It seems Facebook has been swooping the headlines lately by storm for a number of different reasons; this weekend has been no exception.
Apparently on Saturday morning there was a bit of a stir going on in Blog land. Max Woolf a Carnegie Mellon student and avid TechCrunch commenter had posted about our contemporary blog scene. His comment apparently scored high points with the well-known tech startup enthusiast, Robert Scoble as he set out to state his agreement with Woolf’s convictions yet of course adding a few of his own as well.
Surprisingly, his comment did not get through, as this message appeared:
While this “censorship” has received a lot of mixed reviews, Facebook remains firm on its policies against abusive or harassing behavior, since they are eager to create an environment of safe and righteous content.
The issue of a comment being “positive” or “negative” could be quite debatable; Facebook is not only restricted to one country or continent, therefore cross-cultural misunderstanding are not out of the question. In an attempt to solve this issue though, the company resorts to a combination of software algorithms and notifications from other users to identify inappropriate behavior.
Facebook have already contacted Scoble, signifying that his comment had been marked as “Spam” due to two main reasons : first being that he and Max are not friends; Scoble is only subscribed to Max, making his comments subject to more strict scrutiny. The second reasons is due to the fact that Scoble’s comment included three “@” links, making it look even more suspicious.
Our personal views are that Facebook is a private company in the end, and it’s completely up to them to dictate the way they run their business. This is the core difference between Government censorship and Private Company censorship, if we might call it as such. If we are to compare the two; with the latter, you have the luxury of simply not using their service and moving on to another that permits more freedom or is more in agreement with your needs. However, when it comes to the former, the choice is substantial (life, death, imprisonment, war).
Hence, Facebook is a luxury and not a right. A lot of people enjoy using it and yet they seem to forget one essential actuality; they willingly signed up, on their terms, to use their free service. So, if Facebook decided they could be served ads and be a market for games and other products in return to let you have access to their site, it’s completely their choice.
It seems Facebook are trying to do a new thing every single day, and while people may not welcome these changes with arms wide open, they are forced to yield eventually. Our only hopes remain that these new policies do actually contribute to removing actual spam and not “false positives”.
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