Facebook is gaslighting the web. We can fix it.

http://dashes.com/anil/2011/11/facebook-is-gaslighting-the-web.html

by slig • 15 years ago

276 89 15 years ago

dashes.com

tawm• 15 years ago

Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Adashe...

Semiapies• 15 years ago

If that doesn't come up, the text-only link works for me:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dashes....

anildash5• 15 years ago

Apologies for the server flakiness; Trying to address it now. Please feel free to repost/share -- everything is CC licensed.

mnutt• 15 years ago

Regarding "Web sites are deemed unsafe, even if Facebook monitors them", wouldn't it be worse if Facebook deemed websites that it monitored 'safe'? Then Facebook would be saying: "use Facebook services on your site, or we'll scare all of your users with an interstitial message"

notahacker• 15 years ago

This is true. I presume a preferred option would be dumping the warnings altogether, but this would be a big boon for phishers.

What I don't like about the article is the suggestion that the best way of combating Facebook's excessively paranoid and usually unwarranted warnings about offsite content is to show excessively paranoid warnings to people trying to get into Facebook. Particularly when one of the principal gateways to Facebook is the browsers and websites operated by Google - not exactly a disinterested third party.

ajross3• 15 years ago

Why would it be a boon to phishers? Existing solutions for phishing/malware blacklisting are mature and quite well supported. There's lost of competition in the market, and they work quite well overall. It's not like Facebook couldn't just buy one of these for decent coverage.

The point is that putting up what amounts to a false negative malware warning on basically every "minor" link on facebook (I know it's not really a false negative, but that's how it's perceived) is just terrible overkill for the problem, and a terrible experience for the users.

That it survives at all leads one to wonder seriously about facebook's intentions.

ChuckMcM3• 15 years ago

Cache link is essential, of course the term 'gaslighting' [1] may be common in some groups, it was new to me. The general theme is that Facebook is making changes which make the service benefit Facebook more and is less user friendly. I'm not sure it rises to the level of abuse implied by the term but that is clearly subjective. The 'answer' of course is to leave.

I know, I know, "But all my friends are there!" or "Nothing else has the reach of Facebook!" or "I've invested thousands of hours in Facebook!". At the end of the day, Facebook is on the road to becoming a 'public' company, and they are making choices which are in Facebook's interest (mostly about the whole Open Graph stuff which they will sell for money to advertisers for revenue.

The 'good' Facebook you are looking for has to charge its users for accounts because that is the only way to pay the bills without selling you off to less purient interests.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting (warning Wikipedia link)

redthrowaway• 15 years ago

>(warning Wikipedia link)

What's the warning for? If it's warning against being confronted with Jimbo's piercing gaze, that seems a bit snarky.

jojopotato• 15 years ago

I took it as a riff on the "Please be careful" popup warning from the article.

funkah• 15 years ago

Oh, it's snarky. But not for that reason.

saturdayplace• 15 years ago

I took it as a warning that you're about to click a link that has a high potential of sending you down a rat hole that eventually ends up on the Philosophy article.

barry-cotter• 15 years ago

What's the warning for?

Same reason as TvTropes. Potential tab explosion/epic wasted time event.

ChuckMcM3• 15 years ago

I generally prefer to quote somewhat more authoritative sources than Wikipedia, it isn't that they are always (or even most ways) incorrect or ill-written, its just that for subjective things they cannot be relied upon. It is the nature of Wikipedia of course.

evgen• 15 years ago

The 'good' Facebook you are looking for has to charge its users for accounts because that is the only way to pay the bills without selling you off to less purient interests.

Is that related to how the only 'good' search engine would be one that has to charge you per-search lest it be forced to sell your click info and search terms to less prurient interests?

tomp• 15 years ago

Personally, I would rather be stalked by a search engine than by a social network that has seen my photos and knows who my friends are.

However, with the arrival of G+, this issue has become far more serious...

ChuckMcM3• 15 years ago

Its a fair point. One would hope that the only information you share with advertisers is what the person is looking for, not things like they just signed up for a ski vacation with family, or recently became single, Etc.

One of the ways Blekko (a search engine) differentiates itself in this space is by having a privacy policy that let you keep all of your data private, up to and including not being advertised to at all. (and yes I work there, and no this isn't my pushing 'my' search engine, just that you applied your response to search engines and there is an existence proof of folks who took that step to give you the option of not sharing anything about your searches with anyone)

mikeklaas• 15 years ago

Aside: I really like the typography of your title/subheads. I mistook the font for Gill Sans Light initially, though.

ck22• 15 years ago

The only thing that will "fix" facebook is the next thing to popup to diminish their influence.

Of course shooting themselves in the foot wouldn't hurt either.

Remember MySpace? How about Digg?

1010010111• 15 years ago

Exactly.

It is only when the annoyance levels reach a breaking point that the FB alternatives will be made as user-friendly as FB and brought to the attention of the masses. One will emerge as dominant. And the cycle begins again.

Every itch gets properly scratched, eventually.

ck22• 15 years ago

There's also the "fad" and "uncool" factor.

When everyone's mom and dad (and their mom and dad) is also on facebook, it's going to slowly start losing it's edginess.

Then the next "cool" site will emerge.

derekreed• 15 years ago

I agree completely.

Well thought out and sound reasoning.

And the effort is probably hopeless, but maybe it will at least draw some attention to facebook's abhorrent practices. But they get plenty of negative press already, doesn't seem to slow them down.

I figure it's going to take a lot more efforts like this, to stop the abuses when portals gain monopoly power on user's attention.

User's will put up with it, (and probably put up with much worse), there is no alternative to facebook for what facebook does and is. Chickens and eggs ...

lbrandy2• 15 years ago

I work on the team that generated the warning that seems to be the crux of this post. I am pretty convinced that it is a bug.

His central theme, though, is a bit misguided. I don't understand why 1) using opengraph, or 2) using a like button implies facebook should trust your link and whitelist it. Even pages with those integrations can be malicious.

In this actual case though, the notification link (generated from the commenting widget) seems to malformed and causing it to trip a security check. I've pinged a bunch of people about figuring out what is happening and getting it fixed. The guy sitting next to me is currently trying to repro.

As for convincing Google/Microsoft to warn users when visiting facebook.com because of security false-positives, I'll leave that discussion for you guys.

chc3• 15 years ago

Thank you for expressing this so cogently and calmly. It's easy to get defensive when somebody starts flinging wild accusations like Anil does here, but informative and level-headed responses like this are much better at keeping the conversation on track.

HalSF• 15 years ago

It’s hardly calm and cogent — in fact it’s sort of a wild accusation — to describe a post as “flinging wild accusations” when it does nothing of the sort. Yes, Anil’s post is sharply argued and it’s definitely a polemical pushback against Facebook’s practice, but it’s a valuable part of the debate (especially with the added value of the comments below it), not a flame.

qeorge• 15 years ago

FWIW, I see that warning every single time I click a link from inside the FB app.

I find it annoying as hell, but I took it as a bad UX decision and not a conspiracy.

cft3• 15 years ago

Let's argue Reductio ad absurdum.

Why does not Google pop-up similar warnings when you click on its search results?

-Because Google is dependent on the richness and abundance of third-party websites, for its search to be meaningful.

What is the objective of Facebook?

- To suck users into facebook.com, and sandbox them there. Similarly, the smaller objective of Facebook Social plugins is to lift the userbase from third party websites and move it into Facebook.

kristiandupont• 15 years ago

Google scans for malicious sites as well. The difference is of course, that on FB people share links whereas Google can just decide not to include a link in the results and the user will never know.

lbrandy2• 15 years ago

You seem to be under a collection of interesting misapprehensions...

1. Google does warn in various ways when it detects possible badness. As it should.

2. We don't gate ALL links through such warnings. This can be verified by going to your news feed and clicking just about anything.

3. This is about a specific issue with notifications generated from comment widgets (a very common spam vector).

4. Detecting all badness via the domain name at "write-time" is not a sufficient solution to the malicious link problem.

5. Whatever that was, it wasn't reductio ad absurdum.

dustingetz• 15 years ago

google doesn't seem to have a problem with accounts being compromised from visiting malicious sites. I do like the incentive razor you've applied, but i think there is a simpler explanation in this case.

anildash5• 15 years ago

I appreciate your thoughtful response and want to make clear: I'm not ascribing ill intent to you or to any of your individual coworkers. What I am suggesting, instead, is that the overall goals of Facebook as a company combine to yield this result, and that the overall result is a deliberate outcome of the company's strategy.

That being said, I'd eagerly await resolution of the bugs you've described.

I do not mean to suggest that use of OG or the like button should imply trust, but rather that crawling of a site by Facebook consistently over months or years should show whether it has ever been a bad actor, or whether it's ever been flagged by others as a site with ill intention; Indeed, that's exactly what Stop Badware et. al do.

zerostar07• 15 years ago

I 've had this domain that was since forever a simple redirect to our facebook game spam-listed. I 've sent countless appeals for almost a year now and never heard back. Have something to suggest?

andr3• 15 years ago

Having been bit by this warning message, all this sounds a bit too familiar.

At the time it was being caused by McAfee (yes, dust-off the anti-virus conspiracy theories) had flagged our domain as untrusted because our main virtual host (www.) was returning an HTTP 200 on a 404 Not found page. Yes, that's the "security risk" they found. sigh

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mishlawyer• 15 years ago

we've been a big user of facebook but now we're all cancelling our accounts. we used it to organise trips and meet people but now this is just all becoming too suspicious.

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paganel• 15 years ago

If you believe FB is out-there trying to conquer and destroy the web then please don't use FB comments on your website.

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marshray• 15 years ago

Or just don't use FB.

Everything I read about it just makes me happier that I don't.

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vijayr• 15 years ago

This is the part I don't understand - last week there was an article about Salman Rushdie and FB. I doubt anything is going to change by complaining - FB is continuously going to do everything in its power to monetize and lock down it's users. Why not just stop using FB? May be I don't 'get' the importance of FB, but I think people can happily communicate with just email, phone and a bunch of other sites, which are less offensive than FB.

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r00fus• 15 years ago

But as a website user I don't get to choose the commenting system.

As a blog maintainer, there are three major drop-in comments providers (disqus, intensedebate, facebook included), and if I've had gripes with one of the others, I might end up going for FB comments, despite allowing FB to extend it's "creep" there.

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natrius• 15 years ago

Point 3 ("WEB SITES ARE DEEMED UNSAFE, EVEN IF FACEBOOK MONITORS THEM") has been addressed. Here are the other two.

"YOU CANNOT BRING YOUR CONTENT IN TO FACEBOOK"

False. Facebook's API allows all sorts of external content to enter Facebook. They're just shutting down their app that does that automatically. There are plenty of third party apps that already solve this problem.

"PUBLISHERS WHOSE CONTENT IS CAPTIVE ARE PRIVILEGED"

False. The Washington Post has chosen to embed their stories within the Facebook canvas pages, but that's not a requirement. The other popular news sites on Facebook, The Guardian and Yahoo, do not do this.

This entire post is woefully misinformed.

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ricardobeat• 15 years ago

Thanks Dewey.

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steve8918• 15 years ago

This sounds pretty similar to the complaints from SEO gamers whenever Google changes their algorithms and removes them from the top ranks for a search. I don't agree that any of the examples used by the author is anything particularly harmful.

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tlrobinson2• 15 years ago

I'm usually pretty tolerant of Facebook's more aggressive initiatives, but I've started blocking all of the "frictionless sharing" apps. The user interface they present is ridiculous.

1. I see a friend read an article that looks interesting. I click it.

2. Every time I click one of these I'm asked to add the application before I'm allowed to view the link.

3. My options are "ok" and "cancel". The first few times I assumed I couldn't read the article without clicking ok so I just hit the back button. It turns out "cancel" really means "don't add the app, just take me to the link".

Without that confirmation dialog (which most people probably blindly click through) this is exactly how social media worms work.

Perhaps alert users will click "cancel" the first 5 or 10 times, but eventually they're going to accidentally click "ok" or just give in. Not cool.

Plus, why would I want to see articles that friends read, but didn't think were worthy of manually posting about in the first place?

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raganwald• 15 years ago

I tried clicking “Cancel” on an app today, I was returned to FB without reading the article. I won’t bother trying again to discover whether it was a one-off, whether it was just that app, or whether the problem had something to do with whatever I was using to read FB (Flipboard, Facebook for iPad, Mobile Safari, Desktop Safari).

It is enough for me to know that regular links always work (even though FB tracks click-through) and “frictionless” links, aren’t.

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shaver2• 15 years ago

Yes, you should block apps that you don't want to see. They are (per your reasonable definition) badly behaved, and you should exclude them from your stream. I think that's exactly the behaviour that FB would want, because it ties the utility/economics of those apps to the quality of their user-experience.

(Disclosure: I start at FB next week, though I don't have any inside info on this.)

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tlrobinson2• 15 years ago

It's an ok solution for me, but unfortunately I think most users will just click "ok" so they can see their friend's link without realizing what they're actually agreeing to.

I think that's what Facebook wants: "making the world more open and connected"... at all costs. They're constantly pushing the limit of what level of openness users will accept. It's going to backfire.

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iamandrus2• 15 years ago

The only way to stop Facebook is to protest and boycott it. It worked in 2006 and 2007 (News Feed and Beacon, but Beacon might have been 2008) and it'll work again.

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billybob• 15 years ago

I agree with your first sentence. Whether it worked in the past is arguable, since they continue to do slimy things. But one thing is sure: they can't abuse your data if you don't give it to them.

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Karunamon• 15 years ago

.. and that it's not "abuse" if you know what they're doing with it and expect it.

Don't share anything on Facebook that you wouldn't want to see on the news the next morning. Simple and easy.

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nomdeplume• 15 years ago

I applaud the author's use of detailed documentation and the ability and willingness to dig deeper into the technical side of what he believes to be the problem. As soon as I had installed the Firefox addon Noscript I began to notice the facebook scripts put in place on many sites having nothing to do with Facebook. Their real interest is not in being nice by providing you with a free service, but in using data aggregated by its large user base in order to find patterns - and to sell that information to the highest bidder. Pretty soon advertisers and governments will know more about you than you do yourself.

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jerhewet• 15 years ago

The Ghostery plus RequestPolicy addins. Don't leave home without 'em.

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chimeracoder• 15 years ago

How ironic that this blog's own comment system relies on Facebook.

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anildash5• 15 years ago

It's not ironic, it's deliberate. I want to make sure I'm making informed criticisms of Facebook based on actual usage of the service as both an individual user and as a publisher.

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jlujan• 15 years ago

Been a reader of your blog for a while now, and enjoy your insight. I do feel that chimeracoder's criticism is valid, regardless of your argument of establishing objectivity through participation. As a reader, the inclusion of Facebook Connect and Comments really detracts from the credibility, err. sincerity, of your article.

"toolbar that helps you shop online more effectively but neglects to mention that it will send a list of everything you buy online to the company that provides the toolbar."

What about a website that injects its content on every website you visit, regardless of your willingness to participate as a user? Or tracks every visit regardless of your willingness to participate?

Exhibit A: http://mashable.com/2011/11/17/facebook-reveals-its-user-tra...

There is no terms of service or privacy statement on your site disclosing that you are effectively sharing my activity with Facebook. By the way, I opt-out through the disconnect and Ghostery Chrome extensions, so your site has no comment system... just a Comments heading.

"Facebook has moved from merely being a walled garden into openly attacking its users' ability and willingness to navigate the rest of the web."

As the website operator that uses Facebook Connect, you are signaling to Facebook that you are OK with their current strategy to exist on every page on the internet and dictate the way content should be shared. You cannot complain that they are getting rid of the ability to automatically share your blog content in facebook when they have given you the ability to incorporate all the same functionality directly on your page. It is a genius move on their part. They no longer have to worry about users visiting facebook less over time if they are on every other page the user might visit.

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avree• 15 years ago

Sorry, but this seems like a platitude.

If you had actually used the Facebook Comments system as a user outside of your own blog, you would realize that the behavior you're complaining about doesn't exist (except on your site, where a bug is apparently causing it.)

Comments on Techcrunch, for example, which uses this system do not flag any errors.

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suyash• 15 years ago

Haha, I agree!

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aj700• 15 years ago

I am no great fan of facebook. The timeline sucks.

I think the warnings fb use are necessary, there's so many worms and spam wall postings. You can debate the wording and motive. Many users need paternalism.

You can AUTOMATICALLY have posterous post a link on your wall every time you write a blog post. It doesn't use the notes system at all. It sounds like fb are stopping people using notes for something they weren't designed for.

If he's saying every dumb aol/xp/ie6 user will be too scared to ever leave fb for the rest of the web, wouldn't that be the end of the Eternal September, which some would welcome?

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bsimpson• 15 years ago

Good luck with that. Imagine all the YouTube-quality comments that would flood crbug:

    PLZ FIX TEH FACEBOOK LOGIN SCREEN!!

We can have discussions all we like about whether or not Facebook is a net-positive or a net-negative for the Web, but there's no way Google, Microsoft, or Apple is going to blacklist them.

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carols10cents• 15 years ago

Exactly! I hate to say this because it makes me sound like a tech elitist, but some people really do need those warnings because they can't tell what website they're on.

See the ReadWriteWeb article that had to put a big "this is not Facebook" notice on it.

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droithomme2• 15 years ago

People who use Facebook are silly people. No this is not a flame, it's AOL all over again. The walled garden, except the garden is a dystopian big brother state.

I don't mind people being in the dystopia of their own choosing at all. I enjoy going for walks outside the cyberdome. It's quiet and peaceful out here and people are not monitoring and trying to manipulate and control me.

Those who enjoy being a cog in a machine I am sure lead happy fulfilling lives inside The Facebook.

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thom4• 15 years ago

You know, the dystopia in which I'm forced to share pictures of my newborn son with my family, and talk to friends on the other side of the country that I haven't seen for months, is better than pretty much any other dystopia I can imagine.

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droithomme2• 15 years ago

I'm definitely not criticizing anyone who wants to be in the Matrix, I believe in freedom and free will. I read the referenced article and it was yet another one by someone in the Matrix complaining about the Matrix. It seems such a strange complaint since people are not only able to leave at any time but there are many other cyberworlds they could inhabit alternatively, and many they can even create themselves to their own specifications and desires. There is no need to be unhappy with the offerings of a giant multinational conglomerate run by a cynical sociopath with publicly stated contempt for his customers in an age of freedom and choice.

I'd rather save criticism of this fabulously wealthy conglomerate to be directed at the disturbing ways they are trying to claim ownership of things outside their Matrix, such as that of my personal identity, and to track my comings and goings outside their Matrix without my consent. Those parts are disturbing and dangerous, especially when coupled with their deep interest in mixing it up in politics and influencing laws to create a captive universal audience.

Matrix is fine, but I want it to stay bottled up and optional.

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VladRussian• 15 years ago

>the dystopia in which I'm forced to share pictures of my newborn son with my family, and talk to friends on the other side of the country that I haven't seen for months

the things impossible without Facebook :)

The main thing that Facebbok does isn't [technically] enabling some specific communications in some specific space, the main thing is that Facebook puts people into that space, bumps them one into another and thus forcing/making/nudging/tempting to perform act of communication that otherwise may not have happened. Facebook makes [helps to unleash] one a social beast.

Vs. the force in dystopias, in the Facebook case we have dopamine generating activities grounded in the Facebook environment. While they can be replaced by dopamine generating activities in other environments [ i enjoy mine here on HN for example ], why would a social dopamine addicted beast that gets it fix on-schedule bother?

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royaltenenbaum• 15 years ago

The walls are closing in on Facebook. It's only a matter of time for it's business model. People eventually wake up. Better squeeze that IPO for all it's worth.

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bct• 15 years ago

Disappointing. "We can beg other powers to intervene" is not "we can fix it".

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mark_l_watson• 15 years ago

I like to login to FB for several minutes once or twice a week - a quick way to see what some friends are doing. However, I logout as soon as I am done. I also went through and disabled all FB apps, except for my own test app.

Given these simple precautions, is there really anything wrong with FB? Am I missing something?

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MBlume• 15 years ago

If you think that people less prudent than you should be "protected" from Facebook, then your participation may be harmful to them because it's part of what encourages them to participate.

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Facebook is gaslighting the web. We can fix it.

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