Meta Blocked Distrowatch Links On Facebook While Running Linux Servers

Facebook has lifted a temporary ban preventing users from posting links to popular OS comparison site Distrowatch – after going so far as to lock the account of the site's editor.

In the latest installment of its weekly newsletter, the smaller site's editor, Jesse Smith, claimed his efforts to report the issue got him blocked:

In the meantime, regular Distrowatch readers were recommended to follow its RSS feeds. (We note that the Thunderbird email client supports RSS, in addition to Usenet newsgroups and Matrix chat, if you're looking for more open alternatives to the increasingly closed social networks.) Distrowatch also has an active account on Mastodon for denizens of the Fediverse.

The Reg FOSS desk has confirmed that the block was real and active up until lunchtime today. Attempting to post anything containing the text distrowatch.com resulted in Facebook refusing to accept the comment.

Discussion of Linux being blocked under the site's cybersecurity rules is an oddity. As Smith notes, the rich irony of this is that Meta's servers run Linux. The company is public about this, as we have mentioned before – it's one of the biggest known users of CentOS Stream. In first place on the membership list of the CentOS Special Interest Group for large-scale users, called the Hyperscale SIG, is Meta's Davide Cavalca, who has spoken at SCaLE and Red Hat's DevConf about how Meta uses CentOS Stream.

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The ban has been mentioned on LWN and is being discussed on Reddit as well as in the Facebook group of LinuxFormat Magazine, where it's reported that the entire Linux Users community has been shut down.

Facebook famously cut its fact-checking team this year. Instead, it's investing heavily in AI, which tends to mean decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio with LLM bot-generated "slop," as it is now known.

We note that the tools for reporting false and misleading information do remain in place for now – this vulture often spends a therapeutic ten minutes cheerfully reporting anti-vaxxers for sharing false health information. We wonder if those reports now go to an LLM bot rather than a human being, and that some automated systems, ranged in the long caves deep in the bowels of the planet – or at least a Meta datacenter, perhaps one in the fast-melting Arctic – are now blocking mentions of the very OS they're running on.

The Register asked Meta to comment yesterday, and we are still awaiting a response. ®

Bootnote

Thanks to Register readers Mark, Keith, and Sean for letting us know about this.