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

From the TFA

[commlinx]

Not sure how old this story is, but from among other things from TFA (well blog entry) that appear to be have updated over time:

2. My comment included three @ links. That probably is what triggered the spam classification system.

I don't use Facebook / Twitter but that along with other a few other characteristics of the message in question sound like a pretty reasonable way to set up a spam filter.

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.

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.

[SuricouRaven]

It's not always clear what motives are. For example, on MSN, you can't mention any address ending in no-ip.org. Microsoft did it, so I gather, because some botnet was using no-ip.org dynamic addresses and spreading via IM (One of those 'go to mysite.no-ip.org/pictures_of_the_holiday.exe' things I imagine), but it's still very annoying for people like me who have a legitimate use for no-ip.org subdomains.

Re:Actually, they do censor.

[BasilBrush]

Porn sites tend to use affiliate marketing. Which means Joe Spammer can make money from people following his links to xtube. Not hard to see why it would become a sign of spam in the Facebook filter.

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

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.

If only.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you must not remember the goatse ascii stuff the trolls made prolific here in the early days of Slashdot.

To illustrate Slashdot's own comment filtering system, Try pasing the following into a Slashdot comment three times and hit preview.
@}-,-`-
You'll get:
Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.

Try typing something like "OMG PONIES OMG OMG OMG" without quotes and you'll get:
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.

Yet, a quarter of the people I know on FB use both forms *extensively*. If only they'd filter those out.

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:There was nothing in the comment to censor

[dr_blurb]

There's nothing worth censoring in that comment, a guy made a post,

Well, he did mention Google+

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?