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.
No need to detect on individual comments if something is deemed "appropriate" or not.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
FB has a clean interface, generally, but it's what's going on "behind the scenes" that is at issue here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Facebook is popular for infinitely more reasons than just "females are on it".
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?
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 ?
https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/374152_...
That is not censorship. Facebook's approach is.
"Is this censorship?" Are false positives on a spam filter censorship?