Source: I work building an SMM tool, and Facebook Link posts constantly need our attention
...on a social media site designed to aggregate URLs?
> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
I've been perplexed for years, I wonder if it went unnoticed all this time or they reverted then reimplement the ban.
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...
I've long believed that a large part of technological evil comes from bugs which were introduced innocuously, but intentionally not fixed.
Like, your ISP wouldn't intentionally design a system to steal your money, but they would build a low-quality billing system and then prioritise fixing systematic bugs that cause errors in the customer's favour, while leaving the ones that cause overbilling.
This could easily be the same on Facebook - this got swept up in a false positive and then someone decided it's not a good one to fix.
And what are you going to do about it? Get into a lawyer slap fight with a foreign trillion dollar corporation?
Some context: https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/site-support/26448/
Here's VirusTotal on the tarball (note Chrome blocks its download, for the same reason): https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/c08e2ba0049307017bf9d8a6...
Nimda was a Windows malware from 2001. It seems unlikely that would be a meaningful attack vector for a compromised privoxy in 2025. But again, I have not investigated it.
That's quite the statement to make without any source to back it up; I wonder what the evidence for this is.
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.
> 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?
- Facebook is censoring this content
- They decided Linux is malware
- They label groups associated with Linux as "cybersecurity threats"
The first one they seem to give evidence for the second two seem to be assumptions.
Reading the post, it sounds like this may rather be because of incorrect categorization of DistroWatch and links to it than an outright ban on Linux discussion. So yet another issue with Facebook's content moderation methods.
"A bad thing is happening and the evidence of it happening is that I said it's happening."
By the way, I love DistroWatch and do think FB is messing with their posts. But there's no evidence to show if it's a new policy, a glitch in the moderation or an internal screw up.
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.
I knew a company that leapt to the same conclusion regarding GitHub.
And particularly in the context of work primarily about communication or computing : having an official Xitter account for a journalist or a GitHub account for a software developer is like promoting a brand of cigarettes or opiates by a doctor - a violation of professional deontology.
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.
Nobody outside of Facebook can possibly know the whole story. Hell, most people within Facebook can’t know, either.
Are you suspecting that distrowatch knows more about the context than they are letting on?
Their second request (after a network diagram) is always to create an EC2 instance running Kali.
Which, honestly, confuses me a bit -- all of the packages are available in AL or Ubuntu, so why do they care? I don't know, and I guess I don't care enough to ask. Just give me the attestation document please. :)
Likewise, discussion should be allowed.
The actual title of this story is literally not believable if you take the most generic meaning of discussion and Linux.
I'd go even further: I don't believe that anyone could believe that the title is believable.
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...
It's not an exaggeration to say I've experienced it at every employer I've had.
Seriously though, I'm curious (have no account): are you able to post that link on Facebook?
Was it just a cost reduction: fact checking takes effort and those checkers have to be paid? With the result being situations like this?
I guess Linux needs to go mainstream first.
No, it was clearly an attempt to court Trump, unfortunately 'not enough ass kissing, yet' according to the trump team.
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...
They are obviously different and mostly separate.
A presentation of facts can be biased.
E.g. a news agency can have a characteristic political slant, yet not make up facts to suit that narrative.
When a bias is severe, such that it leads to behaviors like concealing important facts in order to manipulate the correct understanding of a situation, then fact checking can find a problem with it.
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.
It's just some "AI" hallucinating.
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.
That seems pretty automated to me.
> 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.
How can one provide evidence that something is not being displayed on a website? Isn't this, like, a formal fallacy, or something?
> 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.
Who was overzealous if not one or more internal policy makers?
Avoid platforms altogether.
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.
If it's something trending towards illegal, toss it into an "emergency" queue for moderators to hand-verify and don't make it visible until it's been checked.
So in your example, if someone uploads war imagery, it would be tagged as "war," "violence," "gore" and be auto-blurred for users. That doesn't mean the post or account needs to be outright nuked, just treated differently from SFW stuff.
There should be - after all, this is akin to graffiti, which is typically fined.
What is not acceptable, is a platform creating a paralegal environment.
This is what the yanks call "a complete nothing-burger".
Though I will admit that Bryan is just a deeply unlikable human who is generally under-informed-at-best on any given subject that he's talking about, so people might be looking at it more cynically than if someone else posted it.
All the Linux reviews that I have been warned about or have been removed have been links to DistroWatch.
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.
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.
In most cases they're pretty radioactive isotopes of gold. But IMO that just makes it feel even more like alchemy. The gold is cursed.
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.
Imagine being confident enough to believe and document that. Crazy? Maybe, but a crazy one can appreciate.
The problem isn't when one uncle is doing this. The problem is when the bulk of the content you see on FB is as crazy as this.
I mean, if you like purchasing the National Enquirer and flipping through it, then by all means, this is for you.
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.
Platforms seem to get a lot more leeway than abusing drugs (alcohol,smoking...) for some reason ?
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
I'm glad someone finally said it.
Give their database to bot for search and destroy and you will understand by how many will survive.
Good luck!
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).
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...
Some people were complaining about meta, but species seems the main one. And only the main site, the mobile site is fine.
— Simone de Beauvoir
Even LWN is covering it.
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)
I can believe DistroWatch the website got blocked by Facebook for whatever reason and I can sympathize, but exaggerating it to something obviously false doesn’t do them any favors. I think the title needs to be changed if it’s allowed to stay up.
TBH I didn't think the @ thing would work - I was just hoping you'd notice. I have been meaning to email you, though.
If this is a genuine policy, I'm at a complete loss to understand Facebook's stance on anything.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.)
