Facebook’s heavy-handed censorship of Linux groups and topics was “in error,” the social media juggernaut has admitted. Responding to reports earlier this week, sparked by the curious censorship of the eminently wholesome DistroWatch, Facebook contacted PCMag to say that it had made a mistake and that the underlying issue had been rectified.
“This enforcement was in error and has since been addressed. Discussions of Linux are allowed on our services,” said a Meta rep to PCMag. That is the full extent of the statement reproduced by the source. Still, it helps us to dismiss various conspiracy theories about the Silicon Valley establishment feeling threatened by the open source movement. Like most big companies, Meta seems slow to respond and react to gaffes that adversely affect users.
Copenhagen-hosted DistroWatch says it has appealed against the Community Standards-triggered ban shortly after it noticed it was in effect (January 19). PCMag received the Facebook admission of error on January 28. The latest statement from DistroWatch, which now prefers posting on Mastodon, indicates that Facebook has lifted the DistroWatch links ban.
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In the above post, DistroWatch notes that it is aware of the supposed lifting of its ban but that the account still seems to be locked. We just checked DistroWatch’s Facebook page (so you don’t have to). A post yesterday was ‘403 Forbidden’ by Facebook (10 likes), but one about a new BSD release published earlier today seems successful (2 likes).
So, it looks like we have a satisfactory outcome from the situation, though it wouldn’t have hurt Facebook to apologize to DistroWatch, among others, publicly. Meanwhile, the reason for the ‘Facebook Linux ban’ remains a mystery. If we had to put forward a theory behind the ban, it would probably highlight how Facebook is transitioning its fact-checking to an X-like Community Notes model.
Transitions often have teething problems, and Facebook posts a lot of data to its platforms every minute of the day. It is ironic, however, that shifting away from professional fact-checker-driven ‘censorship’ should result in innocuous discussions of open-source operating systems being so strictly censored on this social media platform.
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