Is Facebook Using Spam Moderation to Censor Commenting… or Was it Just a Bug that Hit Scoble?

Censorship can be disguised in many ways and often it’s the mask of privacy protection, security or simply, when we’re talking about the web – spam filtering. Last week, many Facebook users noticed that Facebook marked their comments as irrelevant or inappropriate and therefore they couldn’t have been posted.

As TechCrunch reports, it all started when Robert Scoble, a well-known tech blogger tried to comment on a Max Woolf’s post – the topic of the conversation was the tech blogging scene. However, when Scoble tried to submit the comment, he got this message:

What? OK, we get that Facebook wants to keep a safe and clean environment under its domain name, but is this a bit too much?

Of course, what makes a comment “positive” or “negative” is a very subjective thing. Since Facebook is a global site, and what is acceptable in one culture is offensive in another, the company generally relies on a combination of software algorithms and notifications from other users to identify inappropriate behavior. This seems to show a glitch in that system.

So, what was it all about? ZDnet found out the troubling comment:

I’m so glad I didn’t start a media business. It’s actually really tough to get new and interesting stories and to avoid falling into drama. People forget that Techcrunch was built step-by-step as a new publishing form was taking shape. PandoDaily doesn’t have that advantage and, is, indeed, facing competition from social networks that is quite good indeed.

I no longer visit blogs. I watch Twitter, Google+, and Facebook, along with Hacker News, Techmeme, Quora. These are the new news sources.

Plus, Pando Daily actually doesn’t have enough capital to compete head on with, say, D: All Things Digital or The Verge, both of which are expanding quickly and have ecosystems behind them.

You see, nothing that should set off Facebooks spam/moderation system. However, Scoble pointed three things in this comment which might have caused this “false positive”:

1. I’m subscribed to @max.woolf https://www.facebook.com/max.woolf and am not a friend of his in the system. That means that the spam classification system treats comments more strictly than if we were friends.
2. My comment included three @ links. That probably is what triggered the spam classification system.
3. There might have been other things about the comment that triggered the spam system.

The PR official I talked with told me that the spam classification system has tons of algorithms that try to keep you from posting low-value comments, particularly to public accounts (er, people who have turned on subscriptions here on Facebook).

Everyone can make a mistake and for big systems like Facebook mistakes might be often. However, those error messages should be more precise; if the system triggered the message as a spam, tell it that way. Beating around the bush with messages like “irrelevant or inappropriate” isn’t cool and it seems like Facebook doesn’t like its users.

Finally, TechCrunch got a response from Facebook:

To protect the millions of people who connect and share on Facebook every day, we have automated systems that work in the background to maintain a trusted environment and protect our users from bad actors who often use links to spread spam and malware. These systems are so effective that most people who use Facebook will never encounter spam. They’re not perfect, though, and in rare instances they make mistakes. This comment was mistakenly blocked as spammy, and we have already started to make adjustments to our classifier. We look forward to learning from rare cases such as these to make sure we don’t repeat the same mistake in the future.
For more information about our spam prevention systems, please see this blog post: https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=403200567130.

After all, it seems this was really just a glitch, a false positive (subscribed status, many mentions…). However, if you weren’t a popular blogger like Scoble is, how would you feel with this message and how would tackle this issue?