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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

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 how and where self-censorship manifests on social media; next, we will need to better understand what and why." This implies that Facebook wants to know what you are typing in order to understand it.

Facebook is not analyzing posts you don't submit.

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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

>> there are people at Facebook who think

> FB as an entity thinks

There's your disconnect

This is exactly the mentality that causes me to barely visit my Facebook timeline these days. I use it less and less.

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.

But there's lots of things people and companies _could_ do, they just don't do it currently.

This should be more or less confirmable by using a traffic inspector, right? (tamper headers, web inspector, etc) If Facebook is only checking that you've entered some text, then submitting that boolean (or text length) as a POST?

I wasn't sure how to write a title that was concise and captured the substance of the article.

It seems like you want to split hairs about whether "analyzing posts" means examining text or metadata. Do you think that "NSA is analyzing phone calls" would be an accurate description of their metadata dragnet?

At any rate, if they aren't looking at the content of self-censored posts yet, it certainly sounds like they're at least interested in doing so. According to the article, "This implies that Facebook wants to know what you are typing in order to understand it."

Normally, the answer to your question is "nothing". In this case -- a bit of short term research -- you should read what the paper actually says:

Content was then marked as “censored” if it was not shared within the subsequent ten minutes; using this threshold allowed us to record only the presence or absence of text entered, not the keystrokes or content.

If content entered were to go unposted for ten minutes and then be posted, we argue that it was indeed censored (albeit temporarily).

These analyses were conducted in an anonymous manner, so researchers were not privy to any specific user’s activity.

Furthermore, all instrumentation was done on the client side. In other words, the content of self-censored posts and comments was not sent back to Facebook’s servers: Only a binary value that content was entered at all.

So you're trusting what a Facebook rep says as truth?

You can see for yourself what it does. Just look at web inspector as you type a post.

Thanks. I saw another post mentioning this too. I don't have time to test it. I'm not really worried about that all as I don't ever type "I'm going to kill you!" in a fit of rage, come to my senses / re-think it, and then delete the words I typed. :P

Over wild, baseless speculation? Yes.

Wouldn't it be better to trust your own investigation - sans taking the accused party's word for it though?

I'm not "trusting" anybody. The headline made up facts that do not appear anywhere in the article.

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