Why would facebook block an open source initiative, considering that they've contributed a ton of open source software (react, graphql, pytorch, etc)? The more simple explanation is that an automated detector misclassified the link because it shares patterns with spam links.

Facebook is fighting against the "huge target on its back" effect. The bigger of an audience you are, the more interest there is in posting abusive content, whether it's spam, trolling, or something else.

The result is usually that you end up digging a bigger and bigger moat around your submission and curation process, so that your service is not completely flooded with crap.

I think this is what you are seeing here, rather than censorship of this specific link or cause.

I once posted a URL to a forum site I was developing for a community to Facebook, and somehow it set off the spam detector. For the next several months, I would get regular notices that a comment I left on another group's discussion was marked as spam, and was not visible to anyone else. I was posting regular comments, without links, apolitical, not critical of anyone, just adding to the discussion.

The notices have since stopped, but I still rarely get any response to my comments, and anything I post to my profile's feed usually gets "ignored" completely, while in the past I'd get a pretty stable number of likes from friends (in the low double digits or high single digits.)

As someone who has moderated a decent size sub-reddit in the past, I understand that there's no malicious intent on Facebook's part in this. They are just so much bigger than this one individual that they simply cannot see me, the same way I cannot see a bacteria, and may not notice a tiny gnat.

On the contrary, it's not even slightly difficult to believe that this is not deliberate because it happens all the time.

Not everything has to be a mad conspiracy. It's roughly one billion times easier to believe that a bad automated flagging system has triggered and marked this particular link as spam, than it is to believe that someone at Facebook is twirling their moustache, stroking their long-haired white cat, and hatching a plot to thwart the dastardly freedom-fighters of the open-source movement.

Facebook's automated moderation systems are famously shit.

Update: I'm now able to post the link, I'm totally sure it has NOTHING AT ALL to do with this making HN frontpage, just a funny coincidence.

When you say 'blocked as spam' - I Just pasted it into a new post, and it worked just fine? Or do you mean other people can't see it?

I was able to post it recently on FB, from the UK.

Something I wrote in the last 2 weeks on fb was autoflagged as spam. As a result I set my account to be deleted. I thought I was shadow banned. When I reactivated it yesterday I received the post marked as spam, object or confirm wizard. Idk if that's new. But it does feel like they're training a new AI and crowdsourcing that process.

But then again they might genuinely suppress this initiative, idk.

What link? Can you provide a little background for those of us who have no idea what you're talking about?

do they also block it in messenger? afaik they block any url pattern that people tend to share often

Why would it not be spam? If many accounts are sending that link to their contacts, doesn't that exactly mimic bot-spam?

With so many large "crime waves", these small ripples which seem like crimes... Are they? Is MZ(read: Mark Zuckerberg) next to AC(read: Al Capone)? Does he still, in his heart of hearts, refer to his users as "stupid *f's"(as he referred to them in 2000's for "trusting" him. Nothing changed to make his users any smarter, so getting caught openly admitting how he feels did not change his opinion on his users, merely changed who he talks openly with, and the medium.

.eu isn’t the most legitimate looking domain. They probably just have some rules around which domains tend to be spam/scam/bs