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Facebook self-censorship: What happens to the posts you don’t publish?

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Re: Facebook self-censorship: What happens to the posts you don’t publish?

#13
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.

Re: Facebook self-censorship: What happens to the posts you don’t publish?

#14
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.)

Re: Facebook self-censorship: What happens to the posts you don’t publish?

#15
post #4
post #2

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 h…

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.

> 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

Re: Facebook self-censorship: What happens to the posts you don’t publish?

#16
post #15
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 t…

>> there are people at Facebook who think

> FB as an entity thinks

There's your disconnect

Re: Facebook self-censorship: What happens to the posts you don’t publish?

#17
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.

Re: Facebook self-censorship: What happens to the posts you don’t publish?

#19
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.

Re: Facebook self-censorship: What happens to the posts you don’t publish?

#20
post #2

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 h…

From the paper:

Furthermore, all instrumentation is done client-side. In other words, the content of self-censored posts was not sent back to Facebook's servers

https://autoblog.postblue.info/autoblogs/wwwinternetactunet_...

Of course, that doesn't mean they _couldn't_ do this, just that they say they don't currently.

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