Facebook blocks ISSF
Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2020 2:14 pm
Facebook shuts down ISSF.
https://www.news18.com/news/sports/face ... 50303.html
https://www.news18.com/news/sports/face ... 50303.html
I find this all a bit unlikely. There's more to this than the ISSF are letting on.
This isn’t a purge of firearms content or else the NRA of America would have been first on the block - yet they’re still up and verified with a blue tick, as are all the shooting groups, the NRA of GB, NSRA, British Shooting pages, etc.
Literally every shooting group or page I am a member of is still online. There is no purge or censorship of guns or shooting.
It's just the ISSF page. So the idea of "blocking" or "censorship" seems... misplaced.
Given that they got a shoeing last year for that disrespectful post poking fun at a coach at a Shotgun World Cup, there are obviously people with posting rights to the page who have poor judgement. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if they’d posted something which infringed FB's more general rules somehow. Though outright deletion seems extreme unless they’d already had some strikes - they had a blue tick after all, so you’d expect some warnings from FB or just killing individual posts, not the whole page.
I actually wonder whether someone hacked them (or more specifically an ISSF staffer with admin rights on the ISSF page got their personal account hacked). I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone had reused their FB password elsewhere. If they didn’t have Two-Factor Auth enabled, then some miscreant might have got in by credential-stuffing from a password dump elsewhere. Happens literally all the time and it's probably not even targetted. They get a list of email addresses and passwords and start trying them against facebook, twitter, instagram - this time they got a hit on a facebook account with access to a blue-ticked page! Delete the page & change the password for the underlying account (for funsies) and the ISSF end up blaming Facebook because they don’t understand what’s happened to them (they had bad security practices is what).
It might be that somewhere along the line, someone at FB has seen a complaint about an ISSF post and nuked the entire page. They have literally thousands of moderators dealing with content reports and the results (and interpretation of their guidelines & policies) can sometimes be... arbitrary. But as someone who has spent quite a lot of time studying the policies and moderation-efforts of the social media giants, nuking a blue-ticked page like the ISSF strikes me as unlikely unless they were implementing a "no guns" policy en masse - which they obviously weren't. I'm expecting it to be user error or a malicious third party, but don't expect to hear the ISSF admit they fouled up like that.
As an aside, for the love of god:
1. Use different passwords for all your accounts. If one site is compromised, attackers don't get a password that works everywhere. USe a password maager like LastPass to keep those passwords straight (or write them down in a notebook - noone can hack a notebook in the drawer of your desk at home)
2. Register with HaveIBeenPwned to get notifed if your email address turns up in an account breach somewhere. If it's turning up on HIBP, it means it's for sale on the DarkWeb and you need to change your password.
3. Download Authy or Google Authenticator onto your phone and use 2-Factor Autherntication (at least for the important services like your email - your email is the single most important thing you have, because if someone has access to your email, they can use it to do password resets and account recovery on all your other services - facebook, targettalk, etc). When you enable 2FA the servcie will generate some recovery codes - make sure you save them somewhere safe just in case you have issues with Authy or lose your phone. Print them out and stick them in your gun safe - again, noone can hack them there!