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Comment by iamjustlooking | Hacker News Reader

If you are committed to promoting free expression why do you have a feature on your site that can obliterate mentions of a certain phrase? Would you have noticed that you "inadvertently" blocked all mentions of lamebook if there wasn't any publicity about this blocking?

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Probably so they can obliterate mentions of spam domains. HN has a similar feature, except that one can also stealth-ban your account for posting links to certain sites. Until we get strong AI, any high-traffic site where users can post links will need such a feature.

It's one thing to nuke links, but this apparently went beyond that. From the TC comments:

"Wow, you can't type ANY form of lamebook.com, lamebook DOT com, lame+book DOT com...NOTHING! How can I trust Facebook as a messaging system if it's going to block entire words and phrases?!? What if I just wanted to ask my friends what they think about the Lamebook case?? WTF"

This would be like if I asked you for examples of which sites were banned, and you couldn't even post to tell me.

We use it to block spam and malware, typically to block mentions of URLs that are, e.g, links to malware downloads.

Well, we'll accept anything in the name of security.

I call bull on this statement. I once tried to send my friend a perfectly harmless link (no spam, no viruses, no malware or anything) and I couldn't because FB blocked it. The link contained a couple of images from South Park.

I can't imagine using the new FB mail for my communication if FB will censor the crap out of it.

You use it to block spam and malware, yes. But you've just shown that you use it for other purposes as well. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there also an issue with The Pirate Bay on this too? That's neither spam nor malware (not that I'm defending what it is...), so it seems odd to act like this is just for protecting users.

Facebook operates in some countries in which certain speech is illegal, such as denial of the Holocaust in Germany. IIRC they comply with the nation's laws in each country they operate in.

In almost all countries (where appliable) these laws only apply to "public" speach. If you're just mailing a friend you can write there whatsoever.

So there is no reason to censor messages themselves.

> why do you have a feature on your site that can obliterate mentions of a certain phrase?

It's called database access, and every CTO has it, ultimately. That said, I doubt there is a big red button sitting like a blank check for the CTO to nuke phrases that contract his sphincter. That said, what the hell do I know?

This feature "filters" comments as they're made, it's most definitely something that was built as a feature he even says as much, it's not "database access", it's a built in feature for filtering (censoring) bad content. It doesn't remove old mentions, it disallows future mentions.

I love that you can imagine the CTO running through the database blocking all mentions of lamebook in real time.

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