In fact, the reason I hate Facebook and social media so much is that they enable patently stupid theories like this to gain traction.
And I don't see anything illegal here. Facebook.com is a private website of Mark and stakeholders, they can do whatever they want on their territory (if it's legal). As much as you can do on your backyard.
Ethics is a different topic, but it's perfectly legal.
Like if someone said "facebook tracks you everywhere you go" or "your phone is listening to you" or "your television watches everything you watch" it would be shrugged off.
Looking forward to the day that Google, FB and Twitter are classified as public-utilities
I mean do people seriously believe Sheryl Sandberg is sitting somewhere banning Lincoln from Utah with a thousand followers so that he can't spread the gospel of Mastodon
Like how Google gave duck.com to DuckDuckGo and funds Mozilla
If Facebook doesn’t like this explanation and it circulates to millions of people, they are free to offer a competing explanation.
Arguing an unproven point isn’t a problem here, it’s a strategy, and it’s a good one.
A good guess for the actual reason would perhaps be that someone who posts lots of links runs a risk of posting ones found in a blacklist. That blacklist probably doesn’t deliberately contain “competing social networks” though, but could contain such links in error, indicated as phishing or malware.
However, given the strength of Facebook's monopoly, they have the power of a state over people's lives (e.g. via a livelihood that depends on a Facebook account).
The lack of due process (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_process) is very worrying.
The Magna Carta says "No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land."
This feels like a breach of that, even though it is a monopoly corporation, instead of a state.
In some cases, like this one, Facebook or Instagram will ask for identity proof, and once collected, will still send boilerplate responses that the account can’t be activated. It’s not surprising that Facebook collected his ID and still refused to help.
As for Facebook engineers solving complex problems with machine learning, I don’t see evidence of that. If anything, Facebook has huge disconnected code bases filled with bugs and biases that nobody can understand or do anything about.
This is good riddance in a way. That Facebook and Instagram are removing users who may have stayed as decent people bringing others to engage on these platforms is a net positive to society.
The consequences are quite scary, and we have no means to recover from it - control is from remote people in another country, with no means of complaint.
If we're going to have monopoly social networks, we at least need regulation imposing the extensive cost on them of manual vetting with judicial review for cases like this.
