Facebook Censorship Continues
Posted by Nick O'Neill on November 23rd, 2007 12:06 PMYesterday, Mike Arrington posted about potential censorship by Facebook of Moveon.org’s Facebook group that was created in protest of Facebook Beacon. Dustin Moskovitz joined the comment stream to say that this was simply a technical bug. While it may have been, what is not a technical bug is Facebook’s decision to prevent the word “MySpace” from appearing in any ads. In fact the word is completely prohibited.
I have read other places that linking to MySpace is also prohibited but have not been able to reproduce such problems. I should also add that for some reason including the word “Facebook” in an advertisement is also not allowed. According to their policy ad text “cannot reference Facebook directly.” Censorship has always been a touchy subject for companies and Facebook is no exception.
I think the best position on censorship is to completely avoid it. Unfortunately censorship is prevalent throughout all media whether it be social networks or mass media companies. In addition to the word “MySpace,” Facebook has also blocked most of their competitors’ names including Hi5, Friendster and Orkut. I was able to generate an ad with Bebo in the text though. Perhaps Facebook will censor that as well if they end up reading this article.
I can understand wanting to prevent the competitors from advertising on their site but blocking their names from ads is not the way to go about it. They should instead prevent the sites from linking to competitor TLDs (top-level domain names). Do you think any form of censorship by Facebook is reasonable?
Thanks to Andrew Stone for sending a screenshot.
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November 23rd, 2007 at 11:26 am
>Do you think any form of censorship by Facebook is reasonable?
IMHO, only if required by law then it's perhaps reasonable,
all others are not acceptable — even by China standards…
let alone in the US (if that's any different than China
in terms of censoring competitor stuff or political reasons).
But, yes, it's a touchy subject… /ac.
November 23rd, 2007 at 11:47 am
A TLD is the final part of a domain name, e.g. “com” or “gov”, not the whole domain name.
Any kind of domain name block could be circumvented with redirects, anyway, for example with a tinyurl, or another registered domain name.
As for the censorship issue, it's Facebook's site, so they can do what they want, even if this is the first step down that slippery slope of total censorship. It's something we should keep an eye on, though, in case it gets stepped up a notch in the future.
November 23rd, 2007 at 11:55 am
Oops! Either way they can block the domain name if they really wanted. Misrepresented TLDs. Watch out!
November 23rd, 2007 at 12:18 pm
I think this is silly. Facebook should be confident enough that users will not flock to their competition even if it's advertised on their site.
November 23rd, 2007 at 12:26 pm
>Do you think any form of censorship by Facebook is reasonable?
IMHO, only if required by law then it’s perhaps reasonable,
all others are not acceptable — even by China standards…
let alone in the US (if that’s any different than China
in terms of censoring competitor stuff or political reasons).
But, yes, it’s a touchy subject… /ac.
November 23rd, 2007 at 12:47 pm
A TLD is the final part of a domain name, e.g. “com” or “gov”, not the whole domain name.
Any kind of domain name block could be circumvented with redirects, anyway, for example with a tinyurl, or another registered domain name.
As for the censorship issue, it’s Facebook’s site, so they can do what they want, even if this is the first step down that slippery slope of total censorship. It’s something we should keep an eye on, though, in case it gets stepped up a notch in the future.
November 23rd, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Oops! Either way they can block the domain name if they really wanted. Misrepresented TLDs. Watch out!
November 23rd, 2007 at 1:18 pm
I think this is silly. Facebook should be confident enough that users will not flock to their competition even if it’s advertised on their site.
November 27th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
[...] of privacy concerns. This is compounded with other Facebook woes, as they have also been accused of censorship around the issue, and are fighting a constant battle convincing marketers of good returns on Click Through Rates, [...]
December 5th, 2007 at 4:01 am
[...] thing that I just gave up and didn’t place the ad… seems like a silly rule to me. Read the resulting entry at AllFacebook for a better [...]
May 8th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Facbook has taken another censorship move, I am a member of Human Pets. It's an online community of “pets” who own each other, and have fun playing, making gifts for each other. Some of them naughty by nature.
The creator of HP added a membership option, whereby paying members could create and flag items as adult, so only other paying members who chose to view adult items could see them. This solved the pornography issue for 2 months, until today when facebook asked Patrick the creator to remove the option to create adult only items.
Things will go back to the way they were before, where people would break the rules to create adult items, and risk showing them to minors, and getting banned just to make a few points and have some fun.
I created a facebook group to protest this backwards thinking censorship they have now implemented.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=12550629419
May 8th, 2008 at 11:55 am
Facbook has taken another censorship move, I am a member of Human Pets. It’s an online community of “pets” who own each other, and have fun playing, making gifts for each other. Some of them naughty by nature.
The creator of HP added a membership option, whereby paying members could create and flag items as adult, so only other paying members who chose to view adult items could see them. This solved the pornography issue for 2 months, until today when facebook asked Patrick the creator to remove the option to create adult only items.
Things will go back to the way they were before, where people would break the rules to create adult items, and risk showing them to minors, and getting banned just to make a few points and have some fun.
I created a facebook group to protest this backwards thinking censorship they have now implemented.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=12550629419
May 8th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
OMG!!!! Facebook has deleted Human Pets entirely!
Now the creator of Human Pets has a big task ahead of him, he must rebuild Human Pets OUTSIDE of the evil facebook empire.
I am going through severe social withdrawal right now as I have been a Human Pets addict for the last 6 months!
Join this facebook group if you want to show your support for a non facebook version of Human Pets.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=12550629419
May 8th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
OMG!!!! Facebook has deleted Human Pets entirely!
Now the creator of Human Pets has a big task ahead of him, he must rebuild Human Pets OUTSIDE of the evil facebook empire.
I am going through severe social withdrawal right now as I have been a Human Pets addict for the last 6 months!
Join this facebook group if you want to show your support for a non facebook version of Human Pets.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=12550629419
November 7th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
My friend just tried to create a facebook page. Last name is “Gay”. Facebook signup wouldn’t let then use the word. So they had to change it to Gray!
This is pathetic!
November 18th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
http://ourlocal353.ca/forums/index.php?topic=3999.msg31202;topicseen#new
Neat trick, for anyone who noticed.
First I noticed how Michael Thomas took himself off of his Facebook group IBEW 424 and that he had deleted most of his posts. Especially his posts where he was arguing with me. Then suddenly, I find myself banned from Facebook?
Wow, what a great way of making it look like “1″ person is allegedly harassing Michael Thomas for no reason.
Now Michael Thomas is back as the administrator for his Facebook group IBEW 424 and ALL his posts, where Michael Thomas argues with me, is back.
Nice trick Michael Thomas… bravo…. you censoring, fascist low-life.
But… that’s temporary…