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Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments

techcrunch.com

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Re: Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments

#11
post #9
post #6

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?

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.

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

Re: Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments

#12
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...

Re: Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments

#13

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.

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

Re: Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments

#15
@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.

Re: Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments

#17
post #6

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?

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_...

Re: Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments

#18
post #15

@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 copyri…

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).

Re: Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments

#19
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.

Re: Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments

#20
post #6

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?

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.
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