarball. The same kind of anti-malware blocking you'd expect for a mass-market, non-technical audience. Nothing to do with "speech" or Linux in general.

Some context: https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/site-support/26448/

archon810|1 year ago

On another note, Sourceforge just removes the malware flag, but did they actually check anything or just went with the provided explanation without any concrete details? If I hijacked some software and got caught, I'd act nonchalantly like this as well and hope it'll blow over without anyone noticing.

bjoli|1 year ago

I had my post removed a couple of weeks ago for linking to aeon desktop (immutable opensuse).

Vaslo|1 year ago

Thank you for providing this, it seemed a little clickbaity. Even far less technical companies run some things in Linux so seems weird they’d ban Linux talk in general.

oneeyedpigeon|1 year ago

> Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labelled groups associated with Linux as being "cybersecurity threats".

That's quite the statement to make without any source to back it up; I wonder what the evidence for this is.

dec0dedab0de|1 year ago

I assumed that part was conjecture. However, if you define “internal policy makers” broadly from the users perspective, then it’s provably true from the result.

I get that it is worded like it was people in a boardroom making a decision after having a debate. However an overworked admin, or an AI Moderator could just as easily be lumped together as “internal policy makers” from the users perspective.

lofenfew|1 year ago

They are the source. A journo could write an article and mention distrowatch as where they got their information from. If you don't trust them - great, you can do your own research.

> I wonder what the evidence for it is

Maybe "Any posts mentioning DistroWatch and multiple groups associated with Linux and Linux discussions have either been shut down or had many of their posts removed" and "We've been hearing all week from readers who say they can no longer post about Linux on Facebook or share links to DistroWatch. Some people have reported their accounts have been locked or limited for posting about Linux"

What do you think evidence consists of if not that?

amatecha|1 year ago

Probably this: "I've tried to appeal the ban and was told the next day that Linux-related material is staying on the cybersecurity filter." (from the OP) .. Of course, it would have helped if the post author quoted FB's response so we could judge that for ourselves.

buyucu|1 year ago

the evidence is that facebook is blocking this content.

paulnpace|1 year ago

[flagged]

GuB-42|1 year ago

Ok, what's the true story?

It is obviously allowed to discuss Linux. There is plenty of discussion about Linux on Facebook, including some about the recent "ban".

My guess is that some automated scanner found something wrong about the linked page. Maybe there is some link to a "hacking"-oriented distro, maybe some torrents, some dubious comment, etc... Probably a false positive, it happens.

mr_toad|1 year ago

Probably some jobsworth decided that free software = piracy.

I knew a company that leapt to the same conclusion regarding GitHub.

emmelaich|1 year ago

The pic accompanying mentions openKylin. Kylin is China's Unix, formerly based on FreeBSD, now Linux/Ubuntu.

I presume that it is used for launching hacks, but even so discussion should not be banned.

Just makes me wonder if DistroWatch is telling the whole story.

indymike|1 year ago

Kali is one example. That said Kali is not a bad thing.

everdrive|1 year ago

Somewhat ironic given that actual linux packages are mirrored there.

http://www.fedora.mirror.facebook.net/

bluedino|1 year ago

Reminds me of when they do 'firewall updates' at work, and many of the common open-source repositories/hosting etc are blocked.

I understand than some malicious software may use things like curl, but it's also annoying to have to re-create the same ticket and submit to internal IT, and then if someone working on the ticket hasn't done this before, they close it, we have to have a meeting about why we need access to that site...

nailer|1 year ago

Last I checked (2008) Facebook Linux was indeed a Fedora derivative.

Fnoord|1 year ago

Woah, Facebook is hosting malware.

Seriously though, I'm curious (have no account): are you able to post that link on Facebook?

kazinator|1 year ago

Didn't Zuck recently announce that he's getting rid of fact checkers, on the pretext that the parties hired to do fact checking are biased and introduce censorship and unfair false positives that get accounts shut down?

Was it just a cost reduction: fact checking takes effort and those checkers have to be paid? With the result being situations like this?

notfed|1 year ago

Yes, which makes this claim more extraordinary. (And to be fair, I don't think there's extraordinary evidence presented here.)

the-grump|1 year ago

Their phrasing was "mainstream discourse" wouldn't be censored.

I guess Linux needs to go mainstream first.

NikkiA|1 year ago

> Was it just a cost reduction

No, it was clearly an attempt to court Trump, unfortunately 'not enough ass kissing, yet' according to the trump team.

germandiago|1 year ago

There is no such thing as unbiased information. So FWIW, I think fact checking is really just a fight for censorship. Official lies and half truths instead of lies from everywhere intermixed with truths.

There are so many ways to do it wrong even if you tag info as true or fake and in principle you do it with good intention. For example it was the case that certain information was tagged as fake and when claimed for a correction the administrators "could not do anything" (Spain cases researched by Joan Planas by doing requests himself personally for the biggest official agency in Spain, called Newtral, which is intimately tied to the Socialist Party in Spain... really, the name makes me laugh, let us call war peace etc. like in 1984). But they were way faster in doing it in the other direction or often found excuses to clearly favor certain interests.

Now put this in the context of an election... uh... complicated topic, but we all minimally awake people know what this is about...

__MatrixMan__|1 year ago

I recall a headline from (checks notes) 2014. Linux users are extremists according to the NSA (http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/nsa-linux-journal-extrem...).

I imagine something about that caused certain lists to be populated in certain ways, and no linux user cares enough about Facebook to help them correct the problem.

hansvm|1 year ago

I cared tiny bit. I even went out and bought a phone so that I could "prove I was a real person" or whatever to try to make a FB account. Account creation failed, my IP was banned, and I just blocked every FB domain and haven't looked back.

kouru225|1 year ago

Ah shit I guess they’ve been storing my browsing history then…

nu2ycombinator|1 year ago

Interesting. Same Facebook, refuses take action on reports submitted on fake accounts created to spam people and harassment videos.

lukaslalinsky|1 year ago

Yeah, I was really surprised by this. Last year, I reported a number of people, who were trying to scam me (via Messenger messages related to Marketplace listings). Not only did Facebook did not see anything wrong with the accounts and scammy messages, I was flagged for sending useless reports.

guappa|1 year ago

I suspect that the report button doesn't actually cause any human to be involved in the process.

fortran77|1 year ago

Their filters are comically bad. I belong to a Selectric Typewriter enthusiats group and we keep having to re-word things so they don't go into a black hole. Typewriter parts like "operational shaft" or "type ball" or even brand names of gun cleaners and lubricants that are popular with typewriter folks will cause a post not to appear.

emmelaich|1 year ago

Oh just stop it you, I feel my loins tingling.

nottorp|1 year ago

I think they're wrong about the policy. It's more likely that the policy is "let's run the moderation bots unattended to save costs" and is actually site agnostic.

It's just some "AI" hallucinating.

notfed|1 year ago

Seems antithetical to Zuckerberg's recent "More Speech and Fewer Mistakes" announcement.

germandiago|1 year ago

Well, my confidence in the owner of this company is as high as... so I am not surprised that if he is paid (I have no idea this os the case in this very situation), he will no wonder do what the money dictates without any consideration whatsoever. Did anyone see the ridiculous change he made after years of selling (at least in Europe) fact checking, following censorship and teaming up, the scandal selling data to influence an election before. I do not expect anything nice from this leadership. That is why I stopped using Facebook years ago as much as I could.

insane_dreamer|1 year ago

So this is what Zuck meant when he said Meta was "getting back to its roots"? (And I thought he was talking about reviving Facemash)

mindcrime|1 year ago

I'm not convinced this is intentional. I think their auto-moderation stuff is just buggy lately. To illustrate part of why I say that:

Yesterday I tried to submit a link to a Youtube video of the Testament song "Native Blood". Nothing terribly controversial about that, and I'm nearly 100% sure I've posted that song before with no problems. But it kept getting denied with some "link not allowed because blah, blah" error.

So is "Native Blood" banned on FB? Well, I tried a link to a different video of the same song, and was able to submit it just fine. This feels like a bug to me, and I wouldn't be surprised if similar bugs were interfering with other people trying to post stuff.

Granted that's just speculation so take this for what it's worth.

Igrom|1 year ago

Surely that's the result of a rogue moderator's overreach.

rnd0|1 year ago

I attempted to post the distrowatch link to my feed and it was blocked as 'spam'.

That seems pretty automated to me.

not2b|1 year ago

Their "moderators" are bots, not humans, so it seems that the bots have "decided" that Linux-related links are malware or something.

blast|1 year ago

Or some overly optimistic attempt at AI moderation.

jdxcode|1 year ago

I agree, overzealousness sounds like the most likely reason for this.

> Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labelled groups associated with Linux as being "cybersecurity threats".

The author gives no evidence to back up on this claim.

userbinator|1 year ago

Like the others have mentioned, I don't think this is anything more sinister than AI moderation gone wild.

amatecha|1 year ago

I'd argue that automated ""AI""-driven moderation is actually more sinister than a human being deciding it. Censorship and control over communication by automated processes should be held to a very high standard (and probably regulated, I'd think). From IBM in 1979: "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision." ( https://web.archive.org/web/20221216204215/https://twitter.c... )

yuvalr1|1 year ago

Maybe it is about time that we stop relying on closed gardens, censored and managed on a whim, and start reclaiming our internet and freedom back, publishing in open platforms?

BlueTemplar|1 year ago

Open platforms are still subject to all of this, the only thing they give is that you don't need to create an account to see the contents of a link.

Avoid platforms altogether.

rglover|1 year ago

This is the trouble with automation. It's clear this isn't a malicious post, it just matched some keywords their moderation bot identified as such.

I think a lot of the censorship problems would be resolved if they just shut the bots off and relied on user flagging. Does that require a lot more people? Sure. But the long-run result would be far more people would use and trust these networks (covering the revenue of hiring moderators). I know I'd be a lot happier if there was a thinking human deciding my fate than a random script that only a few people know the inner-workings of.

As-is, it seems like a lot of these social networks are just shooting themselves in the foot just to avoid costs and get a false sense of control over the problem.

maybesomaybenot|1 year ago

Um, no. I don't want to see pics of NSFL gore before the userbase has had a chance to remove them. Which is what most moderators spend time removing from FB, to the point where it psychologically traumatizes them.

BryanLunduke|1 year ago

No, Facebook is Not Censoring "Linux", Only "DistroWatch".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOdMTS6XVu4

loeg|1 year ago

It's a shame that this is one of the only accurate top-level comments and it's downvoted to hell.

tombert|1 year ago

[flagged]

InDubioProRubio|1 year ago

The cost of pissing of devs is so high, why cant companies just knuckle under- stop attacking add-blocking browsers like firefox or dev-operating systems. Why would you want to enter that world of pain of getting a ton of adversaries with while balancing on stack o swiss-cheese and duct tape? What is going wrong in those decision maker heads.

thefounder|1 year ago

Facebook is just a website. Move on!

beretguy|1 year ago

Facebook is a cyber security threat.

funcDropShadow|1 year ago

Didn't Mark Zuckerberg say he would reduce censorship on FB just a few weeks ago?

assimpleaspossi|1 year ago

What am I missing here? Why would anyone go to Facebook to discuss Linux?

7bit|1 year ago

I thought Zuckerberg was removing any fact checkers and platform censoring. I'm thoroughly confused. But maybe since Zuckerbergs death the company changed directions again.

imchillyb|1 year ago

Can't sell Linux users AI.

Inability to market directly is antithesis to Facebook and its ilk.

Linux gives users control. That is the very last thing anyone in power wants anyone else to have.

lexicality|1 year ago

I'm genuinely surprised that people were using facebook of all things to discuss Linux distros.

The idea of having to wade through AI generated pictures of Shrimp Jesus and my mad uncle posting about his latest attempts to turn lead into gold (yes, really) to find out about new distros to try seems very alien to me.

knowitnone|1 year ago

I'm sure lead technically can be turned into gold or anything for that matter with enough energy

UntitledNo4|1 year ago

I want to know more about your uncle. I'm not on Facebook, but that would make me consider joining...

einpoklum|1 year ago

(sob) Shrimp Jesus is real! (sniffle)

Also, turning lead into gold is easy: Just break all the protons off to get Hydrogen and maybe Helium, then compress it back so you get a star to form, and wait for it to go nova. Or, if you're in a hurry, you can compress your Hydrogen more and if you kind of jiggle it just the right way then you should get some gold along with other heavy elements.

jbm|1 year ago

Your uncle sounds like a lot more fun than the latest javascript build system.

Imagine being confident enough to believe and document that. Crazy? Maybe, but a crazy one can appreciate.

TheOtherHobbes|1 year ago

Tech obviously isn't a strong suit, but elsewhere Facebook does have corners with good/entertaining/useful small communities. They have good SNR and are more personal than Reddit.

The secret is to train your feed by bookmarking the groups and linking to them directly instead of accepting whatever flailing nonsense the algo decides to default to.

Having said that - I hope everyone has worked out by now that when you have a "free speech" culture based on covert curation and moderation of contentious issues, it's not just going to be about porn and trans people.

Non-mainstream (i.e. non-consumer) tech is going to be labelled bad-think and suppressed too.

hn_acc1|1 year ago

Wonder if someone used "qubes" as a way to work around a ban on "pubes" and the filter thought it was porn?

DidYaWipe|1 year ago

There's no excuse for Facebook's behavior, but... Who savvy enough to use Linux also uses Facebook?

Iolaum|1 year ago

The ones who have family and friends that use it.

beardyw|1 year ago

I am getting no response on that link.

vmilner|1 year ago

Distrowatch seems to be under heavy load (probably because of this news story)

zactato|1 year ago

It makes sense

I assume Facebook doesn't want anything posted on FB that can't be turned into a racist diatribe. There's not a whole lot of racism potential in Kernel tuning.

Maybe you could squeeze in anti-Finnish rant about Linus, but it would be minimal

Lardsonian|1 year ago

Interesting, lets just see what Facebook runs on...

habibur|1 year ago

I get blocked anytime I share my github project.

aurelien|1 year ago

For information X and Meta are not Social Network but Identity Tracing Network.

Give their database to bot for search and destroy and you will understand by how many will survive.

Good luck!

akurilov|1 year ago

After the ethnic cleaning of the Linux maintainers list I would say I'm not impressed

hsuduebc2|1 year ago

Lol. So glad they let literal lies and propaganda going with community notes but keep something usefull. Garbage as always.

docmars|1 year ago

Welcome to 2020 Facebook, except they're coverage of valid topics to ban and censor has expanded more broadly now. This might've been avoided had more of its users sent a message 4-5 years ago that social media censorship isn't acceptable in a society that prides itself on free speech.

kussenverboten|1 year ago

discuss GNU instead... or maybe microcontrollers

cess11|1 year ago

Perhaps they've become closer buddies with MICROS~1. I wouldn't be surprised if they did this in exchange for "AI" compute, i.e. that losing the Linux audience is worth less than being seen favourably by elder oligarchs.

kristiandupont|1 year ago

MS doesn't care about Linux any more like they did in the 90's and 00's.

udev4096|1 year ago

No one, more than linux users, cares about privacy and freedom. What is even the point of using crapbook? Everyone in linux community is either hanging out on IRC or matrix or have self hosted forums

em-bee|1 year ago

to talk to people who are not yet using linux?

sophacles|1 year ago

What? Google is a linux user - I doubt they care about privacy or freedom. Same with facebook - that company uses linux a lot while actively opposing privacy.

Lots of people use linux because it's a good OS, irrespective of privacy concerns (see the occasional flareup about some software or another automatically shipping off bug reports - some people don't care, others are incredibly concerned).

chris_wot|1 year ago

Another great reason to not use Facebook or any other social media.

Beretta_Vexee|1 year ago

My wife was temporarily banned for a photo of a marble statue. My mother receives invitations to groups that share photos of migrants drowned in the Mediterranean. Don't use Facebook, and certainly don't depend on it.

Edit: Recently, a lot of associations working to prevent HIV, sexually-transmitted diseases and family planning have been progressively de-listed, or their content blocked and their accounts banned, all over the world on all META platforms. This is the true face of freedom of expression according to META and its “community rules”.

Meta censorship of abortion pill content (french) : https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/veille-sanit...

lproven|1 year ago

@dang: I do not know why this is flagged, but I think it's a significant development and it shouldn't be.

Even LWN is covering it.

https://lwn.net/Articles/1006328/

dang|1 year ago

I've turned the flags off now. It's not a very good thread, though—mostly jokes and generic reactions, which is what happens when an article contains little information, but the information it does contain is provocative. (Edit: the comments got somewhat better through the afternoon.)

These little scandals nearly always turn out to be glitchy emphemera in the Black Box of $BigCo, rather than a policy or plan. I imagine that's the case here too. Why would Facebook ban discussion of the operating system it runs on, after 20+ years?

(Btw: @dang doesn't work - if you want reliable message delivery you need to email hn@ycombinator.com)

LorenDB|1 year ago

Anybody here have connections at Meta? Seems like this should be fixed.

benrutter|1 year ago

If I'm reading right, the same facebook who announced a week or so ago that they where scaling back all moderation and validation around online safety, are now putting a blanket ban on users discussing such a fundamental aspect of modern technology that facebook itself runs on it?

If this is a genuine policy, I'm at a complete loss to understand Facebook's stance on anything.

loeg|1 year ago

Distrowatch has taken the observation that distrowatch URLs are blocked and really hyperbolized that into the broader and incorrect claim that discussion of Linux is banned. It isn't.

spencerflem|1 year ago

the "free speech" was a promise to promote right wing speech. do not mistake it for ideology.

banning left wing activism, either acknowledging the genocide in Gaza or apparently now promoting free (less surveilled) software is against what the authoritarians want so it is banned.

this is all consistent if you see it through that lens

oliwarner|1 year ago

This should not be flagged.

Post itself is a little light on evidence, but there are people here already who've tried to post Linuxey things, and have seen it in action.

johnea|1 year ago

I notice a lot of topics being flagged recently.

I would ask flaggers to simply skip those posts and let people who are interested in discussing those topics have their discussion.

Shutting down other peoples conversations is a disturbing trend and it is giving HN more of a one sided echo chamber feel.

IgorPartola|1 year ago

I thought they were going to go full free speech. /s

Seriously, if you haven’t already, sign up for a Mastodon account. This is the motivation you need. Encourage some friends and family members to connect with you there.

paulnpace|1 year ago

Why is this submission flagged?

RandomBacon|1 year ago

HN moderation outsourced to FB? /joke

kbelder|1 year ago

Look at the quality of the posts.

This is an obvious mistake, it's obvious Facebook isn't deliberately banning Linux posts, it's obvious their moderation is incorrectly flagging some posts for some reason, it'll get fixed. It could have been an interesting story and discussion about problems with false positives and automated moderating, or about the lack of human contact at Facebook scale, but instead it's just passionate screeds from too easily excitable posters.

(I didn't flag it, btw.)

beardyw|1 year ago

People flag stuff.

stonesthrowaway|1 year ago

[deleted]

itsmartapuntocm|1 year ago

Facebook explicitly told them that Linux was remaining on their cybersecurity filter.

vcryan|1 year ago

Dump Facebook.

rolandog|1 year ago

My hypothesis is that they're now censoring things that seem "lefty".

guappa|1 year ago

They have been censoring lefty things for ages… It's well known how you could be openly nazi but never openly communist.

duxup|1 year ago

Bot or ML gone wrong and it misunderstood the mention of Linux when associated with bad things and just equated them?

buyucu|1 year ago

this is why content moderation is a really bad idea. the false positives are going to dominate any moderation you do.

forgetfreeman|1 year ago

I'd assert that using private walled gardens as primary distribution channels is the root bad idea here.

iefbr14|1 year ago

I didn't notice. Maybe because I have a long list of facebook domains in my hosts.deny.