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.
So what, it’s a private site and no one is forcing you or anyone to use it.
Techcrunch now reminds me of when Danny Sullivan at old Search Engine Watch and now Search Engine Land hitched himself to the Google wagon and rode it to fame.
Your claim to fame now is Facebook 24/7, amazing. If it makes you lots of dough keep it going.
Anyone who develops for a large scale site will only scratch his/her head at the idea that some developer would be motivated to change some code to filter out a test result. Where I work, the effort to do so would be detected quickly, and would presumably lead to job loss. I don’t know how facebook works, but where I work we have a vast code base with extremely stringent safeguards on source control. But even if you are stupid enough to make a change (one that would always be found) without that change being part of a project or bug fix, you still have to find a way to roll it out to production.
The accusations against facebook in this case are that they are either too stupid to have a clear delineation between staged code and production (and no operations and/or release supervisors, to boot!) or are malicious from the top down. Both of those are pretty serious charges that shouldn’t be made by a large tech journal such as this without substantial evidence.
For me, I just take this Dustin Moskovitz fellow at his word. If he says search results are not filtered, ever, then the next step is for someone from facebook to rat them out, and maybe get their 15 minutes of fame. I doubt it will happen, since his explanation regarding indexed search results is entirely reasonable.
Keep in mind that if the combined search query were different (a search for “Britney Spears”, say, and had led to impartial results, nobody would care and would likely move on (no pun intended).
I think the broader issue here is the efficacy of techcrunch reporting.
Legitimate journalism doesn’t loft accusations without some evidence (usually coming from an insider). The effects of reports like this on companies have the potential, especially as TechCrunch grows, to become quite profound.
I hope that as TechCrunch matures, its journalism does, too.
I have stopped using Facebook altogether. Yesterday, I removed all apps from my profile except 1 — Groups. The only reason I haven’t completely deleted my account is on the off-chance Facebook becomes something interesting. Facebook may be the next sliced bread, but it won’t be one I’ll be consuming. Facebook is unstable, error-prone, and frankly, shady. Privacy is my biggest concern, and frankly, Facebook’s privacy policies are unimpressive. For me, it’s a complete waste of time. How many of us have signed up for Facebook just because we wanted to see what all the fuss was about, created an account, played with a few apps, shared a few pictures, and stopped visiting the site? I suspect a lot of us. There are many of you who love Facebook. Enjoy it. You guys deserve each other. I’ll stick with My Yahoo and Google.
Goodbye Facebook
Stop it, stop all these bashing. I am a millennial, don’t you know what that means? It means I can’t take criticism and I am a winner no matter what I do. You should expect a call from my parents on how mean you all are to me.
In case you don’t know my generation of Millennials, here’s an informative segment on 60 minutes
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories.....5200.shtml
Please stop writing so bamn much about FB. MA — my sense is that you write disproportionately too much about FB. I will no doubt unsubscribe from the TC newsletter if TC becomes just a FB blog. We know what FB is. Discover something else, please.
Zuckerberg’s role model is Gates, you can expect Microsoft-like behavior from Facebook, its corporate culture is much closer to M$ than it is to Google. Proprietary, closed, and to some extent manipulative. You can expect more of the same, just as you do from M$. Zuckerberg is playing from M$’s gamebook. Win at all cost!
Inane filler comment with horrible grammar and empty threats to unsubscribe to TechCrunch, referring to Silicon Valley power players by first name from the border of irrelevance in Eastern Europe.
link to my shitty blog
This doesn’t surprise me in the least. You can get a sense of a company from using it’s products. Facebook is not your friend. They’re not in it for you, they’re in it for themselves and the money. That’s not bad in itself (most are) but it matters how you achieve that goal and how you’re prepared to treat your customers to achieve that goal. Facebook will happily roll right over you to get where they want to be.
Everybody does it!
There are some pretty scummy people out there and we don’t them finding all of the scummy stuff they want!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Your search is only looking for groups that originated in your network that have the word privacy in them.
And facebooks search isn’t reliable enough for it to be called censorship.
-Ed
WOW
These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.
I was recently deleted from facebook. they do censor as it suits them. i wasn’t violating their policies. they are just ultimately anti free expression
Holly crap, I noticed the exact same thing when searching for the group or trying to view it. I thought it was suspicious, but dismissed it.
I do what I want on my own property. STFU
Even if Facebook can defend itself this time with a buggy search (hmm, since when is incompetence a virtue?), it’s very likely members of the network will revolt something or the other sooner or later - see this for example: http://constitutional-facebook.org/
As a side note, I’ve seen this sort of thing happening in another web-based social network (a non-profit one, no less!) and seeing the parallels is quite scary.
Facebook just got done editing their search function as well. If you do a search for privacy, you’ll see new keyword identifiers that point to other pages on their site. As a developer, I never pull a page down completely, just disable the functionality that we’re working on. More than likely, this was run when a server farm was being updated…
Also…what are they giving to advertisers that’s revealing? Your age, college, gender? Even at that point, they aren’t “giving” it away, they’re segmenting advertising…it’s smart and every other site does it as well…none of them have opened up their advertising to everybody like this though…it’s smart…very smart.
I’ve searched for people before and gotten the “Search is currently unavailable” message. I would immediately try the search again and get results. Are these people sure it wasn’t just a temporary outage or unhandled exception?
Regardless, I do think Facebook needs to go to an opt-in model. See my little scare at http://ianlotinsky.wordpress.c.....y-privacy/
Is MA going to get away with a hit and run again? We are waiting to hear who those sources are (besides Adam Green) and what led MA to come to such an unlikely conclusion… So far most of us in this thread don’t seem to buy it.
If Google can do it why can’t Facebook? It is their system and their business. No one cries foul when Google censors their search results. Facebook is a business and can return whatever it wants to search results. Is it right? Probably not but that is life.
So… Does what happens in the Facebook STAY in the Facebook? I seriously doubt it…
I suppose it is possible that this search snafu has resulted in much ado about nothing. Perhaps. It is not _completely_ unthinkable…
But regarding Facebook, privacy, and the trust of the Facebook community, perhaps some of you would be interested to know some of the financial backing behind Facebook and the eyebrow-raising links back to government. *I* certainly don’t trust Facebook, or Myspace for that matter. Someone got curious about the $13 million infusion of cash that Facebook got and did some research. Let’s see… A CIA-front venture capital firm (In-Q-Tel), BBN, DARPA, Office of Information Awareness (Total/Terrorist Information Awareness, remember TIA?), etc… All very scary in an Orwellian sort of way. Facebook seems to be the PERFECT application for something like the big-brother OIA, getting the people to fill their databases for them. Look at the objectives of the OIA and the sorts of data Facebook collects. All ur infos r belong to BB.
But, then, anyone truly internet-savvy knows that NOTHING is private on the internet. The NSA has been tapping the trunks at AT&T co-location facilities, for instance. Even encryption is hard to trust after the Hushmail gaff and the back-door(s) found in the NIST reference cryptography algorithms.
Presentation:
http://albumoftheday.com/facebook/
Article:
http://www.commongroundcommons.....34949.html
Peace!
Tim
Hi, hello, privet
toyota truck wrongdoing
They are banning ‘Ron Paul’ now. I can search for anyone else, and any other candidate, but not Ron Paul. Talk about censorship.