HN Explorer

Ask HN: Facebook blocked us and there's nothing we can do?

11 points by ende42 ↗ HN
We - laut.fm, a user generated radio platform running about 1300 radio stations in germany - are being blocked by facebook.

It started last Thursday. Suddenly any post or chat message containing the string "laut.fm" would be blocked with the following error message:

  You can't post this because it has a blocked link
  The content you're trying to share includes a link that our security systems detected to be unsafe:

  laut.fm

  Please remove this link to continue.

  If you think you're seeing this by mistake, please let us know.
In addition our facebook page disappeared. It reappeared on Sunday, but any posts between last November and now where missing.

We have no further information about what might be offending facebook. Our site is pure organic user generated content. We don't do any special SEO tricks.

We and several of our users reported the blockage via the link provided in the error message to no avail. We reported an issue with our facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/164405897002583?rdrhc . When trying to debug the issue via the facebook debugger (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http%3A%2F%2Flaut.fm) one gets the error message "Failed to get composer template data.". Using a link shortener to post laut.fm links won't work either. I worked through the points on this list: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13185406/facebook-wont-share-a-link-to-my-site without success.

The most frustrating part is not even being blocked, but being left in the dark about the reasons.

We are out of ideas. I use this HN post as a last resort. Any help or hint on how to proceed would be highly appreciated.

Niko.

17 comments

[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 64.4 ms ] thread
mschuster91
That total lack of accountability really, really sucks. If I'm a domain registrar and my DNS servers go down, I'm liable for damages. Same if I am a hoster. Or, to stay in the meatspace, when I am a railway/flight operator, I'm liable by law for delays.

Yet, if Facebook or Google decide to block, downrank etc. my business, I have no legal options at all, I don't even have any transparency. Everyone is at the mercy of the Cloud Gods. That has to change.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
Houshalter
It does suck, but on the other hand spam is rampant and fighting it from overrunning your site necessarily means there will be some gray areas and false positives.
ende42
I agree 100%. I know they at least have to try to reduce spam. I only wish anybody would react on our error reports.
rsankar
You pay for tickets.You pay your registrar. You don't have to pay for Google and Facebook .
mschuster91
As an advertising customer, yes I do pay them.
officialjunk
I'm not familiar with this aspect of Facebook, but it looks as though they do provide a reason in the message, though: "...includes a link that our security systems detected to be unsafe." unless this is just their catch-all phrasing for links that they don't like for some reason. Have you looked into why they may think your site is unsafe? Is your user generated content properly sanitized? Are other *.fm links working? How are you hosting (maybe the IP range is banned by some other malicious activity)?
ende42
The IP range is only shared with our other services as laut.de and laut.tv which can be shared just fine. Links to other FM domains work, too. I'm pretty sure our content is sanitized properly.
ende42
BTW: I just posted the link to this HN post on Facebook. This worked. However, if anybody else tries to share my Facebook-post it get's blocked, because the excerpt contains the string "laut.fm". Hilarious.
hervert
I am the engineer at Facebook responsible for this mistake - my apologies, and I've already fixed it. The domain was blocked due to a false positive on one of our automated classifiers used to fight spam. While we strive to have 0 false positives, some do happen. We are investigating how this happened in the first place and will be adjusting the classifier accordingly.
coverband
Thank you for doing the right thing and having the courage to own up to your mistake.
ende42
Thank you for your honest response. Mistakes happen all the time.

The thing that concerned us most is that as a user of Facebook we had the impression that all efforts of reporting the issue where unheard. There was literally no feedback what so ever. I totally get that Facebook can't respond individually to error reports, it's just got too many users for that. None the less we felt really helpless in that situation.

I would never have imagined anyone of Facebook would ever answer this HN post. So again: Kudos for this statement and thanks for resolving this issue.

Niko.

msaleh123
I registered My domain "www.3rbpro.com" at 31/5/2014 and set up WP blog on it, For some reason my domain was banned from Facebook. So when I try to post a link from my domain in Facebook I get this notice: https://www.dropbox.com/s/y2bnlaaqm4ieiua/Screenshot%202014-...

I've tried contacting Facebook via the form but they don't answer me. Is there any way of knowing what caused this and is there a way to fix this because it's crucial to my business.

keepitessential
my site Facebook.com/keepitessential is also blocked. What did you do to fix that? I get "The content you're trying to share includes a link that our security systems detected to be unsafe" when I try to share it.