It’s been a minute since Linux – the backbone of the internet these days, and for a while, Meta’s assets included – has been the target of a smear campaign by Big Tech.
After all, the entire tech industry is benefiting from, and many big players have been contributing to the development of Linux, while appearing to make peace with the “little” competing, free and open source project. That war is well over – the good guys have won.
In the past, Microsoft would go after Linux, with a CEO branding it “a cancer” at one point. But now, Meta appeared to reignite the controversy, censoring posts that reference Linux and DistroWatch.com as “cybersecurity threats” and blocking the account of the site.
Of course, Facebook runs Linux servers, and as has already been noted, so does the rest of the internet/world. A major reason is the superior level of security and flexibility it provides, compared to, say, Microsoft Windows.
But none of that stopped Facebook from reviving – if only briefly – the one-sided feud proprietary tech giants have against Linux, as posts mentioning it, and DistroWatch, got banned.
Linux is a kernel – the heart of any operating system built on top of it (core Android being one of them). These operating systems are referred to as “distros” (distributions) in the free and open-source community. Hence, DistroWatch, a website that has for well over a decade served to track a great variety of Linux operating systems.
They provide for reliable OS’s, these days fully compatible with major hardware manufacturers’ products, that give not only big corporate users like Meta, but anyone deciding to run a “distro” – like the popular Ubuntu or Fedora – a high degree of control over their computing, and an order of magnitude better security than anything closed source systems like Microsoft or Apple can offer.
How absurd then, that Facebook treated the mention of Linux as “malware.”
“Starting on January 19, 2025, Facebook’s internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labelled groups associated with Linux as being ‘cybersecurity threats’. Any posts mentioning DistroWatch and multiple groups associated with Linux and Linux discussions have either been shut down or had many of their posts removed,” DistroWatch announced.
It remains unclear as of this writing how and why this incident occurred.
