Facebook is Blocking Canadians’ Posts About the Assassination of a BC Sikh Leader. Their Posts Were Targeted by India’s Government.
Facebook is Blocking Canadians’ Posts About the Assassination of a BC Sikh Leader. Their Posts Were Targeted by India’s Government.
Canadian Sikh Facebook users receive notifications that their posts are being taken down because they’re in violation of Indian law
Exhibit A on why getting your news from fb is a bad idea.
It's not about that, at all. It's Facebook actively removing shared events and posts within a community, because Indian gov asked them to.
So, fb is an unreliable place to post information you want others to see?
Sounds like what I was talking about.
If they are willing to remove this at the behest of a foreign nation, I do not trust them to be a disseminator of any news or information,
Meanwhile I've seen this story all over Canadian Mastodon and Lemmy. I guess Meta just has to do business in India.
Ban Facebook from Canada entirely, I say.
how about we just use it for its intended use and not expect to rely on it for key information??????
Because that clearly isn't working.
Because there were and are few better more accessible news aggregation options. (Edit- for the general less technically minded folks).
Here we are on the fediverse trying to change that. Make sure you preach outside of the echo chamber.
I tried to post several links to news on this topic to Facebook just now. Would not let me. Now all posts except ads are blank now. I guess that's my "punishment". Fuck you Facebook!
Have you been living under a rock? Canadian news isn't allowed on Facebook because our government decided Facebook had to pay to host news links and they weren't even close to making a deal before they signed it into law. It was a political stunt. Government gets to pretend they're putting pressure on big tech, then they can blame big tech when their shitty terms aren't accepted, then in a couple years when they make a deal they can act like they won.
To copy what I posted in the same thread on another instance (but conversation seems more relevant here):
So they received a take down request from the Indian government, mistook the users for being in India, followed the law that they're required to follow in India, and when it was brought to their attention that those users were actually based in Canada they went back and allowed the posts. This doesn't seem as malicious as people are making it out to be, they should probably work on their geo-blocking, but with 3 billion users in 150+ countries with their own local laws it's probably safer to be aggressive when it comes to removing content when requested.
Really? Data harvesting company Meta didn't know which country these posts originated from, on their own site? I have my doubts, to say the least.
Yeah, I mean, Meta being incompetent doesn't exactly surprise me, but it's not exactly a good look either way. (Since when does Meta do authoritarian governments' censorship for them? Nations can make takedown requests on their citizens posting news they don't like? On one hand, of course. Like a billion people live in India, Facebook will do whatever it can to keep that business. As much as alreadyI dislike Facebook, the idea had never crossed my mind before.)
Do you really want Frontline facebook moderation staff (or many levels between) having the ability to run the kinds of queries required to validate country of origin or other privacy-invading points of validations required?
I don't.
And it takes time for those kinds of queries to reach the (very busy) desks of the purposefully constrained few, who can.
Funniest thing about comments like this is that I imagine you thinking that Meta is just one dude sitting at a computer lol. Meta is a huge company, like almost 100k employees and even more automated processes. I think it's very, very likely that the team that gets a takedown request from the Indian government just goes ahead and takes that post down.
Or Facebook is subservient to the biggest market. I wonder why this guy Nijjar needed Killin by India.
I guess he was a strong proponent of a Sikh free state, which Modi sees as a direct threat to his free and prosperous India (I believe he's Hindu). So they labelled him a terrorist and had him shot outside a Sikh temple in BC...