Technology

Defederating and blocking bots is the old way, it's defensive and passive and lets them continue what they're doing. It puts the decent people always one step behind.

A better way is the "you're locked in here with me" approach. Redirect bots to a version of your site that provides naught but LLM-generated Nazi furry gibberish and an endless spiral labyrinth of new pages and product reviews of nonexistent products. Try to see if there are any that do that little Javascript-evaluation-to-render-the-client-side-site thing, and if there are, have them mine cryptocurrency for you. Federate with Threads, but serve to the Threads bot an endless series of users who say nothing but constantly-rephrased additional comments which highlight in plain English language situations like this and the types of harm that Meta causes in the real world, and good things to search for if you want to pursue a better solution.

Let the botgarbage come to harm through what comes back to them from your instances. Let them figure it out, if they can, and affirmatively defederate with you instead. Welcome all comers and give good free content to the humans and nothing but pain and misery to the semi-malicious bot traffic. View any bot that talks to you that hasn't got the message yet as a new opportunity and a new challenge.

This is the new way

Which was their goal

Cancelling has been cancelled

Who the fuck is upvoting this

LGF's policy is one of the most upfront and protective ones I've ever seen, second only to something like Pluralistic or other sites which simply don't do ads. Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks like they make it clear they run Google Ads which require cookies, tell you how to opt out of the data collection on Google's side, and promise not to leak your information to anyone except Google.

Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on the site.

Google’s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to your sites and other sites on the Internet.

Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

We may contract with third-party service providers to assist us in better understanding our site visitors. These service providers are not permitted to use the information collected on our behalf except to help us conduct and improve our business.

We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your personally identifiable information. This does not include trusted third parties who assist us in operating our website, conducting our business, or servicing you, so long as those parties agree to keep this information confidential.

Whether you believe their privacy policy is a separate issue, but if you're gonna pick out someone's privacy policy to call cunty and complain about, this is about the last one I would do it to.

"They're all just as bad as meta"

Lol if only you knew what meta have and do with that data

If you continue using our website, we'll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies on this website.

You literally have an "x" button in the top-right of your web browser (or similar exit feature if you've disabled or moved that).

When Netscape Navigator's initial announcement post went out, people were alarmed about the idea that someone might be trying to charge money for software related to the internet. Some people questioned if it was legal to even do that, since the supporting software, backbone, and all the content were freely created by other people -- it was basically at that point a 100% non commercial environment.

Things have changed

Which is funny because Meta has wanted to avoid the "information arbiter" label to avoid the regulations it would inevitably impose.

But I guess no company can resist eating the cake once they have it.

However, they are monopolies, and should be treated as such.

It used to be

On November 30, 2009, Johnson blogged that he was disassociating himself with "the right," writing: "The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff. I won't be going over the cliff with them." He has been heavily critical of conservatives and libertarians since then.

I'd say that's about 10-15 years too late, but as a total outsider who's not at all familiar with the situation, it looks like his realization and action on it was sincere.

Also as TA notes, LibsOfTikTok is still up and Meta gave the argument that the reason was phishing/malware without any further explanation. I.e. even if LGF was still hosting extensive right wing propaganda (which would most likely be a fine reason on the surface to block it IMO), I'd still see a decent argument for the real reason being the Kansas Reflector story and not anything propagandastic.

Hard disagree with this person.

They're position basically boils down to "Facebook won't tell us what problems were identified with the domains that caused the blocks, but it's better to have guards against malicious domains than not". That is a false dichotomy.

A better response is, "unless Facebook is actually disclosing what issues with the domains caused the flagging, we should not allow them to block news websites, especially when they've been critical of Facebook". To do otherwise is basically just giving them carte blanche to block domains whenever they want to, and assuming on their behalf that they're being honest and benevolent.

They go on to make excuses for Meta all throughout the article:

Whatever issue Facebook flagged regarding those ads — Kendall is not clear, and I suspect that is because Facebook is not clear either

While this interpretation of a deliberate effort by Facebook to silence critical reporting is kind of understandable, given its poor communication and the lack of adequate followup, it hardly strikes me as realistic.

For an even simpler example, consider how someone forgetting a password for their account looks exactly the same as someone trying to break into it. On any website worth its salt, you will be slowed down or prevented from trying more than some small number of password attempts, even if you are the actual account owner. This is common security behaviour; Meta’s is merely more advanced.

As someone who works in security, this is actually a hilarious indictment of how inadvanced Facebook's security would have to be to be mistaking actual organic shares and reposts with malicious boosting attempts, and once again is assuming innocence on their behalf where no assumption of innocence is warranted.

Even their sarcastic line,

If you wanted to make a kind-of-lame modern conspiracy movie

is an unwarranted dismissal of assertions that Meta polices political content on their platforms as being akin to a conspiracy, even though we in fact know they do that. Reporting has shown that Meta does actively take political stances and translate those into actions and policies in their sites.

Hanlon's Razor is about assumptions sans evidence, because of the natural human tendency to automatically interpret actions that harm you as intentional. It's not, however, meant to discount evidence of patterns of malicious behavior by actors known to be problematic.

And this is not a new, one-off behavior on Facebook's part:

The climate divide: How Facebook's algorithm amplifies climate disinformation - Feb2022

Facebook did not label over 50% of posts from top climate change deniers, says new report - Feb2022

Facebook’s New Ad Policies Make It Harder for Climate Groups to Counter Big Oil - Mar2022

I can't tell if the author thinks Facebook's security is advanced, or incompetent.

This is a well written and a very rational take on the situation. Nick is probably right.