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Yesterday I tried to post a link on FB to an "Anonymous video maker" that I saw linked in an article shared here. It's just a web based video maker but when I t

by oblib 8y ago

Yesterday I tried to post a link on FB to an "Anonymous video maker" that I saw linked in an article shared here. It's just a web based video maker but when I tried to post it I got a message saying "Facebook thinks this is spam" and FB wouldn't let me share it. Since the page doesn't promote any political view at all we might hesitate to make the leap that they are censoring political views but because the entire purpose of that app is intended for exposing corporate/political/social issues it's a bit difficult to believe FB doesn't have that in mind when they block a link to it from being shared. I'd love to hear what other reasons they might have because I really cannot think of any that hold up. Here's the link: http://anonymous-video.com/index.html http://anonymous-video.com/index.html

admax88q 8y ago
The reason they have is when the spam filter is run against anonymous-video.com it returns positive. You're assigning far too much agency to the decision as if someone at FB reviewed anonymous-video.com specifically and decided to block it or not. Its just a machine learning model that has been trained on a bunch of existing spam finds signals in common with your link.
- oblib 8y ago
  "The reason they have is when the spam filter is run against anonymous-video.com it returns positive." That's not a reason. It's an explanation that fails to provide cause.
- evincarofautumn 8y ago
  Can semi-confirm: I worked on Site Integrity (Infrastructure) at FB in 2013–2014, and iirc there were many instances where a benign URL was automatically flagged as spam, and someone had to explicitly go and whitelist it because we were getting complaints. Could be any number of things—I’d guess URLs containing things like “video” and “anonymous” are often sketchy pirate sites that try to install malware; or perhaps that URL was a malicious site in the past but isn’t anymore. The policies are explicitly written in code (Haxl) but a lot of them invoke machine learning models to do actual classification of stuff (URLs, images, comments, &c.)—although I’d imagine an increasing amount of the computation is being moved over to the Haxl side because it’s so much less resource-intensive than the FXL system it replaced. Where possible, SI usually errs on the side of “better safe than sorry” when it comes to spam, malware, fake accounts, &c.—hence users’ complaints of “getting zucc’d” when someone reports them, or their activity on the site triggers a filter.
  - oblib 8y ago
    That site lets you make and download a video but they don't offer to host it. They do host their own content there though. Here's the link to the article that was shared here where I found the link to the video that led me to the anonymous-video.com site. https://lmgsecurity.com/exposing-the-secret-office-365-forensics-tool/ https://lmgsecurity.com/exposing-the-secret-office-365-foren... I did a Google search on the anonymous-video.com domain name and nothing at all came up about spam or malware or anything nefarious at all, unless you consider the videos hosted there to be "spam", but that's a huge leap to make because they're not selling anything there. The entire site is blacklisted on FB, not just the video maker. This convinces me even further that this is not a decision based on machine learning models. I understand FB has the right to do this, and I'm not arguing here they shouldn't. I do, however, think it's important that we know and understand how, why, where, and to whom, when it is done. And I do think that FB users should be concerned about this specific site being blacklisted. I am.

by oblib 8y ago

admax88q 8y ago

The reason they have is when the spam filter is run against anonymous-video.com it returns positive. You're assigning far too much agency to the decision as if someone at FB reviewed anonymous-video.com specifically and decided to block it or not. Its just a machine learning model that has been trained on a bunch of existing spam finds signals in common with your link.

oblib 8y ago
"The reason they have is when the spam filter is run against anonymous-video.com it returns positive." That's not a reason. It's an explanation that fails to provide cause.
evincarofautumn 8y ago
Can semi-confirm: I worked on Site Integrity (Infrastructure) at FB in 2013–2014, and iirc there were many instances where a benign URL was automatically flagged as spam, and someone had to explicitly go and whitelist it because we were getting complaints. Could be any number of things—I’d guess URLs containing things like “video” and “anonymous” are often sketchy pirate sites that try to install malware; or perhaps that URL was a malicious site in the past but isn’t anymore. The policies are explicitly written in code (Haxl) but a lot of them invoke machine learning models to do actual classification of stuff (URLs, images, comments, &c.)—although I’d imagine an increasing amount of the computation is being moved over to the Haxl side because it’s so much less resource-intensive than the FXL system it replaced. Where possible, SI usually errs on the side of “better safe than sorry” when it comes to spam, malware, fake accounts, &c.—hence users’ complaints of “getting zucc’d” when someone reports them, or their activity on the site triggers a filter.
- oblib 8y ago
  That site lets you make and download a video but they don't offer to host it. They do host their own content there though. Here's the link to the article that was shared here where I found the link to the video that led me to the anonymous-video.com site. https://lmgsecurity.com/exposing-the-secret-office-365-forensics-tool/ https://lmgsecurity.com/exposing-the-secret-office-365-foren... I did a Google search on the anonymous-video.com domain name and nothing at all came up about spam or malware or anything nefarious at all, unless you consider the videos hosted there to be "spam", but that's a huge leap to make because they're not selling anything there. The entire site is blacklisted on FB, not just the video maker. This convinces me even further that this is not a decision based on machine learning models. I understand FB has the right to do this, and I'm not arguing here they shouldn't. I do, however, think it's important that we know and understand how, why, where, and to whom, when it is done. And I do think that FB users should be concerned about this specific site being blacklisted. I am.