I have personally never heard of, or seen, any scams or malware related to mastadon - aren't you giving too much benefit of the doubt?
My best guess is that their lists of competitors to keep an eye on got mixed up with other stuff. Or, of course, that they simply don't want to promote competitors on their platform, which would be normal for any non-monopoly.
I could imagine that the wording regarding corporate control could have erroneously triggered a filter because that phrase appears for example in anti-wax and conspiracy theory posts.
It would be interesting to do some experiments here: post the same text to see if it gets removed again, and then repost it and remove sentences to see which one triggered the filter.
the largest mastodon instance has 500k users. Facebook has two billion users. If you can post twitter and tiktok and tumblr links on facebook, do you seriously think there's someone sitting at facebook taking names and making lists about a social network that practically nobody even uses
there are competitors a hundred times as large you can link too. My first guess is it probably tripped some NSFW filter because on some mastodon instances there's quite a lot of porn.
> do you seriously think there's someone sitting at facebook taking names and making lists about a social network that practically nobody even uses
Yes, when I worked at a 500-person startup there was an employee who’s sole task was to stay aware of our established competitors and nimbler startups. It was jokingly nicknamed the “office of paranoia.”
That said, I highly doubt FB is using their list of competitors to block posts mentioning them.
There are a number of extremely poorly moderated Mastodon instances with a large amount of hateful and hurtful content. I’d imagine they’re automatically blocking a lot of these sites.
Source: I used and helped maintain one of the “don’t federate with these instances” list.
I mean, sure, but the post content doesn't mention `examplebarelylegal.moe` or `exampleviolenceagainst.gay` or some such domain -- it's just the project's main instance list, which lists only instances intended to be compliant with a moderation standard.
Oh, Fediblock! The list of based instances. It's amazing to me that the people who maintain these lists don't seem to realize that they're maintaining a useful directory for all the people they don't like to help them find places to congregate, meanwhile isolating them from more moderate influences.
The explanation is much simpler, look at the date, text of the post and that it was removed with a delay. His friends who disagreed with him politically must reported it as a spam. Since FB accounts are tied to real names, FB unlike other social sites can trust reports more and start blocking automatically.
My best guess is that their lists of competitors to keep an eye on got mixed up with other stuff. Or, of course, that they simply don't want to promote competitors on their platform, which would be normal for any non-monopoly.