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Robert Scoble’s profile raises awareness for the problem with censorship on facebook.com:

Wow, does Facebook do sentiment analysis on comments and keeps you from posting negative comments?

I just tried posting a long comment to @Max Woolf’s comment area and Facebook kept me from posting, showing me this error message.

Has anyone seen this before? Shows the kind of machine learning and content analysis that Facebook is doing to keep everything “happy” here. The comment was analysis about another tech blog. This is sort of scary, but also intriguing. I don’t know of any other social network that analyzes your content in real time, looking for stuff that’s bad to post.

Anyone at Facebook want to talk about what the system is doing here and what kinds of things the algorithms are looking for?

Among the first 100 comments / replies to this post, we find:

David Berkowitz As scary as it is, I’m also intrigued just what you were posting that triggered it.
John Peter Mahoney Never seen this before .. wild.
JC Bouvier Facebook is a happy place, Scoble, didn’t you know that?
Fabiola Christensen I’ve tried the same thing. Therefore, I am soon back to using google plus more!!! :-/
Aidaliz Maldonado Whoah!? Did your comments include profanity or simply negative remarks?
Fabiola Christensen HATE IT!
Emmett Lollis I’d like to see the contents of the post in order to analyze what factors they must be using.
Robert Scoble ‎David Berkowitz I have saved that text. Maybe I’ll post it over on Google+.
Ian Tuck I’ve never seen this before. Are you sure you don’t have some sort of App installed that might be mediating your comments?
Dennis J Smith I have seen that before but forgot what I was trying to post at the time. FB has never allowed me to post the word Powerball either.
Lucas Johnson or how you haven’t triggered this before? As always Scoble, i think you broke it bro.
Aidaliz Maldonado I just got a similar pop-up just now when I commented, but different wording.
Tony J. Stanislawski I have seen this before with personal comments, that verge on the negative side, but for me it usually sarcasm which they cannot get yet it seems.
Max Woolf ‎…ಠ_ಠ
Enric Teller I’ve seen warning that the comment may be irrelevant, but not a block message. That’s trusting algorithms that are not AI yet too much.
Yosi Taguri I thought its an april’s fool joke
Miran Maric When Google + first came out, I tried to post a pro- G+ posting and was denied several times…
Frantzdy Romain uhhh 1984 anyone..guess Big Brother’s watching
Barb Gonzalez Let us know more when you find out.
Janet Thaeler Wow, this needs to be reported, are you blogging or is someone blogging about this? Lots of possible sources in this thread.
Stuart Duncan Shiny happy people only need apply. All else will be censored.
Stuart R. G. Calimport AI assisted positivity and ethics. Interesting. I got a post asking whether I was sure I wanted to post to a public thread once. I quite like that, perhaps emails, texts etc should have that too, although it may put libel lawyers out of business.
Luke Allen McManamon I have had “warnings” from FB similar to this. If this system become more mainstream I will consider discontinuing use of FB. I will not have my content censored.
Robert Scoble Here’s the comment: https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/cdZQPUiMp9b
Robert Scoble – Google+ – Facebook is keeping you from being an asshat in comments … plus.google.com
Facebook is keeping you from being an asshat in comments OK, so I go over to +Max Woolf’s content area on Facebook, and respond to his post about…
Clif Hirtle You have got to be kidding me.
Lucretia Madden Pruitt That distresses me on so many levels I can’t even begin to express it.
Leigh Fatzinger Facebook gives the ability for page admins to block certain words or terms from being entered into comments. It’s usually reserved for offensive language. But theoretically any words or phrases could be entered into the blocked text section. Your comment might have included one or more of those phrases. Interesting, though. Hadn’t seen the pop-up before.
Chris Hamilton Wow. I got it, too. That’s…less than ideal.
Rick Ladd Last time I can recall actually seeing something like this was inside the firewall at Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, when I tried to share a photo and explanation of why the new (at the time – 2008?) waterless urinals had flies painted in the “sweet” spot. It was flagged as “tasteless”, presumably because of the word “potty” in the URL of the page I was attempting to share.
Nicholas Pappagallo Jr. kinda censorship, no? I do like posiitve comments but censoring should be up to the invividual that gets the comment not FB
Leigh Fatzinger BTW – I just got the same pop-up when I tried to make a comment on this post. I think it might be a bug.
Adam Fitzgerald Robert, everytime I comment on your posts I get a similar warning. It says “are you sure you want to post, comments may get you blocked”
Rick Ladd I got a different message when I posted the comment, above, which said it “might” be inappropriate and gave me a choice of whether or not to post!! No threat, however. Me no like!
Zachary Collins Facebook’s algorithm for choosing what comments are “irrelevant or inappropriate” is obviously broken. Plus, as Facebook wanting to be a communication platform, it should not be moderating comments in such a way. If really needed, a report button would be a better alternative.
Bryan Thatcher I wish this was included in the SMS apps on phones!
Robert Scoble I bet that someone reported me as a spammer or troublemaker and that got Facebook to apply a harsher set of algorithms on my content. Lucretia Madden Pruitt I’ll let you know what I learn about this. It is pretty harsh. I wonder what’s going on here?
Dean Rodgers You’re full of crap and have no clue what you’re talking about. Stop spreading lies!!!!
Eyal Shahar I want to believe that there’s a good explanation for this…
Nick Hall Facebook’s MO has always been to build community – to build connections. For example, we don’t have access to a ‘dislike’ button because it creates a destructive/negative relationship between two social objects. (Remember the Whopper Sacrifice campaign from a few years back: defriend 10 people for a free burger?) I haven’t been stuck with this error message before – my speculation would be the excessive negative keywords near the term ‘Facebook’ or the first two sentences not mentioning/referencing enough of the original posts’ content. Is there any word on the anti-bullying enhancements to Facebook, yet? I wonder if this algorithm-hunting functionality from Facebook is related to anti-cyber-bullying campaigns.
Zachary Collins And now before I was able to post that comment, I got a message asking me to confirm and warning that I could be banned from adding comments: http://cl.ly/1b1Q0w0b2z3U2F3l1Q3Z
Dean Rodgers Recent experience says such a filter, if it exists, has yet to be perfected.
Raimo Van Der Klein I think it’s just you that get these
Mim Eisenberg I’ve been unable to share on FB links to a G+ post. Let’s see right now if I can post here my G+ profile: https://plus.google.com/107386502152174751016/posts
Mim Eisenberg It posted, but that’s not my photo, and initially, after I clicked Enter, I got this pop-up: Are you sure you want to post this? If your comment is irrelevant or inappropriate, you may be blocked from commenting on public posts. Please review your comment before posting. Confirm Cancel
Mim Eisenberg But it’s apparent that FB has an algorithm that doesn’t particularly like anything to do with Google+.
Chris Sel Leigh – no matter what words the page admin chooses to block, how do they really define what is irrelevant and what is not? Unless of course someone at Facebook is messing with Scoble
Robert Scoble ‎Mim Eisenberg I don’t think this algorithm has anything to do with Google+. I’ve posted hundreds of links to Google+ here without getting this kind of error before.
Greg McBride Screw you, Robert. You suck! I hate everything about you. Asshole!
Robert Scoble ‎+Greg McBride: Heh. Your comment got through.
Greg McBride Well, it didn’t reject the comment I just posted. Guess they aren’t filtering me. By the way, I was joking. I have no problem with you.
Ian Beyer Interesting, it wouldn’t let me post Mim’s link either. It also told me this morning that I had apparently sent too many friend requests for its liking and was going to ban me from doing that for the next 14 days. Which is interesting, because I haven’t sent any friend requests recently, but I have rejected a couple from people I don’t know.
Mim Eisenberg But I certainly got the pop-up simply because I wanted to post the link to my G+ profile.
Robert Couture Nice Censorship … no more freedom of speech at Facebook
Greg McBride I once got an alert that said “You’ve included the word ‘boobs’ in 14 status updates in the past 7 days. Are you sure you want to continue talking about boobs? I mean, they’re just boobs.” Bizarre.
Stuart Duncan Just for fun, I’m copying and pasting your message exactly to see if it gives me the same error or if it’s just because they’re after you specifically….
Heiner Neuling Yes, here is some censorship going on. They even delete whole posts
Stuart Duncan 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.
Michael Markman Orwell’s thought police are now algorithmically more efficient.
Stuart Duncan It did give me the exact same message… hitting confirm put it through anyway. But yeah, it’s not just you. I got the same messgae.
Mim Eisenberg Needless to say, I was replying to Robert Scoble’s 2:06 pm reply to me, not to what Ian just wrote, which is also fascinating and does lend credence to the concept of an anti-G+ algorithm on FB.
Matt MacKenzie Well my preference is strawberries over blackberries any day. Cheese is also nice.
Matt MacKenzie ‎(I guess it doesn’t catch everything…)
Rosh An This is disgusting to see a algorithm making the first ammendment null and void!
Erik Boles My guess is that some FB test code accidentally made it into production and will soon go away and some soft and warm message from FB will come out about a “tool for possible future consideration” was accidentally published to some production clusters.
David Teicher definitely not real
Stuart Duncan Competition check: “I watch Twitter, Google+, and Facebook, along with Hacker News, Techmeme, Quora. These are the new news sources.”
Stuart Duncan No censoring on that post. I wonder what in the world Facebook didn’t like about your comment.
Nick Beenham I’ve seen this but only once.. Actually I think it was my last comment to you. Odd because in it I said FB was a nice place… Maybe it’s Google subterfuge?
Leslie Poston I’d like to hear their explanation Robert, since I’ve gotten the same message once or twice for innocuous comments on personal profile threads or on pages.
Jeff Foster That’s nucking futz!
Jonathan Matthie I can’t believe this is real. Wow.
Ayelet Noff That’s scary shit….what was the comment u posted? I am curious now….:-) Would be interesting to see if FB enables u to post it in the comments section here.
Robert Morris wow.. that blows
Christopher DeMero It’s crazy.
Brandon Wirtz What the Fuckity Fuck does Facebook know about sentiment? Those Fucktards wouldn’t know shit if it hit them in the face after bouncing off the ass of their naked 20 iq brains. They had to use machine learning because they weren’t able to do human learning on them selves, the worthless POS’s Who are they to censor my comments based on some Skynet like code snippet, rectally divined by some outsource programmer who likely barely speaks English him self. Clearly the system doesn’t work cause this rant of a ramble of a post made it through their fucktard of an analyzer.
Brandon Wirtz Oh, but for the record, the sentiment analysis, isn’t sentiment, it is Repeated word usage across multiple posts in the same time period. If you talk about “Puppies” in every post, they assume you are spamming about puppies, but rather than say “quit spamming” they throw this message instead.
Lynn O’Connell I have seen bizarre things from Facebook before, but not that message. When they were fighting with Zynga about 2 years ago, they started doing all kinds of weird things to torment their game players. Bans for posting too often on walls, etc. All of which stopped when they reached a deal. So, I definitely believe that FB can/will program algorithms that hurt users if it serves their needs. But hard to see what the need would be here, given that G+ doesn’t seem to be the trigger.
Adam Chernow Odd. I’ve gotten the “you can’t post this because you don’t have permission” box before (on posts, btw, from friends, with a comment box) but haven’t seen this one.
Lotus Carroll Well, butter my biscuit, that *is* interesting.
Krsna Domine Robert, thanks for posting this. Will share.
Erik Boles Based on the number of f-bombs posted in this thread and elsewhere to test this out (can we call this the “Fuck Scobleizer” effect??) I am more convinced now that this was test code that got rolled into production and just so happened to hit Roberts account, which got it huge exposure.
Stven Story we don’t meed or want a big brother!!!
Robert Scoble ‎David Teicher this is most definitely real.
Scott Schablow I wanted to tell you what I really think the net effect will be to Facebook’s future but I’m afraid it will get censored. And then what, FB policebot begins monitoring all my posts. Is there a FB dissident status it jail for offenders to the state? Too far reaching for comfort for the very reason you stated, their algorithm was unable to discern your context.
Robert Scoble I have written Facebook PR about this issue and will let you know what they say in response.
Brett Nordquist It’s as if Facebook hired the admins from Etsy.
Stuart Duncan Yup, definitely real. I got the same prompt when I copy and pasted Robert’s comment… except mine had a confirm box on it so that I could push it through anyway.
Lucretia Madden Pruitt So via our own haphazard testing, we’ve figured out that it’s not consistent. Some people can post without warnings, some can’t when it comes to the exact same message. Wall settings may or may not be a factor, frequency of posts regarding same topic or words may or may not be a factor, person posting may or may not be a factor. Either way? I find it offensive that there’s no clarity when it comes to what behavior triggered the message. I’d hate to think that someone tried to post something like this comment of yours to my wall and it got blocked Robert. It’s very nanny-state of them.
Srikar Dhanakoti Wow, i have never seen this kind of activity on Facebook.
Diane Bisgeier I had this exact message about 2 weeks ago. I bullishly tried again with the same message and it went through.
Donald Frazier Sounds like HAL-speak. Scary.
Shane Srogi Facebook’s troll alert.
Krsna Domine Ah I see. They’re only filtering Robert Scoble. well…I wonder why.
Lotus Carroll I have to admit that the Big Brother comments are amusing to me. “Big Brother” has been watching us all for quite some time already.
John De Bord This is rather nuts. “Would you like to play a game….”
David Teicher ‎Robert Scoble really? i’m shocked. i can’t believe someone at FB would have signed off on something like this across the board. could it have been a product of certain settings set by the person whose post you were commenting on?
David Leffler Send them a pizza (with anchovies) and they’ll back off. Nothing like sending pizza to geeks to calm them down.
Eric Leslie I’m guessing it has something to do with high profile profiles. When I tried to friend you, it suggested I make sure that I actually know you in person before I send you a friend request. It doesn’t do that for other people.
Todd Tweedy The warning window “Are You Sure You Want to Post This” started appearing around April 10th along with a rollout of The Comment Can’t Be Posted.