8 ms·

Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments

125 points by Braasch 14y ago

vapourmile 14y ago
@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?
__mark__ 14y ago
Is it using sentiment analysis?? If so that is very cool. But also annoying; I'm glad I don't use FB.
chrisrhoden 14y ago
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.
- chrisrhoden 14y ago
  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?
- nikcub 14y ago
  I think that is just a coincidence, definitely not intentional - it would be insane for fb to do that
- taligent 14y ago
  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.
  - chrisrhoden 14y ago
    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.
jasonkolb 14y ago
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.
- karl_hungus 14y ago
  wat?
tree_of_item 14y ago
Completely ridiculous. The next step is Facebook hellbanning people for "inappropriate comments".
- slig 14y ago
  Isn't that exactly what happens here?
  - BlackJack 14y ago
    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.
untog 14y ago
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?
- reso 14y ago
  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.
  - bobds 14y ago
    I'd rather pay with false negatives when it comes to comments.
    - mkjones 14y ago
      I agree - we've turned off the classifier that caused this false positive, as it's clearly too aggressive.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- jawngee 14y ago
  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_10151486189050161_558110160_23577940_1717231185_n.jpg https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/374152_...
- matznerd 14y ago
  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.
waterlesscloud 14y ago
So Facebook has decided to take control and accept responsibility for content on third party sites? That's an...interesting choice.
driverdan 14y ago
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.
jfoutz 14y ago
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.
gojomo 14y ago
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_Scream http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scr...
jachwe 14y ago
@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.
- kaybe 14y ago
  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).
- mkjones 14y ago
  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.
jawngee 14y ago
This happens to me fairly often. Though I seem to get this warning more: https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/374152_10151486189050161_558110160_23577940_1717231185_n.jpg https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/374152_...
- premise 14y ago
  Wow, that’s pretty “nice.” P.S. {temporarily removed}
  - mkjones 14y ago
    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?
darkstar999 14y ago
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.
- kaybe 14y ago
  If it was an opt-in thing it would be great.
- Natsu 14y ago
  I like the HN way of doing things, where every user can choose their own showdead setting.
zupreme 14y ago
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.
- firebones 14y ago
  "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.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
loverobots 14y ago
Misleading story. I call it censorship when your comment is more or less removed "because you believe in [insert cause, religion or candidate here]" not because of an imperfect algo trying to remove spam.
veneratio 14y ago
Having just finished a general AI course, this was fascinating and a great example of why to be careful with automation.
protolif 14y ago
People are still using Facebook?
- gm 14y ago
  Lol, quite an opportune comment as FB approaches 1B users.
premise 14y ago
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?
peterkelly 14y ago
The ironic thing is that if Facebook also forbid irrelevant posts, it would become a vast, empty wasteland.
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
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.
tuxguy 14y ago
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.

125 points by Braasch 14y ago

@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?

__mark__ 14y ago

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

chrisrhoden 14y ago

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.

chrisrhoden 14y ago
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?
nikcub 14y ago
I think that is just a coincidence, definitely not intentional - it would be insane for fb to do that
taligent 14y ago
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.
- chrisrhoden 14y ago
  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.

jasonkolb 14y ago

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.

karl_hungus 14y ago
wat?

tree_of_item 14y ago

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

slig 14y ago
Isn't that exactly what happens here?
- BlackJack 14y ago
  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.

untog 14y ago

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?

reso 14y ago
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.
- bobds 14y ago
  I'd rather pay with false negatives when it comes to comments.
  - mkjones 14y ago
    I agree - we've turned off the classifier that caused this false positive, as it's clearly too aggressive.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
jawngee 14y ago
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_10151486189050161_558110160_23577940_1717231185_n.jpg https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/374152_...
matznerd 14y ago
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.

waterlesscloud 14y ago

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

driverdan 14y ago

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.

jfoutz 14y ago

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.

gojomo 14y ago

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_Scream http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scr...

jachwe 14y ago

@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.

kaybe 14y ago
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).
mkjones 14y ago
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.

jawngee 14y ago

This happens to me fairly often. Though I seem to get this warning more: https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/374152_10151486189050161_558110160_23577940_1717231185_n.jpg https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/374152_...

premise 14y ago
Wow, that’s pretty “nice.” P.S. {temporarily removed}
- mkjones 14y ago
  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?

darkstar999 14y ago

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.

kaybe 14y ago
If it was an opt-in thing it would be great.
Natsu 14y ago
I like the HN way of doing things, where every user can choose their own showdead setting.

zupreme 14y ago

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.

firebones 14y ago
"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.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

loverobots 14y ago

Misleading story. I call it censorship when your comment is more or less removed "because you believe in [insert cause, religion or candidate here]" not because of an imperfect algo trying to remove spam.

veneratio 14y ago

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

protolif 14y ago

People are still using Facebook?

gm 14y ago
Lol, quite an opportune comment as FB approaches 1B users.

premise 14y ago

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?

peterkelly 14y ago

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

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

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.

tuxguy 14y ago

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.