Is This Censorship? Facebook Stops Users From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments techcrunch.com
Today was just another Saturday morning in blog land when Robert Scoble, the well-known tech startup enthusiast, went to post a comment on a Facebook post...But when Scoble went to click post, he received an odd error message:
“This comment seems irrelevant or inappropriate and can’t be posted. To avoid having comments blocked, please make sure they contribute to the post in a positive way.”
Scoble posted his original comment in its entirety on his Google+ page, and it’s clear that it contains no profanity or even any obvious argumentative language...Scoble’s a pretty popular guy on the web, so not surprisingly his Google+ post about the incident attracted more than 100 comments within the first hour after he posted it. Several other people there report having seen the same message in recent days, and one person named Steven Streight wrote that recently his Facebook commenting ability was “temporarily limited” because of comments that he says were similarly benign such as “I’m a married man.”
Not surprisingly, a number of people are seeing this as an example of censorship — a word that almost always has negative connotations in the tech world.
Update: A Facebook policy spokesperson emailed the following explanation:
“To protect the millions of people who connect and share on Facebook every day, we have automated systems that work in the background to maintain a trusted environment and protect our users from bad actors who often use links to spread spam and malware. These systems are so effective that most people who use Facebook will never encounter spam. They’re not perfect, though, and in rare instances they make mistakes. This comment was mistakenly blocked as spammy, and we have already started to make adjustments to our classifier. We look forward to learning from rare cases such as these to make sure we don’t repeat the same mistake in the future.
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re: several other people report having seen the same message in recent days
Auto-censored for not being "relevant", and then auto-scolded to be more "positive" if you don't want your comments blocked? Judging by the many 'relevant' comments on this post that were not so 'positive' (go to techcrunch link), not many are buying the official Big Brother Facebook explanation. Everything has to start somehow...fyi
Today was just another Saturday morning in blog land when Robert Scoble, the well-known tech startup enthusiast, went to post a comment on a Facebook post...But when Scoble went to click post, he received an odd error message:
“This comment seems irrelevant or inappropriate and can’t be posted. To avoid having comments blocked, please make sure they contribute to the post in a positive way.”
Scoble posted his original comment in its entirety on his Google+ page, and it’s clear that it contains no profanity or even any obvious argumentative language...Scoble’s a pretty popular guy on the web, so not surprisingly his Google+ post about the incident attracted more than 100 comments within the first hour after he posted it. Several other people there report having seen the same message in recent days, and one person named Steven Streight wrote that recently his Facebook commenting ability was “temporarily limited” because of comments that he says were similarly benign such as “I’m a married man.”Not surprisingly, a number of people are seeing this as an example of censorship — a word that almost always has negative connotations in the tech world.
Update: A Facebook policy spokesperson emailed the following explanation:
“To protect the millions of people who connect and share on Facebook every day, we have automated systems that work in the background to maintain a trusted environment and protect our users from bad actors who often use links to spread spam and malware. These systems are so effective that most people who use Facebook will never encounter spam. They’re not perfect, though, and in rare instances they make mistakes. This comment was mistakenly blocked as spammy, and we have already started to make adjustments to our classifier. We look forward to learning from rare cases such as these to make sure we don’t repeat the same mistake in the future.
-----------------------------------------------------------
re: several other people report having seen the same message in recent days
Auto-censored for not being "relevant", and then auto-scolded to be more "positive" if you don't want your comments blocked? Judging by the many 'relevant' comments on this post that were not so 'positive' (go to techcrunch link), not many are buying the official Big Brother Facebook explanation. Everything has to start somehow...fyi
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