Facebook censors things similarly the way Twitter does. Matter of fact, all the major social media platforms do. I've seen friends and family banned for the silliest of things, for years and years now. We've only just now reached a point where politicians are being targeted, which is kind of insane.
The problem with censorship and I've posted this on HN plenty of times: Today it's the voice of those you disagree with, tomorrow it's your voice.
Fwiw, I’ve seen comments on HN about problematic aspects in FB’s past, which were factually correct and delivered on a neutral tone, but were reported/flagged and became invisible.
It's strange to me how any censorship from Facebook is savaged on this site but I rarely see censorship on HackerNews criticized. This website habitually shadowbans people and controversial comments are hidden as if they never existed. The mods here explicitly warn people against rocking the boat, all in the name of "preserving what this site is for". The disparity is very odd to me. In many ways it seems like people are totally fine with censorship, until someone they don't like or agree with is doing the censorship. At the very least Facebook will tell you they are censoring you. Shadowbanning, a prevalent practice on HN, I think is even worse and more abusive, yet it seems the majority of users here don't have an issue with this. Maybe I'm missing something, but from my perspective the hypocrisy is laughable.
Edit: I think people are missing the point. I don't particularly disagree with any of the replies. HN's commentary is pretty superb in part due to censorship and I agree that without a big stick being used open communities turn to trash. My question is though, why are people defending the mods here but when FB tries to do the same thing, we act like FB is some cyber Gestapo out to dominate speech on the web. It boils down to HN good, FB bad; it's shallow and hypocritical. And I maintain that shadowbanning is an abusive practice. If a user's behavior is such that the user can no longer participate, the user ought to know this. Shadowbanning is like internet gaslamping. You are telling the user one thing while the reality of the situation is different. Websites should not be playing these mind games with their users.
why is that hypocrisy? Even if facebook censors, it's plausible that their positios is that they want to let you opt-in to censorship. an onion site lets you use the site that they censor on an opt-in basis. (I opted out of facebook just over a month ago).
I posted on Facebook about how the NSA have a profile of everyones race, sexual preference religion etc- it was in the context of the Australian government digital health record scheme, I basically said no point opting out of that if you already have Facebook. The post was gone within 20 minutes, right off my wall. Facebook is a closed platform now, at least in China everyone acknowledges the censorship, in the west were still cencored but the fact that it happens is also cencored.
I also cannot share this on FB. Amazing. The fact that FB is censoring this content deserves its own HN exposure. It is an article about international law with nothing offensive, but FB blocks it.... this is going further than I'd have thought FB would ever do. The future doesn't look so bright for social media.
Last time Facebook decided to censor the news in Australia they ended up censoring links a bunch of government pages like links to emergency services[1].
Fortunately I've since deleted my account but the whole posturing around ownership of people's posts and shares is just wild to me.
On a semi-related note I once had a message in FB Messenger that was blocked - it refused to send and gave me an error that the link wasn't allowed. Can't remember what it was as it was a long time ago. But the Facebook censorship situarion has been dire for some time...
Censorship is not a problem on Facebook, it is disinformation. There are no problems limiting information on Facebook, the problem is the opposite in that you are constantly bombarded by an endless stream of highly-targeted bullshit that is designed to engage your lizard hindbrain and bypass reasoning as much as possible.
Unrelated, but the last time I criticized FB on HN there was a rabid backlash along the lines of "you can't just criticize the biggest name in the valley and expect to get away with it".
I suspect Facebook censors things for various despotic governments in the fashion that Google does (in order to comply with local guidelines would be the excuse used here). It's also possible that Facebook has deals with advertisers and blocks some content that may reflect poorly on them as well, but it's nebulous.
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