Earlier this month I wrote a blog post showing that a search for presidential candidate “Ron Paul” in Facebook Groups yields zero results. Facebook blamed the problem on a bug (unofficially, via comments by employees to that post), which was later corrected.
But a new issue may be harder to explain. On Tuesday, scores of mainstream press organizations (see WSJ, NYT, LATimes, CNET, AP, etc.). and bloggers reported on a privacy issue around part of Facebook’s new advertising platform.
MoveOn.org was leading the charge, and created a petition to demand Facebook not disclose personal information about a user without their explicit consent.
But now a side story is developing around the issue that relates to search censoring, again, at Facebook. Naturally all the press on the issue led people to go to Facebook to find the group MoveOn set up to organize their opposition to Facebook’s current privacy policy on this issue.
The group, which now has over 12,000 members, could not be located via search. Yesterday a search in Facebook Groups for “Privacy” began to return an error message saying “search is currently unavailable” (see image to right). But at the same time, searches for any other term yielded normal results.
Later search began working again, but the MoveOn Group was not included in the results even though it clearly had the term “privacy” in the title. A filtered search yielded seventeen results, but only sixteen could be viewed. The MoveOn group was likely the seventeenth, unseen result. See bottom image below.
MoveOn contacted Facebook to complain, and the search is now working. Facebook has not responded to a request for comment sent yesterday on why this may have happened, although we are in the middle of the Thanksgiving holiday.
MoveOn’s Adam Green, who alerted us of the issue, had this to say:
Facebook has the potential to revolutionize how we communicate with each other and organize around issues together in a 21st century democracy. But to succeed, they need the trust of their users. That trust will be undercut if they continue to put the wish lists of corporate advertisers ahead of the privacy interests of their users. It would also be undercut if it turned out our group was intentionally hidden from Facebook users — as opposed to it being an accident.
We’ll see if Facebook responds at all, and if they blame this on a bug as well.
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My website, http://www.20dc.com does everything Facebook does and is situated around politics. No censorship at all, even if petitions start up against us haha. Checkit out, as it also has a slew of tools that Facebook doesn’t have specifically formulated for political use, including a political satire section.
This is not all that they are censoring. I’ll be posting about some more features that they are sensoring.
If you use Facebook for any extended period of time you know that search barely works. Half the time it just says “search is down.”
A play on Hanlon’s razor: never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. Maybe they’re just having trouble maintaining a huge, live search index.
Who in the world would care to use Facebook to search for political content? It’s the place where you can throw a sheep at your friends.
But this is really no news. Sites like facebook, google and myspace consist of farms of servers hosting search indices. These servers get updated regularly, and in some cases few of them may not get updated. Sometimes portion of an index can get wiped out across 100% of the farm. Point being, who cares, its technical problem on part of Facebook. I guess there’s really not much going on in the tech world… Again, no news.
If facebook does not allow people to discuss on facebook, they will go somewhere else. The discussion will continue, only facebook will loose some users.
hope facebook remembers what brought us to facebook at the first place and avoid such mistakes in the future….
Hi MA
Since most of my comments are answered by DR, I will try my luck with you.
Why not all bloggers - “great” ones like you and “insignificant” ones like us unite to kill facebook?
Then you can start a new one or buy it ?
Oops, we are novices - so if you already have a stake in facebook then pls forgive us.
Rather ironic that searching for “Privacy” on Facebook yielded no results eh? Because there is no privacy on Facebook. ha ha ha…
I am unable to repro the screenshot you took. If you search for “privacy” now you will find well over 500 results. If you search for “privacy moveon.org”, the petition will be the first result. If there was a bug that caused you to only receive 17 results, please rest assured that you were missing far more than the one group. We do not censor search results. Ever.
Why is Dustin leaving a comment at 11:11pm on Thanksgiving? Hard Worker… (Hard Censorer…new word)
Dustin, thanks for coming on and commenting. The 17 results search was filtered to “Business, Consumer Group.” And it appears that search is now fine, although it was fixed after MoveOn contacted Facebook.
It’s just mathematically improbable that a bug would appear for a key term at exactly the time people begin to search for it, and then that MoveOn’s group would be specifically removed from results. Occam’s Razor suggests someone at Facebook proactively censored the results, although I would be surprised if it was known by management.
MA -
I was encountering issues searching on general people names around the same time - the content we were searching on had nothing to do with the groups mentioned in the post.
J
This is a well-intentioned post, but even if you don’t believe Facebook, in the past they haven’t really censored information.
For example, in the whole “newsfeed” controversy in the past, they didn’t shut down that group. I’d imagine the same thing is the case here- probably just a one-off bug during a push.
I think a more interesting question is MoveOn’s total lack of focus. Following the “General Betrayus” ad in the NYtimes, it’s easy to see this as a publicity stunt to target the hottest topic of the moment. Just like when Cuomo attacked Facebook, MoveOn sees a headline and figures it can be used to raise their prominence and funds.
This does all seem very queer indeed. However, I have observed many times in the past that Facebook is really bad at counting. Search result counts are often off by one, as are numbers of photos, videos, etc. It’s kind of embarrassing, but I’m not sure it should be used as evidence of censorship. I definitely would like to see Facebook directly address the rest of the assertions in this post, however (I mean in a blog post or press release, rather than a blog comment).
Phil,
Did you really see Facebook’s violation of privacy via Beacon discussed in the headlines BEFORE MoveOn’s campaign? Certainly not in the NYT, WSJ, LA Times, AP, and CNN…and truth be told, not even in the majority of tech publications/blogs (though some did, TechCrunch included).
If anything, this error of yours proves the rationale of this MoveOn campaign to be solid. It shined the spotlight on this important issue.
I assume you’d grant that MoveOn would not exist without the Internet, and that MoveOn has a rightful interest in keeping the Internet a fertile environment for organizing regular people in our democracy. That’s why MoveOn fights for Net Neutrality. And that’s why MoveOn feels it would be tragic if Facebook’s potentially revolutionary organizing platform became untrusted due to a perception that Facebook puts the wish list of corporate advertisers ahead of the privacy interests of users.
I hope you sign our petition to Facebook…
http://civ.moveon.org/facebook.....techcrunch
There are several possible answers here:
1) a code bug, which is inevitable in any website
2) a rogue engineer has taken it upon himself to defend facebook by censoring our search results, inevitably causing a much bigger scandal
3) a conspiracy involving the engineers AND the management to silence moveon.org
You’re somehow suggesting #1 is NOT the simplest possible answer? Come on mike, the accusation is unreasonable, but that explanation of it is just silly.
Hey Dustin, why don’t you fix the the privacy page, the Block People search box and Limited Profile add box are extending way past the page… I’m using Firefox 2.0.0.9, it also does it on IE.
Also note that Adam Green didn’t really address my comment- this is about picking a hot topic and trying to get headlines.
MoveOn is an increasingly floundering organization that can no longer convert white-hot issues to fund-raising and activism. The solution to problems like these, for orgs, politicians, etc, is to do a Google Trend Search and basically find out what’s hot and target it.
It’s a strategy of relevance by proximity.
Dustin,
I think everyone would hope that it’s #1. And credit to you for laying out the 3 options in a good faith way.
Here are two very specific things you can address–perhaps there are indeed easy explanations:
1) At the exact same time that “privacy” was typed in to the search bar and the result was “search is currently unavailable” search was perfectly available for other words.
2) The numbers are not the issue. The issue is that when one searched “privacy” and narrowed to “Business/Consumer Group” the MoveOn group was not listed. (It is listed now.)
Again, thanks for engaging this issue in good faith.
Adam
Hi Adam,
sure thing.
1) Our search index is split across many servers. Different search terms map to different servers and if there is an issue with one of them, you’ll lose the ability to search just those. I’m sure there were other terms that would have failed at the same time, but most would succeed.
2) If a group matches certain filters/terms, it is listed in the index multiple times (e.g. once for “privacy”, once for “moveon.org”, once for the set of groups that match “Business/Consumer Group”). Similar to 1), it’s possible to have an issue with just one of those locations in the index and not all of them. I missed that Mike’s screenshot represented a filtered search - my apologies. I assure you though that very few users actually would think to filter to “Business/Consumer Group” before just trying to search for moveon.org. Thanks, Mike, for being such a power user!
Again though, I just want to appeal to everyone’s sense of reason - why would Facebook censor anything at all knowing the people who want to be found would be upset by it and complain loudly (and to bloggers, who love to listen to things like that)?
Dustin
Michael Arrignton wrote:
“… Occam’s Razor suggests someone at Facebook proactively censored the results, although I would be surprised if it was known by management.”
Techcrunch source told me Caper the ghost was last seen around the Facebook’s server farm. Could you please investigate and report…
Why would facebook have anything against Ron Paul? Really. Don’t you think you are reading too much into this.
Happy thanks giving
Dustin,
I hear you on #1. Your answer’s not conclusive, but certainly is plausible.
On #2, I honestly don’t quite get it. When “privacy” was fixed, MoveOn’s group was not coming up in the results (right now, it comes up immediately). When one wanted to check to make sure it wasn’t just getting lost in the 500 groups that you correctly say deal with privacy, and the search was narrowed to a category where only 17 or so groups applied, MoveOn’s group wasn’t there either. When you typed most other words in the group name “Petition: Facebook, stop violating my privacy” none of the searches found the MoveOn group. When “MoveOn.org” was typed in, lots of other MoveOn groups were found, just not this one.
On your “why would anyone do that, knowing they’d get caught” point, the same would apply to political campaign staffer after political campaign staffer who writes crazy stuff anonymously in blogs thinking nobody could ever figure out it’s them, or business staffer after business staffer who edits wikipedia thinking nobody will ever find out. While it may all end up being a mistake (your option #1), I don’t think your other options should be seen as unreasonable.
But again, thanks for engaging.
Adam
I’ve been censored by Techcrunch before. Who has the louder voice? I’m going to go a limb and side with Facebook this time…
Dustin,
You’re explaining IT 101 to a bunch of conspiracy hungry sell outs. Don’t waste your breath dude. Let’s grab a beer down on Castro and forget about this s*** hole…
Ok, this will be my last post, but I don’t want to leave Adam’s comment hanging. Multi-word searches on Facebook are always AND searches - if the server for “privacy” was down, then it would fail against just that server, but still join the results for the others and present a non-error result page (even if there weren’t results).
I’m not sure why the filter search also didn’t work, but it would be a different type of problem - most indices are updated real-time, but not all. Speaking of which, the group-size sort is also not updated real-time (it shows up at the top for you, Adam, because you are already in it). I’ve taken the liberty of asking our search lead to update it now so that the petition will appear in the first page of results, lest we be accused of burying the result. This will be finished soon.
I disagree that your analogy is accurate - those kinds of situations involve forums where it is a reasonable assumption that a participant is not affiliated. The same is not true of the code behind a website.
I guess I can’t guarantee you that this wasn’t the result of a bug and I guess I understand why you might think we would react that way - but I can say that correcting a bug fixed it, not removing these [hypothetical] lines of code:
// screw adam green, at least for a few hours.
if ($group == “moveon.org”) {
return false;
}
The former might be possible to hide from management (though only a handful of devs at FB would know how to do that) - but I don’t see how you could fix it without being noticed AND while deceiving us into thinking we fixed it another way. So really that rules out option #2, only leaving an insistent but apparently lying me to facilitate #3.
Dustin
Well apparently the king has left the building. But let me just say that Mike has in a way won this one. He actually got FB to comment on his BS no news story.
Is this TechCrunch or FaceCrunch? Please provide RSS feeds without all this Facebook (and related) stuff or I’ll unsubscribe soon.
Funny that you think you are part of this volley b/w moveon and FB, but youre not.
Facebook search always messes up, it’s rarely functioning properly and always has those retarded “Showing 11-21 of 15″ errors. Just another ill-timed glitch.
I have to side with Dustin here (#19 & #25). As a developer I’ve encountered search solutions, such as the one he had described and on two occasions had to implement them. It’s often very difficult to ensure 100% accuracy of search results in a multi-server indexed search infrastructure. It will sometimes happen that things don’t necessarily get added to the index immediately. On other occasions, the item is added to two nodes in the distributed index, but not to the one node which you happen to be hitting with your search term. There are so many non-malicious reasons why that particular search term could have failed. Oh guess what, the other day a search for iTunes resulted in an error. OMG, did FB censor that as well? Most certainly not.
People get a hold of yourself… sensationalism over things like this really bothers me. Try adding a website to google. Then search for that site in 1 minute. See if the result comes up. Oh, and search for your term from different computers. God forbid the result shows up in different places, or doesn’t show up at all. Are you going to cry a river about that too?
This is not intended to be a flame. Simply an eye opener from another developer. =) Take it as my 2c — even if slightly angry :p
I side with Dustin on this one too. Facebook has done a decent job at making 50 million people happy. Mike has done a poor job at keeping his few readers informed. It almost seems like the ramifications of the inflation have caused a havoc at techcrunch.
#28, unless you are Steve Jobs, f**k off.
i love facebook. if facebook wants to censor someone or something, then so be it. long live facebook!
It’s pretty convenient that the search filters are cropped out of the screenshot. FB’s search always says there is one more result than there actually is, so the there was never a phantom result.
The underling ‘privacy’ concern is bs, no one on FB is forced to share their activity with their friends. It’s all just fundraising for moveon, they just need to keep the outrage going so they can continue to milk the fools that fund them.
Search hasn’t worked for a couple of days on iPhone.facebook, what’s the conspiracy there?
The solution to online privacy problems is simple = If you don’t want the world to see it, use it and exploit it - don’t post it online.
As for whether facebook is being dodgy about it’s searches and whatnot - call them out on it enough and they’ll eventually take the high road, or at least take a route that’s not so easily detected by users.
What all this boils down to tho, is the fact that we’re all users of the service and they control the site. We don’t own our profile on facebook. We don’t own those friends lists, etc. just like we don’t own the comments we write here on Techcrunch… but we are still responsible and will someday be held accountable for them nonetheless.
This is a non story. Another chance to promote FB however. I dont mind all the FB posts as it’s clear, like it or not, FB is the darling of the marketing company run by that whistle blower Dan (below).
A real FB story would be one about the backlash there is circulating against all the spammy new FB applications that are being released. There are like 10 groups dedicated to campaigning to FB to somehow limit the number of spammy requests people get from these so-called ‘applications’.
Do a search ‘when its working’ for ‘applications’ in groups and take a look at the groups that come up, the first 20 results are large groups all against these FB apps.
facebook.com/s.php?q=applications&k=200000010
Luckily my FB app was denied as ‘offensive’ so I cannot be blamed for any of this
I was wrong there is more than 200 groups (I stopped counting after that) that are all dedicated to STOPPING FB applications. Its VERY clear that there is a LARGE group of FB users that are sick to death with the app requests. Now this is a story! Considing APPs are the new viagra for the internet and Open Social is all the rave, it might just turn out that it’s not that ’social’ after all to have the whole world making apps….
@elegance a REAL story would be FB losing about 20% of their user base in a mass exodus caused by their dislike of the apps.
It’s funny. Looks like Techcrunch is censoring my comment!
Excellent. They blocked me by username. Seems like I’m able to get through by name. My previous comment was - most of you are being fooled here, all of this is a method to create publicity for FB, as techcrunch may have a sizeable stake in the company.
Censoring is somewhat necessary to win the trust of their users but they should not forget the democratic approach.
i love facebook
Maybe to filter out competition.
http://tekno-world.blogspot.com
I just want to know if I can block Beacon, and I use IE7.
Here is the full article that TC wouldn’t write:
startupcrunch.org/facebook_applications_anti_social_not_open_social
Arrington’s comment “It’s just mathematically improbable that a bug would appear for a key term at exactly the time people begin to search for it, and then that MoveOn’s group would be specifically removed from results.” Doesn’t even make sense…
I know you really want to break a legitimate scandal…but this is reaching.
Kudos to Dustin for stepping forward and clarifying (as it seems a lot of people on here, including MA don’t quite understand what takes place behind the scenes with searching).
This is the company that 50 million people are trusting with their data?
HA!
People using facebook are setting themselves up to be screwed because there is a 22 year old at the helm who has proven time and again to be incredibly morally flexible.
Just like how bosses are “mysteriously” getting their hands on incriminating photos from the so-called PRIVATE profiles of their employees.
Nope, you couldn’t pay me to join facebook.
All your privacies are belongs to me.
what’s the mystery?
now facebook has a backdoor too… just some teething problems working it out…
microsoft, google, apple, they all operate with “permissions”
Search across the amount of data that Facebook deals with is no simple affair, and can be an ongoing exercise in refinement. I won’t even speculate on what they have to deal with running Facebook on Windows - yikes.
But let’s say this is intentional, the people who started Facebook are of a generation that has been told over and over ‘if it’s someone’s service they can do what they want with it, you don’t have to use it’ and it’s totally understandable if they decided to employ that conventional wisdom. That defense against unwanted criticism is often heard in discussions about doing the right or wrong thing, and if censorship of critics is at play, they’ve turned that defense into an attack.
As a rare user of Facebook, when I log in to their site I am greeted with a page of response requests that have their contents and buttons all mixed up - the message for one person is inside the content area of a different person and their buttons are inside a 3rd person’s content area… so I log off the crappy site thinking that bug ridden site is doomed.