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 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?

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.

- 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.

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.

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.

It's not an exaggeration to say I've experienced it at every employer I've had.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Platforms seem to get a lot more leeway than abusing drugs (alcohol,smoking...) for some reason ?

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

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 your domain links to content that AVs flag as malware, it gets blocked on FB. This is probably not shocking? Distrowatch is likely uniquely susceptible to this because they're constantly linking to novel, 3rd-party tarballs ("Latest Packages" column).