
Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments - Braasch
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/05/facebooks-positive-comment-policy-irrelevant-inappropriate-censorship/
======
untog
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?

~~~
lbrandy
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.

~~~
thespin
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".

~~~
mkjones
Another FB engineer here - I actually work on the system that caused this
false positive. You're right that if we were actually trying to stop
constructive discussion from happening, that would be bad. We're definitely
not trying to do that - in fact, our goal is the exact opposite.

Similarly, if we let through blatantly malicious or spammy comments, I think
that would be bad as well.

While I wish I could say we were perfect at stopping spam, the reality is that
no spam classification system is perfect. Sometimes we err too far on the
conservative side, and spam gets through. Sometimes we err too far on the
aggressive side, and good content is incorrectly blocked. That's what happened
here - it turned out one of our spam classifiers was a little too aggressive,
and we've turned it off.

~~~
waterlesscloud
A laudable goal, but for what definition of "constructive"? And PLEASE don't
tell me that you guys think it will be the same definition for every site.

------
darkstar999
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.

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

------
jasonkolb
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
wat?

------
zupreme
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
"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.

------
chrisrhoden
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.

~~~
taligent
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.

~~~
chrisrhoden
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.

------
driverdan
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.

------
jachwe
@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.

~~~
kaybe
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).

------
gojomo
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream)

------
tuxguy
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.

------
DanielBMarkham
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.

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

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

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

[https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-
snc7/374152_...](https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-
snc7/374152_10151486189050161_558110160_23577940_1717231185_n.jpg)

~~~
premise
Wow, that’s pretty “nice.”

P.S. {temporarily removed}

~~~
mkjones
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?

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

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

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

~~~
slig
Isn't that exactly what happens here?

~~~
BlackJack
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.

------
protolif
People are still using Facebook?

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

------
premise
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?

------
jfoutz
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.

