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Facebook Blocks Users From Mentioning BugMeNot.com
ThinkingInBinary writes "The other day, I was trying to mention bugmenot.com in my Facebook status, and I discovered to my horror that Facebook blocks the phrase 'bugmenot.com' as "abusive" in status updates, messages, and presumably any other communications on the site. Facebook isn't even listed on BugMeNot, as they requested that logins for Facebook be blocked. This is pretty ridiculous, as I can't even send my friends a message mentioning bugmenot.com!"
This is pretty ridiculous, as I can't even send my friends a message mentioning bugmenot.com!
Of course you can, you just can't use Facebook. Which is probably for the best anyway.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The bigger they get, the more arrogant they get.
Allowing a single corporate entity to control your communication is a bad idea. I suggest this new thing called "email", which is offered by a large number of different providers, and not censored by most.
there is no reason why they cannot do this. it is their website, their policy. of course they will piss some people off, of course they went ahead with this filter fully aware it would bother some people
on the flip side, you are not a zombie craven to facebook. it is entirely in your power to use some other service. facebook is not the end all be all.
there was geocities, tripod, xanga, friendster, myspace, and now facebook. it is time for you to simply discover the next social networking app in a long line of apps that come and go every couple of years
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
From your 'blog':
"... it's appalling for Facebook to block anyone from even mentioning the site -- it's plain and simple censorship, and it's unacceptable!"?
Why is it 'appalling' and 'unacceptable'? You do not own Facebook, and when you created an account, you pretty much waived your rights. If I recall correctly, Facebook is still a privately-owned company. They can block whatever they want, whenever they want, for as long as they want.
If you don't like this policy, familiarize yourself with the Terms of Service before you sign up to similar services.
You're always free to build your own alternative to Facebook; until then, you want to play in their playground, you play by their rules.
"We'll need 2000 crickets, 4 cans of Easy Cheese, and the fluid from 18 glowsticks for this plan to work...." - ph0n1c
Facebook users seem so confused. Facebook, Inc. *OWNS* the website facebook.com - they can do basically whatever they want with it. tough cookies.
the basic premise of physical property is that if you do work on something and make a new thing, then you own it. own meaning society agrees you have exclusive rights to control where and how a thing is used. we have all sorts of other modern day legal and monetary things that also mean you own things, like titles and deeds and receipts. largely, these ideas of ownership have spilled over into the information, too, and rightly so - controlling the use and application of certain information for limited time helps society a lot. many of the current out-of-control IP systems are a bit slanted toward big organizations, but still, all in all IP is a good thing.
people own their personal connections to other people. you made them. an individual is the only person who know how another has treated them, how well they like them or hate them, if they would invite them over to a party next Friday. except, of course, if a person decided to give that information away by publishing it on a global communication system. once you do that, you don't own it any more, then it's like loose change on the sidewalk.
so when you join facebook, you give away your information, your connections to other people. and this is valuable stuff - it's no wonder pie-in-the-sky valuations for facebook are over $15B and growing. If asked to sell the same information, people simply wouldn't, they would and have simply keep it private, and rightly so.
that said, I made a facebook profile. I resisted it for years, but when we wanted to build a app to reach people, the facebook platform worked really well. I still see it as an inequitable exchange, though - Facebook makes explicit and public the information that is valuable to the individual when held private. In doing so, most users give far more to Facebook than they receive in return. it's just business.
Now that BugMeNot will block logins for web sites that request it, what good are they? Why mention them at all?
But at one time, the First Amendment, along with the other liberties guaranteed by our Constitution, were a shining example to those who sought their own liberty while living under authoritarian rule. In my lifetime, America was really a beacon of liberty for the world.
Thanks to fearmongering and the heavy-handed lovers of power, those days are gone, probably forever. We're not the "shining city on the hill" that Reagan spoke of anymore. In fact, he was one of the ones who started the ball rolling down that very hill.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Time for remedial Civics, once again. I swear, it's like public schools are even working any more...
The First Amendment wasn't written in a vacuum. It was part of a centuries-old conversation in Europe that took place amongst people like Milton and Rousseau. Let me distill centuries of thought and arument down to a sentence for you.
Hiding the truth is bad.
It's bad when the government does it. It's bad when companies do it. The more power an entity has, the worse it is. Free men should be unafraid and unashamed to speak their minds. Anyone who tries to squelch that speech is evil.
The cure for bad speech is more speech. There needs to be free and open debate on everything, and when there is, only the Truth is strong enough to prevail.
We don't like censorship in this country. We don't like men who try to muzzle people. We don't stop the KKK by forbidding them to speak. We stop them by calling them a group of inbred idiots and laughing at them.
If you want to do public business in this country, then you need to learn to understand the rules. We don't squelch speech here. The Bills of Rights is merely a list of examples. It was made explicit that our freedom in this country is the DEFAULT setting.
It's not that since the First Amendment pertains to government, then companies can squelch speech. It's that nothing GIVES companies the right to do it.
If not even the government has the right to stifle conversation, then it's for damn sure that mere companies can't either.