
Facebook self-censorship: What happens to the posts you don’t publish? - ForHackernews
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/12/facebook_self_censorship_what_happens_to_the_posts_you_don_t_publish.html
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joshfraser
There's no need for speculation here. Open Facebook, right click, select
"Inspect Element" then the "Network" tab.

On a self-censored status update, they send a request to /ajax/bz that
triggers their censorlogger, but don't pass the content itself.

On messages & chat, they send a request to /ajax/messaging/typ.php to show the
other person you're typing, but again, they don't pass your message to their
servers.

On search, they send a request to /ajax/typeahead/search/facebar/query/ which
passes everything you type to their server to power their auto-complete
functionality.

~~~
alexwright
Yes you _could_ do that two seconds worth of testing, in basically every
browser these days even. But then you couldn't write a link bait article about
the possibility that they are doing it.

~~~
B-Con
This is Slate. I expect nothing better.

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sp332
Someone should fix the HN headline, currently "Facebook monitors and analyzes
posts that users type but don't submit".

 _In their article, Das and Kramer claim to only send back information to
Facebook that indicates /whether/ you self-censored, not /what/ you typed. The
Facebook rep I spoke with agreed that the company isn’t collecting the text of
self-censored posts.... "we have arrived at a better understanding of how and
where self-censorship manifests on social media; next, we will need to better
understand what and why." This implies that Facebook wants to know what you
are typing in order to understand it._

Facebook is not analyzing posts you don't submit.

~~~
leokun
Title uses vague words that are not necessarily untrue. Facebook is analyzing
self-censorship, just not the contents of self-censored posts. What is maybe
interesting to users is that there are people at Facebook who think it isn't
right for the user to self-censor, that it apparently robs Facebook and your
"friends" of the value in that self-censored post. That seems mildly insane
and I'm glad I do not use Facebook.

~~~
yid
> What is maybe interesting to users is that there are people at Facebook who
> think it isn't right for the user to self-censor, that it apparently robs
> Facebook and your "friends" of the value in that self-censored post.

This is FUD. Facebook has a large data science team that publishes lots of
studies on online behavior [1]. These are academic, peer-reviewed research
papers. Insinuating that FB as an entity thinks that "it isn't right for the
user to self-censor" is unfounded speculation.

[1]
[https://www.facebook.com/publications](https://www.facebook.com/publications)

~~~
j_s
>> there are people at Facebook who think

> FB as an entity thinks

There's your disconnect

------
xux
The highest correlation for censoring are these demographics: Average number
of friends of friends 1.32, Group member count 1.29, Gender: Male 1.26,
Gender: Male X Percentage male friends 1.11.

The lowest correlation for censoring are these demographics: Age 0.85,
Percentage friends conservative 0.77, Percentage friends liberal 0.77.
Extrapolating from the results,

 _Group that self-censors the most seems to be: Young male user with many male
friends who are in a tight network._

 _Group that self-censors the least seems to be: Old users who are politically
aligned_

Probably expected, but hilarious anyways.

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federalemployee
This is why before I post to Facebook I write my post in vi, edit it
repeatedly, consider what my life has become, and then :q!.

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pavanred
Why even bother reaching out to a Facebook representative, one can always
monitor the HTTP requests that are sent.

To me it seems completely speculative and the image of an incomplete post at
the beginning of the article enables people who don't read the article
completely to draw uninformed conclusions.

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adamgluck
This rather interesting, but harmless paper is getting blown way out of
proportion in this article. All they do is see who is returning information,
and make hypothesis about the demographics of those people. Their methodology
is very clearly explained in the article "using this threshold allowed us to
record only the presence or absence of text entered, not the keystrokes or
content."

Furthermore, and somewhat amusingly, "a summer intern conducted this work."
Thus, it was mostly a summer project, researching demographics about people
who started to comment and then stopped.

They put forth 7 major hypothesis:

1) posts will be censored more than comments 2) men will self-censor more than
women 3) users with more opposite-sex friends will self-censor more 4) younger
users will self-censor less 5) users with older friends will censor more 6)
users who more frequently used audience selection tools self-censor less 7)
users with more diverse friends will self-censor more

All of these are interesting questions based in a large amount of literature
that they could uniquely address and answer with the data that they had.
Recording whether or not users enter and then remove data is honestly
relatively unimportant. Yes, websites taking user data without asking is an
invasion of privacy, but I think this sort of article represents a type of
knee jerk alarmism and exaggeration that can be incredibly hurtful to efforts
to use data Facebook has available to answer interesting questions about human
interaction. It also, furthermore, represents a purposeful misreading of the
article, which is journalistically questionable.

If you want to read the article for yourself you can find it at
[https://www.facebook.com/publications/493601774027388/](https://www.facebook.com/publications/493601774027388/).

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pasbesoin
In this age of the "post-page" Internet, it is best to assume that
_everything_ you do on a... "page" (cough) may be communicated, _unless_ you
take measures yourself to stop this.

This will continue to be a topic of concern and debate for at least some of
us: _Whose_ agent is the browser? The client's, or the host's?

Currently, design trends towards more and more "programmatic" content and
behavior seems to be favoring the latter.

(I, for one, do not like this change.)

~~~
001sky
It would be interesting if the internet was born fully formed. If there was
not an embedded base of people "thinking it was like it used to be". My guess
is it may have never got off the ground. But now that there is sufficient
momentum behind a paradigm that makes people predictable (ie, the "old way"),
the confidence has been built up to perfectly suit people taking advantage of
this very predictability. For the most part, this revolves around "free",
"anonymous", "open", etc. The powers that be do not want these things to
exist...for the very reason that money is to be made by selling the picks and
shovels to those who dream they may one day achieve these things. Heaven
forbid you provide this to them, they would then be outside the system of
tribute to those _who just happen to be in charge_.

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neakor
Facebook, as usual, simply gives no regard to personal privacy. They will do
whatever it takes to exploit your personal info, including your deepest and
darkest thoughts, in order to make money. Mark Zuckerberg is a shameless
person. Just look at how he copies every single competitor shamelessly. What
can we except from a company with a leader like that? Shameless exploitation
of course.

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throwaway0192
They appear to log both when you hover over the input box without clicking,
and when you click it and enter text in addition to the aforementioned time
delay trigger (that I didn't test).

Here is some of the data they are transmitting:

[{"user":
"BLANKED","page_id":"BLANKED","posts":[["censorlogger",{"cl_impid":"BLANKED","clearcounter":0,"instrument":"composer","elementid":"BLANKED","parent_fbid":BLANKED,"version":"x"},
BLANKED,BLANKED]],"trigger":"censorlogger"}]

BLANKED is inserted where some of the data could potentially be personally
identifiable information. Of note is the "clearcounter". They apparently
evaluate how many times you clear the data. The ajax call is apparently a more
general function as they must supply the trigger.

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001sky
Seems like a scare story conflating metadata (which they collect) with data
(which they do not). While certainly the serriptitous and opaque tracking of
meta-data is unwanted by many, the idea that they _might, maybe, want_ to
track 'actual data' is latent premise. That they don't, is the reality. But
there is no neutralizing this fear, here. Because in fact, they _can_.

So, in eseence the tL;DR = FUD.

 _The Facebook rep I spoke with agreed that the company isn’t collecting the
text of self-censored posts. But it’s certainly technologically possible, and
it’s clear that Facebook is interested in the content of your self-censored
posts. Das and Kramer’s article closes with the following: "we have arrived at
a better understanding of how and where self-censorship manifests on social
media; next, we will need to better understand what and why."_

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lucb1e
I assumed they did this and just don't enter anything private on such
websites, even without hitting enter. I never actually checked, but what
better way to learn thoughts than by unspoken words?

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Nursie
This is almost as creepy as lie-detection by analysis of subvocalisation.
Almost.

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callesgg
I have always asumed they saved the text as a hole. This comes more as a
relief than a revelation for me.

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rgj
That was a pretty long article to give the answer to the question in the
title: "nothing".

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teaneedz
I'm not sure what is worse - that Facebook allows data collection for these
type of studies or that there are engineers and data scientists willing to
study it.

Does Facebook wonder why we don't trust them - or even care?

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mal3x4u
I checked the network and it's not sending any packages to facebook while
typing or on release or on delete... :) wtf? just check the info before
writing such a big article about a lie :))))))

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c_magg
Why not show us a Wireshark screenshot?

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thenerdfiles
So they're running E2E tests on DOM states?

I see a whole new class of submission:

    
    
        {{Software company}} uses robust architecture patterns on Webpages

