Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments

http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/05/facebooks-positive-comment-policy-irrelevant-inappropriate-censorship/

by Braasch • 14 years ago

125 69 14 years ago

chrisrhoden3• 14 years ago

Based on the anecdotal comments below the original post, it seems like there's a very high correlation between posts that get flagged as inappropriate by Facebook and those that mention Google+ or link to it. Which seems absurd, on the face of it, but I am going to have to experiment.

chrisrhoden3• 14 years ago

I haven't been able to make the dialog show, even by copying the full text of the comment which was originally flagged. Maybe they dialed it back?

nikcub• 14 years ago

I think that is just a coincidence, definitely not intentional - it would be insane for fb to do that

taligent4• 14 years ago

Interesting.

Based on anecdotal evidence I actually believe that there is a high correlation between flagged Facebook posts and alien abductions. It seems absurd sure. But I am going to have to experiment.

chrisrhoden3• 14 years ago

Perhaps this is an issue of my tone not coming through on the internet, but I wasn't giving anecdotal evidence any weight on its own, which was the point of my experimentation. Experimentation, which, as you will see from my reply, yielded nothing. The only thing I can figure is that you read what I said in a hurry and didn't digest what I meant or you don't understand the scientific method.

jasonkolb• 14 years ago

This is a great example of machine learning gone wrong. Facebook turns the knob on their "positivity" algorithm a little too far to the right.

Machine learning is one of this things that works great until it doesn't, and you get misguided decisions like this that had zero human involvement.

karl_hungus• 14 years ago

wat?

tree_of_item• 14 years ago

Completely ridiculous. The next step is Facebook hellbanning people for "inappropriate comments".

slig• 14 years ago

Isn't that exactly what happens here?

BlackJack• 14 years ago

What is the point of that comparison? The purpose of HN is very different from the purpose of Facebook. On this site, comments are everything - they define the site.

Joel Spolsky gave an interesting talk on the "Cultural Anthropology of StackExchange" where he talks about the importance of keeping people out as a tool for building communities. The prime example was StackExchange vs. Yahoo Answers.

untog2• 14 years ago

This is an isolated incident. "Irrelevant or Inappropriate" sounds like a euphemism for spam- if Facebook is fighting comment spam then I applaud them. Their algorithm just isn't quite right yet. No story here.

"Is this censorship?" Are false positives on a spam filter censorship?

reso• 14 years ago

It's exactly this. Let's not forget the quality of techcrunch comments improved by an order of magnitude as soon as they switched to Facebook's comment system, which has the best spam/troll detection I've ever seen. A tiny number of false positives is a fair price in my mind.

bobds• 14 years ago

I'd rather pay with false negatives when it comes to comments.

jawngee2• 14 years ago

Isolated incident for whom? This happens to me once a day for the last couple of weeks. I get this a couple of times a day:

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/374152_...

matznerd• 14 years ago

It's definitely not isolated, and it definitely feels like censorship. A company shouldn't be deciding what we can or can't say, especially if it's not profane. They once tried to block me from posting a link to a site that was critical of facebook.

Natsu2• 14 years ago

I find it interesting that your comment and the one above it, both of which express mild, but polite disagreement, were downvoted into grey.

lbrandy• 14 years ago

Hi, fb engineer here. This is exactly what's going on. If you recall, there were several articles written a few months back pertaining to comment spam, and very low quality comments (ascii art or 'LOOOOOL!!!') from subscribers. This is part of an effort to curb that and has likely gone awry. It only affects subscriber -> subscribee comments.

thespin5• 14 years ago

So FB tries to filter out ASCII art.

It sounds to me like FB is trying to win over advertisers who really are not interested in the web, except to the extent they can profit from it. And they may learn FB has led them to believe there is much more potential than the results actually show.

Meanwhile, the "consumers" using the web are generally interested in it. That includes ASCII art and LOL, as a means of communication. And not simply to discuss, purchase products and services.

FB is going to fade away. It's just a matter of time.

Because their motives are becoming more and more clear to even non-technical users, these motives are antithetical to the social (cf. commercial) premise of the internet, and they cannot maintain a monopoly on communication through the web, excluding other avenues by being "the only option". Couple this with advertisers who are still patiently waiting for results, results which will never come.

How can you call this anything other than censorship? There is no profanity, no objectionable content whatsoever in the post.

It's not "isolated", it's "targeted".

jacquesm2• 14 years ago

If you want to get rid of spam simply ban programmatic posting to walls from apps.

What users get up to is a lot less bad than what apps do.

And get rid of the 'like' un-feature. That will go a long way to restoring sanity.

heyitsnick2• 14 years ago

I'm confused here. Posting "LOL!" is not spam in any way, at least how i define spam. It might not subjectively be appropriate (if it's not appropriate to find it funny), it's debateably irrelevant (if it is not important who finds it funny). But it's not spam.

Spam is broadly defined as unsolicited bulk advertising. An example spam comment would be "LOL! Also check out this great pharmaceutical company: xxx".

The latter is certainly something that should be filtered out, if it's irrelevant advertising that marketers are using to peddle their crap. It's mostly unsubjective and uncontextual and its appropriate for filters to automatically detect.

But filtering out the former is a form of censorship that is often best left to humans (like downvotes to bury bad comments). I don't think this should be the job of the comments system to determine what is considered "appropriate" or "beneficial to the discussion."

A "LOL" or ASCII art image or "no u" or any other meme can be anything from a well-timed ironic offhand jab, an appropriate affirmation or response, to totally irrelevant and inappropriate noise. It depends on topic, context, parent, and existing noise in the thread and is inherently objective.

tomp• 14 years ago

We have spam here on HN as well. We just deal with it differently - downvoted comments are not censored, made less obvious so that the casual reader doesn't need to read them.

That is not censorship. Facebook's approach is.

chc2• 14 years ago

No, spam gets killed. Voting is the standard way to deal with bad comments, but egregious abuses only show up if you have showdead on.

AJ007• 14 years ago

Also take in to consideration Facebook is trying to get companies to spend a lot on advertising their Facebook pages.

One way for Facebook to do this is prevent users from making "irrelevant or inappropriate" on the advertiser's page.

I have never seen a message like this before, but I rarely post comments on Facebook. I have, however, had issues with business associates spamming me. I found out firsthand just how difficult it was to unjoin a group. I also noticed that I could flag a comment as spam, it disappears, and then magically re-appears again later. These "spammers" still have their accounts.

Facebook is basically a controlled platform for spamming. Its for attractive girls to spam photographs of themselves to hundreds or thousands of males. Its for companies to blast out their messages to millions of people. There is little question that Zynga's initial growth came from saturating player's friends feeds with notices about their farm. All supported by Facebook's aggressive opt-in by default email notifications. If that isn't spam, I don't know what is.

Facebook's business model is one of figuring out how to monetize all of this noise without scaring away its users. One way you do this by making spam more relevant. The other way is by ensuring "spammers" that want to be seen fork over sizable amounts of money. This is something anyone buying in to their IPO should think a lot about.

As negative as that sounds, I like Facebook a lot. I refuse to use Google+ or any other social network. Because of Facebook I've been able to keep in touch with a lot of people who I would have never seen or heard from again in my life.

That said, I've seen a disturbing trend in my Facebook friend's list of attractive females de-activating their accounts (attractive females make or break socially connected platforms.) There is too much noise for them. And you bet, if something is "irrelevant or inappropriate" they will be the first to leave.

thespin5• 14 years ago

This is a very good summary.

Spamming is very central to FB. Lots of unsolicited email, by default. Noteworthy is the early battle with Google over who gets access to your email contacts/address book.

Second is the female audience. Without them, FB loses its appeal to many people. And would fail to have gained momentum at universities.

If Mr. Zuckerberg had only stolen the email addresses and photos of his fellow male students at Harvard for his photo-comparison "project", which he noted, judging from the looks of some of his classmates, might as well include photos of "farm animals", and posted them online for other students to see, I sincerely doubt many would have cared.

However, if you obtain photos of female students, email them and tell them you have posted photos of them online, and others can rate their appearance, you can bet almost every one is going to sign up to check things out. This is the "secret" of FB's success. Because once the female students have signed up, the male students are soon to follow. This is also why Google+ is a relative ghost town.

I like the idea of FB: being able to communicate with almost everyone via the web. Who would not like that? It's great. And it will certainly not die with FB.

I'm just not keen on the people behind FB.

taligent4• 14 years ago

You know what makes your point so hilarious is you could replace Facebook with "internet".

The internet is nothing more than a controlled place for spamming. The internet is for attractive girls to spam themselves to hundreds/thousands of males. The internet is trying to monetize all of this noise without scaring away its users.

Now let me ask you. Is that ALL the internet is for ? Is that ALL Facebook is for ?

waterlesscloud2• 14 years ago

So Facebook has decided to take control and accept responsibility for content on third party sites? That's an...interesting choice.

driverdan• 14 years ago

The solution is pretty straight forward. Stop using FB to handle your site's comments. I don't even see comments on TechCrunch anymore because I have FB whitelist only and I'm not the only one.

jfoutz• 14 years ago

I'm just super impressed Facebook admins can string two sentences together in a coherent way! I'm happy to give them a piece of gum as a reward. Those fun guys just need to promise not to walk while they chew it.

gojomo• 14 years ago

Facebook's algorithms seem on their way to becoming the 'Allied Mastercomputer'/'Adaptive Manipulator' that tortures the remnants of humanity in Harlan Ellison's dystopic short story, 'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scr...

jachwe• 14 years ago

@nikcub I think it's not a coincidence.

In fact FB declines Post and Messages for a while already. For example you can't post or comment and include a picture from imgur, while it (obviously) fine from other hosts. Thats what i experienced so far, but i can imagine there are other examples.

That does not need to be censorship. Might be that they got an agreement about not hotlinking or hosting imgur images for copyright reasons.

kaybe2• 14 years ago

If you click on 'reply' below the comment you're responding to, it will nest and your comment will show up in nikcub's threads (so it will be easier to notice for them).

mkjones4• 14 years ago

Do you have an example of FB blocking imgur images? We certainly don't intend to, and I'd like to get it fixed if we are for some reason.

jawngee2• 14 years ago

This happens to me fairly often. Though I seem to get this warning more:

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/374152_...

premise2• 14 years ago

Wow, that’s pretty “nice.”

P.S. {temporarily removed}

mkjones4• 14 years ago

I don't think that's how sharing someone else's post works. If I make a friends-only post, and you share it to your friends, only the intersection of our friends can see it. I agree this is maybe not as clear as it could be on the UI, but I believe that's how it should work. If you find otherwise, would you mind filing a bug at www.facebook.com/whitehat?

darkstar999• 14 years ago

Google+ needs to do this. I follow Linus Torvals and some other big names in tech, and there are dozens of worthless comments on every single one of his posts.

"+1"

"Wow,,,,,,,,,,,"

"。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。"

Incredibly low signal-to-noise, which makes me not even want to look at the comments.

kaybe2• 14 years ago

If it was an opt-in thing it would be great.

Natsu2• 14 years ago

I like the HN way of doing things, where every user can choose their own showdead setting.

zupreme• 14 years ago

This is consistent with Facebook's established strategy. Ultimately Facebook want to make sure that you (the user) will always associate Facebook with positive emotions, not negative ones.

It's the same reason that there is no dislike button, in spite of years of requests to the contrary.

If you really look closely you will find that Facebook does not have the most advanced UI, nor does it offer the most functionality. People don't use FB for any of those reasons, even if they think they do. People use FB because FB makes them feel happy, connected, and valued among their "friends".

Allowing FB to be used to post negative comments runs contrary to these objectives and, due to the current limitations of machine interpretation of language, it is inevitable that some innocuous comments get misinterpreted along these lines.

I'm not saying that I am supportive of this practice, but I do understand why they are doing it.

firebones• 14 years ago

"associate FB with positive emotions, not negative ones"

So basically, it wants to be the Disneyland of the Internet?

Laudable. Although I can't tell if my early adopter bias is telling me this is an avenue for disruption, or whethrer such safe pablum is the ticket to riches for reaching the masses. I am now leaning towards this being a big step in the AOLification of FB.

veneratio• 14 years ago

Having just finished a general AI course, this was fascinating and a great example of why to be careful with automation.

protolif• 14 years ago

People are still using Facebook?

gm• 14 years ago

Lol, quite an opportune comment as FB approaches 1B users.

premise2• 14 years ago

Hey, where’s my “Generate an appropriate comment” button?

According to Mark Zuckerberg, people using Facebook are “dumb fucks,” so probably they should be guided?

peterkelly• 14 years ago

The ironic thing is that if Facebook also forbid irrelevant posts, it would become a vast, empty wasteland.

__mark__• 14 years ago

Is it using sentiment analysis?? If so that is very cool. But also annoying; I'm glad I don't use FB.

DanielBMarkham• 14 years ago

This is not isolated.

I posted a comment on a friend-of-friend's feed. He posted some Bertrand Russell quote and I took issue with the phraseology but generally agreed with the sentiment.

When I clicked the "post" button, Facebook gave me some warning message along the lines of "are you sure you want to be posting this? If you post bad things you could be banned from commenting"

I found this fairly insulting. I think Facebook has finally found the thing that's going to drive me completely away from their system.

tuxguy• 14 years ago

This is not isolated. fb's algo sucks. I was posting a genuine comment & tried to post it 3 times. It warned me with a popup, as in the article & the 3rd time, it warned me that i would not be able to comment on public posts.

IMHO, a more practical flow would be: warn the user 3 times, but on the 3rd & final time state that : this will be submitted for review by a human reviewer & if found abusive, your a/c will be disable for x days.

A genuine commenter would gladly agree to such a request.

FB has humans who could review this, or they could use Amazon's Mturk - ship off each abusive comment as a HIT which gets posted after the 3 warning attempts, & maybe send it to multiple reviewers(mturk workers) - & use a majority vote, to decide among the reviews.

Decision could be binary ( ban/no ban) or some reputation metric ( decrement by 10 points , & if no suspect activity occurs in the next x(30?) days, karma/ reputation to be restored to the original number.

Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments

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