Censorship? Facebook stops user from posting ‘irrelevant’ comments

Is Facebook now censoring users by blocking what it perceives to be “irrelevant or inappropriate” comments? American blogger and tech evangelist Robert Scoble said he encountered such an error message when he was posting a comment on another Facebook user’s wall. “This comment seems irrelevant or inappropriate and can’t be posted. To avoid having your comments blocked, please make sure they contribute to the post in a positive way,” read the supposed error message, a screenshot of which Scoble posted on his Facebook account. Scoble narrated his experience on his account on a rival social network, Google+. “Looks like Facebook is doing content analysis in real time before it will let you post and is looking to keep the service ‘happy.’ I sure wonder now what kind of algorithms Facebook is running on content,” he said. But on Sunday morning (Manila time), Scoble said a PR from Facebook sent a response, saying Facebook had classified his comment as spam. He quoted the Facebook PR as saying what happened was a “false positive” [incorrect] because his comment was one that Facebook did not want to block. “Turns out that my comment was blocked by Facebook’s spam classification filters and that it wasn’t blocked for what the comment said, but rather because of something unique to that message. They are looking more into it and will let me know more later, after they figure out what triggered it,” he said in an update to his Google+ post. Scoble said his comment may have been blocked because he was commenting on a post of someone who is not his Facebook friend, his comment included three @ links, and there might have been other things about the comment that triggered the spam system. He said the PR person also said a team is looking into why this message got a false positive, and will be adjusting the algorithms appropriately. “I actually appreciate that Facebook is trying to do something about comment quality. I had to recently change my privacy settings to only allow friends of friends to comment on my posts because I was getting so many poor comments on my posts (when I did that the poor quality posts instantly stopped),” he said. A separate article on TechCrunch said what happened to Scoble could be similar to the experience of film critic Roger Ebert in January 2011, when Facebook temporarily disabled Ebert’s blog because of allegedly “abusive comment.” “It turns out that Ebert’s blog never actually contained objectionable content – a number of Facebook users had flagged his page as ‘abusive’ after he wrote a critical tweet about Ryan Dunn, an actor who died in a drunk driving accident. It could be that Robert Scoble has been similarly flagged by other Facebook users, for reasons justified or not,” it said. — LBG, GMA News