Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp Down

[Ivanhoe]

[Angrybk]

4 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Just as a matter of interest, how many people here actually use facebook?

 

Most USAians do. I use it for posting dog pics and weird news links I found and have blocked anybody who does any more than that. (Which is why my feed is basically all targeted ads directed at me, poorly. I never get involved in political discussions because… imagine the four most active posters on this forum turned into Voltron and fed a constant diet of crystal meth. 

[MiloMorai]

18 minutes ago, Angrybk said:

Most USAians do. I use it for posting dog pics and weird news links I found and have blocked anybody who does any more than that. (Which is why my feed is basically all targeted ads directed at me, poorly. I never get involved in political discussions because… imagine the four most active posters on this forum turned into Voltron and fed a constant diet of crystal meth. 

I am a member of several Fb groups and their BIG no-no is politics.  Politics will get you the boot/PNG real quick.

[Angrybk]

12 minutes ago, MiloMorai said:

I am a member of several Fb groups and their BIG no-no is politics.  Politics will get you the boot/PNG real quick.

Good call!

[Harold Jones]

Looks like it was user error plus a hole in a system designed to prevent such errors.

Quote

During one of these routine maintenance jobs, a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity, which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centers globally. Our systems are designed to audit commands like these to prevent mistakes like this, but a bug in that audit tool prevented it from properly stopping the command. 

https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/05/networking-traffic/outage-details/

 

[rmgill]

11 hours ago, Markus Becker said:

That could backfire. Aren't there several Supreme Court rulings saying that the government can't use private industry to do things the constitution bans the government from doing itself? 

Yes. What the white house has admitted to is already illegal. 

Arguably, they'll keep doing it and then when the next administration comes in, probably an R unless they steal the election lock stock and barrel, and it'll be a bunch of section 1983 lawsuits or charges for federal charges for deprivation of rights under color of law (felonies). 

[Steven P Allen]

8 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Just as a matter of interest, how many people here actually use facebook?

 

This USian does not.  I'd say that about 1 in 10 of my close associates do not, but the sampling is hardly random.

[Der Zeitgeist]

8 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Just as a matter of interest, how many people here actually use facebook?

 

These days I mostly use it for booking at restaurants that don't have a real web page and receiving birthday notifications for people I don't congratulate (because they would be in my own calendar otherwise). 😅

Facebook was pretty nice about ten years ago, when you were able to reconnect with people from back in school or long-lost friends. When they started to compete with Twitter and made it into a "news" resource, it all went to hell.

These days, almost no one of my friends there really use it as a "social" network any longer. For some, it changed into a political platform, for one girl from back in school, it's the place where she posts nothing but child abduction warnings. In that way, it's a bit like TankNet is today, mostly to be used as a warning about how the Internet was a mistake for some people.

Edited October 6, 2021 by Der Zeitgeist

[Angrybk]

23 minutes ago, Der Zeitgeist said:

These days I mostly use it for booking at restaurants that don't have a real web page and receiving birthday notifications for people I don't congratulate (because they would be in my own calendar otherwise). 😅

Facebook was pretty nice about ten years ago, when you were able to reconnect with people from back in school or long-lost friends. When they started to compete with Twitter and made it into a "news" resource, it all went to hell.

These days, almost no one of my friends there really use it as a "social" network any longer. For some, it changed into a political platform, for one girl from back in school, it's the place where she posts nothing but child abduction warnings. In that way, it's a bit like TankNet is today, mostly to be used as a warning about how the Internet was a mistake for some people.

Ironic thing is that everybody I know who works at Facebook frivkin loves it — great pay, lots of perks, the hours aren’t too crazy etc. Compare to Amazon, which has a rep for being pretty brutal. 

[TrustMe]

The social network was a good movie https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

[Angrybk]

16 hours ago, DB said:

The snippets of her testimony to the Senate committee make a lot of sense to me.

Identification (or in this case, perhaps confirmation) of a problem is only half the game. the other half is the solution to the problem, and it does not follow that the person who manages to do the first has the right answer for the second.

It seems rather unfair to her to have her be considered either a Facebook plant, or to ascribe motives for her opinion on an approach to the solution.

Her job was to apply certain techniques - you call them censorship - to manage the public (read: legislature) concern about the effects of social media. She blew the whistle because Facebook claimed that this approach was effective, when it was not. Her perception was that Facebook was merely pretending to follow that approach.

Her opinion is that if the approach was properly applied, then it would solve the problem, and it's clear that if Facebook wanted it, they could put the effort in to remove the items that they considered harmful. The broader question of censorship and whether Facebook should be a free speech platform is outside the remit of her whistleblowing.

Excellent post, fully agree. 

[Markus Becker]

1 hour ago, rmgill said:

Yes. What the white house has admitted to is already illegal. 

Arguably, they'll keep doing it and then when the next administration comes in, probably an R unless they steal the election lock stock and barrel, and it'll be a bunch of section 1983 lawsuits or charges for federal charges for deprivation of rights under color of law (felonies). 

Certain lawsuits could take care of that faster. 

Even our Supreme Court has stated that FB can't just ban anyone nilly willy. Given its monopoly FB has to respect freedom of speech and ours doesn't go nearly as far as yours. 

Edited October 6, 2021 by Markus Becker

[Angrybk]

2 hours ago, Markus Becker said:

Certain lawsuits could take care of that faster. 

Even our Supreme Court has stated that FB can't just ban anyone nilly willy. Given its monopoly FB has to respect freedom of speech and ours doesn't go nearly as far as yours. 

It’s a private company, why shouldn’t they be able to decide who posts stuff on their platform? (Somebody’s going to bring up the cake shop lawsuit, I was opposed to that as well)

[bojan]

In which case they should be open to be sued for what was posted on their platform also.

[rmgill]

Civil lawsuits are ok. But for folks in government pushing on private sector to perform censorship, civil penalties that the tax payers just pay aren't enough or sufficiently dissuasive of the behavior.  Criminal penalties need to follow. We have this legal structure and I think it needs to start being used.

[sunday]

4 minutes ago, bojan said:

In which case they should be open to be sued for what was posted on their platform also.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/04/facebook-child-exploitation-technology

Quote

Facebook failed to catch hundreds of cases of child exploitation on its platform over the past six years, a study published on Wednesday found.

(...)

Only 9% of the 366 cases were investigated because Facebook alerted authorities, while the rest of the investigations were initiated by authorities without prompting from the social media giant.

This suggests Facebook is not doing all it can to enforce its community standards, which bans “content that sexually exploits or endangers children,” said TPP executive director Daniel Stevens.
(...)

They are very able to delete "homophobic" and "islamofobic" content. No so much with antisemite content in the Spanish facebook, as most of that content comes from the Radical Left.

Edited October 6, 2021 by sunday

[rmgill]

11 minutes ago, Angrybk said:

It’s a private company, why shouldn’t they be able to decide who posts stuff on their platform? (Somebody’s going to bring up the cake shop lawsuit, I was opposed to that as well)

1. public square arguments assert. This derives from company town/company store issues of the 1800s/early 1900s.
2. if they curate the content to a certain editorial slant then they are no longer a platform and are thus a content producer. This puts them in a different class.
3. If they get to curate and restrict speech they don't like, and worse do so under government auspices, this is an attempted end run around 1st amendment protections. Just as the police can't search someone's home without a warrant, they can't also pay a 3rd party to search the same property without a warrant. Both are violations. The latter indicates wilful evasion of constitutional limits and frankly should be considered criminal conspiracy.

https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230

[Markus Becker]

2 hours ago, Angrybk said:

It’s a private company, why shouldn’t they be able to decide who posts stuff on their platform? (Somebody’s going to bring up the cake shop lawsuit, I was opposed to that as well)

Like I said, the government can't circumvent the constitution by putting pressure on private businesses to do what the constitution bans the government from doing directly. And the digital information monopoly FB and so on have. They are not one out of a dozen but the one and only. 

[Angrybk]

23 minutes ago, Markus Becker said:

Like I said, the government can't circumvent the constitution by putting pressure on private businesses to do what the constitution bans the government from doing directly. And the digital information monopoly FB and so on have. They are not one out of a dozen but the one and only. 

I personally think that Facebook is a force for evil not good (and it's a case study for how a lot of nice people can create a giant entity that acts like a monster) but basically every complaint against Facebook involves people who think that the company doesn't block enough stuff that they disagree with, or blocks stuff that they agree with.

Edited October 6, 2021 by Angrybk

[Ssnake]

7 hours ago, Markus Becker said:

the government can't circumvent the constitution by putting pressure on private businesses to do what the constitution bans the government from doing directly

They shouldn't, but they do. Governments just can't do it too openly. But you can threaten to hurt companies badly (in non-public conversations) while you're (influential with) the government simply by denying permissions or designing regulations for maximum stupidity. A ruling party official could signal to be speaking for the president and mention that planned merger, and the permission required for this, then ask the company to think long and hard about whom to piss off in such a situation if they still don't get the drift. Nothing in writing, and yet the the pressure is there.

"The Years of Lyndon Johnson" provide numerous examples for this type of behavior. The idea that it happened then but not today is something that goes beyond the quite far reaching limits of my imagination. Just think of how Hungary or Poland brought the entire national press to heel.

[DB]

Isn't there precedent in the way that the law deals with telecommunications companies not being responsible for what people say on the telephone?

I think the point that Ryan made about the difference between unmoderated and moderated content falls under this type of provision - if you do any moderation then you're accepting responsibility for the content, if you don't, then you should not be liable, in the same way that you can't sue the air for transmitting "hate speech" to your ears.

[Ssnake]

Sure, that's how things ought to be handled. Evidently however, they are not.

 

The inability of customers to contain themselves, accelerated by the profit mechanisms of the operating companies, create of course the kind of conditions in whish mushy concepts such as "hate speech" can find their way into legislation - be it as more power leverage over the tech companies, be it as the typical ham-fisted gut reaction by some legislators acting on the impulse that "something must be done".

[Markus Becker]

6 hours ago, Ssnake said:

They shouldn't, but they do. Governments just can't do it too openly. But you can threaten to hurt companies badly (in non-public conversations) while you're (influential with) the government simply by denying permissions or designing regulations for maximum stupidity. A ruling party official could signal to be speaking for the president and mention that planned merger, and the permission required for this, then ask the company to think long and hard about whom to piss off in such a situation if they still don't get the drift. Nothing in writing, and yet the the pressure is there.

"The Years of Lyndon Johnson" provide numerous examples for this type of behavior. The idea that it happened then but not today is something that goes beyond the quite far reaching limits of my imagination. Just think of how Hungary or Poland brought the entire national press to heel.

 

They keep trying and the courts kept stopping them. I think in this case too because they threaten the companies publicly. And the companies complied, also publicly. 

[Ssnake]

Yeah, the difference between skilled power brokers and amateurs that do it on the front stage.

[sunday]

Or governments