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

It's been a while.

[ntropy]

First post since 1999 to say...

Delete your fucking Facebook account, idiot.

Re:It's been a while.

[TheRaven64]

You are depriving Facebook of access to your future comments though. You're also making Facebook just a little bit less valuable to your friends (who can't use it to contact you anymore) and to advertisers (who can't use it to sell you things anymore).

Just stop using Facebook

[rta]

Problem solved.

And actually, the guy who tried to post, is the reason why FB has so much power anyway. The blocked comment itself says he can't be bothered to read blogs anymore and he just watches FB, G+ and twitter. If you want to go swimming with sharks don't be surprised if you get eaten.

There was nothing in the comment to censor

[Zapotek]

Here's the flaged comment from TFA:

I’m so glad I didn’t start a media business. It’s actually really tough to get new and interesting stories and to avoid falling into drama. People forget that Techcrunch was built step-by-step as a new publishing form was taking shape. PandoDaily doesn’t have that advantage and, is, indeed, facing competition from social networks that is quite good indeed. I no longer visit blogs. I watch Twitter, Google+, and Facebook, along with Hacker News, Techmeme, Quora. These are the new news sources. Plus, Pando Daily actually doesn’t have enough capital to compete head on with, say, D: All Things Digital or The Verge, both of which are expanding quickly and have ecosystems behind them.

There's nothing worth censoring in that comment, a guy made a post, the system flagged it as spam, it was a simple false positive. The fact that it's the first that we know of is pretty damn impressive, means that their system is probably working quite well.
I wish that the editors would quit with the sensationalist crap already, can we please use some common sense next time?

Re:Why do intelligent people (continue to) use FB?

[Sepodati]

It's a great way to keep in contact with a large group of people (family, friends, co-workers) and stay updated on a variety of topics (football, TV shows, news). I'm not going to email everyone individually. I'm not going to call everyone individually. They are not all individually going to come to my website or gallery. I'm not going to visit 30-odd websites to get the latest news/updates/posts.

I have no expectations of privacy for anything I do on the web, so I don't really care what FB does with my posts or interests. That's the real world. It's not an "ignorant sheeple" don't care... it's an "educated assessment of the personal value of the system" don't care.

If it doesn't work for you, then that's fine and obviously there are plenty of other options out there.

Just a few simple questions, mr Facebook

[aglider]

What'd be the difference between "filtering" and "censoring"?
How would you tell spam and non-spam apart?
Will I still be able to read what you filtered out as spam?
Why don't you leave the users themselves to trash what they consider useless on their own?