Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments

techcrunch.com

125 pointsBraasch69 comments

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.

I agree - we've turned off the classifier that caused this false positive, as it's clearly too aggressive.

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_...

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.

I find it interesting that your comment and the one above it, both of which express mild, but polite disagreement, were downvoted into grey.

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.

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".

I think that's an overwhelmingly negative perspective. Facebook was (for me, at least) a draw initially because it wasn't drowning in crap like MySpace was. It was a locked down experience, and everyone benefitted from it. In all honesty, I don't see this as a dramatic move away from that idea.

The MySpace interface was an abomination. The fact that users would tolerate it says something about the standard one has to meet to hold an audience. It's not very high.

FB has a clean interface, generally, but it's what's going on "behind the scenes" that is at issue here.

The MySpace interface in and of itself was OK, especially for the time when it was made. It's what MySpace allowed users to do with it that was an abomination.

I'm not sure why you got downvoted for calling the MySpace interface 'an abomination'. It's hard to find a better word for it.

MySpace was very weird in that it seemed like they didn't want you to alter your page. I know that statement seems odd, but there wasn't an easy way to do this. To make changes they didn't offer a UI to set up your own CSS or simply changes colors/backgrounds/etc without CSS, you essentially used JS injection on a couple fields to get the page to look like you wanted. If they had limited what people could do it, or gave them an easier avenue to do it, MySpace might not have lost as much traffic once the much 'prettier' Facebook came out.

To understand why MySpace was designed like it was, perhaps it's helpful to look at the man behind the orginal MySpace: it's the guy behind Demand Media.

They own the domain name registrar eNom and Google SEO operations like eHow.

His idea is to churn out millions of pages of primarily machine-generated "content".

Very little human input is required.

This is enough to fool the search engine that it's what people want. Because the generated pages reflect what the search data says people are searching for.

But as anyone who has opened one of these pages knows, it has a certain "feel" to it. It vacuous. It's cheap.

It's also effective.

He earns a few pennies by having gotten you to look at the page, and once that's done, it matters little what you do or what you think next. Mission accomplished. In the aggregate, this design makes him money.

If you understand how a company like eNom makes money it also arguably fits with this sort of mass production idea.

It may be that MySpace was designed around the idea of mass production of "user-generated" pages. As a sort of fly trap to catch web surfers and searchers, similar to the way eHow or eNom would. Get users to help generate the pages. Not much input is needed. Just a little.

This is just how I see it. I could be wrong.

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.

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.

I think you need to adjust that tin-foil hat of yours.

Facebook isn't going anywhere. And it is because of decisions like this that it will continue to grow. People want a high SNR for comments. It encourages you to contribute more to a discussion not less.

If you want ASCII, LOL nonsense stick to 4chan.

It sounds like you've gotten it completely wrong. He didn't mean people can't use ASCII art of write 'lol'. If you have an account and have a lot of subscribers you will notice many comments (obviously spam) which write lol, hello, hi etc and are not contributing anything to the conversation. These are people that just want to expose their account in as many places as possible (spammers).

Facebook aren't trying to stop people using phrases like 'lol'. In this case the filter made a mistake. Big deal. They need to continue to improve it. Anyone calling this censorship is idiotic.

Are you focussing on the post in question, and what it says, or are you just focussing on the notion of a spam filter and silly comments? No one is arguing against spam filters. FB sends a lot of email that serves no purpose other than to try to get a user to log in. Is that "spam"? Would FB be opposed if an email provider filtered all that mail out of the user's mailbox?

The question is: Does the post in question appear to contribute anything to a conversation? Or not? Perhaps it appears to promote other websites and seems a bit short on "content"? What makes it "spam"?

Look at the words the post contains.

If FB is really having trouble with spam, then that speaks to the design of FB. Does every FB user need to use a website on the open internet, that any spammer can access, to contact their friends and family?

The FB employee says they shut off the filter. I think that speaks for itself.

If you want to get rid of spam simply ban programmatic posting to walls from apps.

What users get up to is a lot less bad than what apps do.

And get rid of the 'like' un-feature. That will go a long way to restoring sanity.

Why ban API use by applications? Wouldn't that kill a large part of Facebook's valuation?

Users can turn email off for all or individual apps, and people could only add apps which use their information more responsibly.

I'm not a FB user, and in a more ideal situation the FB 'like' button would not be so heavy--you can't really remove it for sites because it's a lifeline, but for site performance it's slow.

So basically, get rid of Facebook, Jacques?

Fine by me.

I'm confused here. Posting "LOL!" is not spam in any way, at least how i define spam. It might not subjectively be appropriate (if it's not appropriate to find it funny), it's debateably irrelevant (if it is not important who finds it funny). But it's not spam.

Spam is broadly defined as unsolicited bulk advertising. An example spam comment would be "LOL! Also check out this great pharmaceutical company: xxx".

The latter is certainly something that should be filtered out, if it's irrelevant advertising that marketers are using to peddle their crap. It's mostly unsubjective and uncontextual and its appropriate for filters to automatically detect.

But filtering out the former is a form of censorship that is often best left to humans (like downvotes to bury bad comments). I don't think this should be the job of the comments system to determine what is considered "appropriate" or "beneficial to the discussion."

A "LOL" or ASCII art image or "no u" or any other meme can be anything from a well-timed ironic offhand jab, an appropriate affirmation or response, to totally irrelevant and inappropriate noise. It depends on topic, context, parent, and existing noise in the thread and is inherently objective.

So what if you post not one "LOL" but thousands or millions of "LOL"s? Furthermore, what if the whole purpose of you posting millions of "LOL"s was to defeat spam filters. Would it be spam then?

Yes ban accounts that are clearly abusing comments with thousands or millions of "LOL".

No need to detect on individual comments if something is deemed "appropriate" or not.

We have spam here on HN as well. We just deal with it differently - downvoted comments are not censored, made less obvious so that the casual reader doesn't need to read them.

That is not censorship. Facebook's approach is.

No, spam gets killed. Voting is the standard way to deal with bad comments, but egregious abuses only show up if you have showdead on.

Also take in to consideration Facebook is trying to get companies to spend a lot on advertising their Facebook pages.

One way for Facebook to do this is prevent users from making "irrelevant or inappropriate" on the advertiser's page.

I have never seen a message like this before, but I rarely post comments on Facebook. I have, however, had issues with business associates spamming me. I found out firsthand just how difficult it was to unjoin a group. I also noticed that I could flag a comment as spam, it disappears, and then magically re-appears again later. These "spammers" still have their accounts.

Facebook is basically a controlled platform for spamming. Its for attractive girls to spam photographs of themselves to hundreds or thousands of males. Its for companies to blast out their messages to millions of people. There is little question that Zynga's initial growth came from saturating player's friends feeds with notices about their farm. All supported by Facebook's aggressive opt-in by default email notifications. If that isn't spam, I don't know what is.

Facebook's business model is one of figuring out how to monetize all of this noise without scaring away its users. One way you do this by making spam more relevant. The other way is by ensuring "spammers" that want to be seen fork over sizable amounts of money. This is something anyone buying in to their IPO should think a lot about.

As negative as that sounds, I like Facebook a lot. I refuse to use Google+ or any other social network. Because of Facebook I've been able to keep in touch with a lot of people who I would have never seen or heard from again in my life.

That said, I've seen a disturbing trend in my Facebook friend's list of attractive females de-activating their accounts (attractive females make or break socially connected platforms.) There is too much noise for them. And you bet, if something is "irrelevant or inappropriate" they will be the first to leave.

This is a very good summary.

Spamming is very central to FB. Lots of unsolicited email, by default. Noteworthy is the early battle with Google over who gets access to your email contacts/address book.

Second is the female audience. Without them, FB loses its appeal to many people. And would fail to have gained momentum at universities.

If Mr. Zuckerberg had only stolen the email addresses and photos of his fellow male students at Harvard for his photo-comparison "project", which he noted, judging from the looks of some of his classmates, might as well include photos of "farm animals", and posted them online for other students to see, I sincerely doubt many would have cared.

However, if you obtain photos of female students, email them and tell them you have posted photos of them online, and others can rate their appearance, you can bet almost every one is going to sign up to check things out. This is the "secret" of FB's success. Because once the female students have signed up, the male students are soon to follow. This is also why Google+ is a relative ghost town.

I like the idea of FB: being able to communicate with almost everyone via the web. Who would not like that? It's great. And it will certainly not die with FB.

I'm just not keen on the people behind FB.

What an offensive and ridiculous comment.

Facebook is popular for infinitely more reasons than just "females are on it".

@Taligent: "What an offensive and ridiculous comment"

What an offensive and ridiculous comment! Google for 'Hypocracy'.

Meanwhile, back on topic....

I came here Googling for the warning after receiving it from Facebook for this exact comment following the discovery of the 'beat box' feature in Google translate:

"Amazing! Personally, I think it's also very cool that if you type an English sentence instead and press the button, it will read the English with a pretty convincing German accent."

Spammy? Jury?

You know what makes your point so hilarious is you could replace Facebook with "internet".

The internet is nothing more than a controlled place for spamming. The internet is for attractive girls to spam themselves to hundreds/thousands of males. The internet is trying to monetize all of this noise without scaring away its users.

Now let me ask you. Is that ALL the internet is for ? Is that ALL Facebook is for ?

I am sorry, but isnt it just like describing life on its own?? Bunch of women try to look and smell and feel younger than other women in order to win most guys affections (or at least, the most)

Perhaps in your perception of reality. But in the real world ("life on its own")? No. No one obsesses over how women look/smell/feel and for what reasons except you. What does your comment have to do with Facebook? How does this further the discussion? Comments like yours make this community an unwelcoming place sometimes.

He was continuing the unhelpful and almost absurd generalization that the parent was making about the "internet being for X, Y, Z". Sure its true in the most general sense but it's not a useful point to make--that was his point.

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.

If it was an opt-in thing it would be great.

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

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.

wat?

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.

"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.

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 haven't been able to make the dialog show, even by copying the full text of the comment which was originally flagged. Maybe they dialed it back?

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

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.

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.

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.

@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.

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).

Do you have an example of FB blocking imgur images? We certainly don't intend to, and I'd like to get it fixed if we are for some reason.

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...

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.

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.

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

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

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

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/374152_...

Wow, that’s pretty “nice.”

P.S. {temporarily removed}

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?

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

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

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

Isn't that exactly what happens here?

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.

People are still using Facebook?

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

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?

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com