Distrowatch was blocked for linking to an AV-flagged privoxy 4.0.0 tarball. The same kind of anti-malware blocking you'd expect for a mass-market, non-technical audience. Nothing to do with "speech" or Linux in general.
I guess filtering is level of:
"My 11-year-old son keeps talking about this Linux thing with his computer. What is Linux? Is it a hacking tool? Should I be worried?"
Who knows? The article says "I've tried to appeal the ban and was told the next day that Linux-related material is staying on the cybersecurity filter." -- presumably we could ask Distrowatch to share the exact wording of the response they got back, but the fact FB apparently responded in such a way suggests it wasn't a filter specific to Distrowatch.
Maybe! We're all just speculating about the degree of accuracy here. I messaged them on Mastodon to see if they will clarify the text. Will post back if I hear from them.
This is Facebook, where people regularly post something in group A and think they posted it in group B, and then complain that their post was "deleted" or "censored".
On another note, Sourceforge just removes the malware flag, but did they actually check anything or just went with the provided explanation without any concrete details? If I hijacked some software and got caught, I'd act nonchalantly like this as well and hope it'll blow over without anyone noticing.
Nimda was a Windows malware from 2001. It seems unlikely that would be a meaningful attack vector for a compromised privoxy in 2025. But again, I have not investigated it.
Thank you for providing this, it seemed a little clickbaity. Even far less technical companies run some things in Linux so seems weird they’d ban Linux talk in general.
Some context: https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/site-support/26448/