Facebook Says It's Filtering Comments For Spam, Not Censoring Them

bhagwad writes "Apparently Robert Scoble tried to post a long comment on Facebook only to have a message pop up saying 'This comment seems irrelevant or inappropriate and can't be posted. To avoid having your comments blocked, please make sure they contribute to the post in a positive way.' If true, this is huge. For one the self-moderating system of comments has always been the rule so far. And with countries like India rooting for the pre-screening of content and comments, is Facebook thinking of caving into these demands?" Facebook says there's a more innocuous explanation: namely, that the comment triggered a spam filter.

Comments

Re:positive way but not spam

[tomhath]

The article says they are rewording the message. On the other hand they wouldn't want to give too many hints on how to side step the spam filter. Spammers versus spam filters is a constant arms race

Actually, they do censor.

[OzUnsane]

Try exchanging even private messages using the term 'xtube'. Yes, they censor.

Re:Actually, they do censor.

[Cito]

I just tested that on my msn account

I tested on aim, msn, yahoo chat on my trillian client and I could paste that URL without it censoring

So it's not censored by the actual msn network at all.

The official msn client might censor it. But who uses official clients anyhow?

Trillian rocks and doesnt block anything for censorship. Worked just fine pasting a no-ip.org site, tested about 10 of them

Re:From the TFA

[jouassou]

On Facebook, you use @ links to mention friends in a post or comment. So if you say something innocent like "I went to the movies with @Jane, @Peter and @Bob", that would trigger such a spam filter.