Sharing Linux release announcements is apparently a cybersecurity threat. Fortunately, Facebook’s keeping an eye on me to make sure that doesn’t happen again.
Two of my posts have been removed and I’ve been banned from posting to FOSS Force’s Facebook page until tomorrow because I posted links to a couple of items published on DistroWatch. Not only that: if I continue being such a bad grrl, I could [be still my beating heart] have my Facebook account cancelled.
What the frack did I post? you ask. It’s complicated, so I’m going to ‘splain things in the order I saw them — and in the *way* that I saw them…
For starters, one post was a link to DistroWatch’s notice of the release of version 26.11 of Parted Magic, which is one of the most used apps on the planet for partitioning hard drives. The other was to a DistroWatch release notice for the stable 1.0 release of LCOS, better known — and better explained — as Lunduke Computer Operating System.
Why is Zuck going all Mommy-Dearest over this? “Your post goes against our Community Standards on cybersecurity,” Facebook yelled in big bold type, before returning to its regular reading type. “We have these standards because we want everyone to feel safe, respected and welcome.”
I could kinda understand that last sentence applied to Lunduke, if the word “cybersecurity” wasn’t mixed into it. After all, he does have a way of making us liberal woke snowflake types feel both unrespected and unwelcome, but never necessarily unsafe (unless, of course, we start shouting lefty slogans at a Lunduke rally). Besides, the link wasn’t about Lunduke the wingnut, but about Lunduke the distro builder and the Linux distro he’s developed — and I doubt very much that Facebook’s thinking he’s built a backdoor to LCOS that’s going to report users to ICE or something.
By the same token — actually it’s only a similar token — I could kinda sorta understand Meta’s cybersecurity concerns about Parted Magic, but only if I didn’t think it through. Yup, it’s true that you can really screw up a hard drive with Parted Magic if you don’t know what you’re doing, but the key phrase there is “if you don’t know what you’re doing.” That’s not its designated purpose.
Remember the “in the order I saw them” caveat? That’s where we are now, and that’s where it gets even weirder, because maybe the links in question aren’t necessarily to those posts at all. It seems that the image accompanying the Parted Magic text is the splash screen for the OpenIndiana open source Unix operating system, and the text for the LCOS splash screen image is for the release of NebiOS, another Linux distribution.
Aye-yi-yi! At this point I throw up my hands, roll my eyes, pretend I’m a dweeb, and sigh, “Technology. Go figure.”
I protested with Facebook’s AI, of course, and told them to get a human involved. Even with the mismatched image and text, that’ll likely work, because there’s still nothing there that would trigger a cybersecurity alert.
Without the weird mismatch, I’ve had similar experiences with the Zuck universe in the past. My main Facebook account has on occasion contained a post with some phrase or something or another that’s tripped a flag, which always gets fixed after I convince Facebook’s threatening herd of Llamas to have an actual human being look at the post and then decide.
Again, I’m assuming the same thing will happen here. However, it would be nice if Facebook trained those Llamas to automatically summon a pair of human eyes before letting the dogs out and starting with the threats.
Oh, BTW. At the same time as they were posted to Facebook, the same links were posted to Bluesky, Mastodon, and X. None of those platforms even blinked.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
The root cause of the problem is that you posted to Facebook. Stop doing that and no more problems!
We would, except our Facebook page is popular with our site’s readers.