Facebook has banned person-to-person gun sales

Apparently you could buy and sell guns on Facebook before today. Note the past tense there. The New York Times says that this change is in response to President Obama’s recent push for Zuckerberg and Co. to cull the person-to-person transactions from the social network and Instagram — similar to how it treats sales of marijuana, prescription drugs and other illicit substances. Licensed gun dealers are still fine; the idea here is curbing the background-check-free sales that can occur on a person-to-person basis.

To wit, Reuters writes that Facebook previously nixed firearm advertisements stating “no background check required” or sales that’d cross state lines because those displayed a “willingness to evade the law” around two years ago. Still feel like testing your luck? A Facebook spokesperson tells us the site has systems in place to remove and review listings.

“Over the last two years, more and more people have been using Facebook to discover products and to buy and sell things to one another,” head of product policy Monika Bickert tells us in a prepared statement. “We are continuing to develop, test and launch new products to make this experience even better for people and are updating our regulated goods policies to reflect this evolution.”

Source: The New York Times, Reuters

Facebook should know by now what’s news and what’s spam

Late last week, The Guardian published an interview with a survivor of Obama’s first drone strike, which occurred in tribal Pakistan on his third day as president. It detailed the impact the attack had and raised concerns over the civilian damage these drone strikes can cause. But as important as this story sounds, you would not have been able to share it on Facebook. If you tried to do so, Facebook would have blocked you.

Spencer Ackerman, the story’s author, learned about it from friends who tried to share the link and couldn’t. He took to Facebook to voice his disappointment. The piece, after all, contained nothing inherently offensive, without any graphic imagery or incendiary language. After his editors informed Facebook about the block, he was then told that it was an error. It turns out that the link was somehow marked as spam by Facebook’s automated anti-spam system. The story has since been cleared of that false positive and can now be shared. Ackerman, for his part, has told us he believes it was an honest mistake.

But this is not the first time an innocuous news story has been flagged unfairly. In December last year, for example, a New York Times article about 1950s nuclear targets was blocked with a message that read: “The content you’re trying to share includes a link that our security systems detected to be unsafe.” In November, Facebook also initially blocked Boing Boing and Tech News Today stories about a Facebook rival called Tsu.co. Those stories were marked as spam. (Tsu is an incentive-based social network that pays its users for sharing and generating content, which Facebook says encourages spammy behavior.)

These stories were eventually approved and the ban lifted. But the fact that completely benign links can be marked as false positives at all is concerning. For many people — almost 1.59 billion users, at last count — Facebook is their predominant window to the world. It’s the modern equivalent of a web portal, not unlike MSN, Yahoo or even AOL, Engadget’s parent company. Facebook, for its part, doesn’t seem to shy away from this pronouncement. In May of last year, it partnered with several news sites like the New York Times and Buzzfeed to host editorial content from those sites on Facebook’s own servers. Ostensibly, it’s to improve page load times, but it also keeps you, the user, within Facebook’s walled garden. And walled gardens are no good if they keep you from reading and consuming outside links.

You might point out that these issues were all resolved in the end, but what about the stories we don’t hear about? What about news links from smaller blogs or independent websites that don’t have the same clout or reach as The Guardian or the Times? What if a legitimate news story gets blocked and nobody reports it? We might never know about it.

Of course, it’s not really Facebook’s fault either. A social network of its size attracts a slew of spammers and folks who wish to flood the network with bad links. Sometimes spammers embed their links behind URL shorteners or attach them to an image to hide detection. In an explainer on its spam prevention system posted in 2010 (which a Facebook spokesperson claims is still relevant today), Facebook said that it devotes a tremendous amount of time and resources to build systems that “detect suspicious activity and automatically warn people about inappropriate behavior or links.” It uses a combination of anti-spam tools, engineer intervention (they can write rules in real-time to identify malicious content) and community reporting to filter the bad stuff out.

But sometimes legitimate stuff still gets hit with the ban hammer. In that same post from 2010, then-company spokesperson Matt Hicks, wrote:

“Every once in a while, though, people misunderstand one of these systems. They incorrectly believe that Facebook is restricting speech because we’ve blocked them from posting a specific link or from sending a message to someone who is not a friend. Over the years, these misunderstandings have caused us to be wrongly accused of issues ranging from stifling criticism of director Roman Polanski over his sexual abuse charges to curbing support for ending U.S. travel restrictions on Cuba to blocking opponents of same-sex marriage.”

It’s unfortunate, then, that Facebook isn’t more forthcoming about why and how it blocks certain links. Facebook said in the above post that it won’t share details regarding how its anti-spam algorithm works because otherwise spammers might learn to game the system. Indeed, we asked Facebook to comment on what happened with Ackerman’s Guardian story, and the company simply pointed us to a comment left on his post where a Facebook spokesperson said it was a false positive. But it’s still a disconcerting feeling to know that a link might be blocked for no obvious reason beyond that it was marked as spam. That would be a good enough excuse if Facebook were just for communications between friends and family. But when it’s also a daily news source for a billion-plus people, it’s not an excuse at all.

Some of these so-called false positives could be averted if Facebook took its role as news disseminator more seriously. Perhaps it could be more like Apple News, which combines the usual algorithmic news feeds along with links curated by actual human beings. This would be right in line with its status as modern day web portal — MSN, AOL and Yahoo all have full-time editors who curate their homepages. In fact, Facebook did at one point hire editors to curate news: It was for its Paper news feed app, before that transitioned into what eventually became Instant Articles.

To be fair, Facebook’s News Feed is different to that of Apple News or even Twitter Moments in that it’s based almost entirely on who your friends and family are. Your news feed is based on an algorithm that combines stories you tend to “Like” and the kinds of posts Facebook thinks will get the most engagement. In a way, your news feed is already curated, but by a machine, not by a person. For Facebook to hire editors to curate personalized news feeds for all its 1.59 billion users might be asking too much.

And yet, why can’t it have both? A combination of human news curation along with Facebook’s powerful news feed algorithm could send a strong message to its users that Facebook really is their one-stop-shop for all that’s happening in the world. And, more importantly, perhaps having real people monitoring the news would prevent legitimate stories — like the ones Ackerman wrote — from going unseen.

[Image credit: Lead/middle: Getty Images; Bottom: Facebook]

Facebook eyes ride-sharing feature for events pages

Facebook has been ramping up its Events pages as of late, and a recent patent application shows another use for those listings. In the paperwork, the social network explains how Events pages can also serve as a hub for ride sharing. Instead of the usual Going, Not Going, and Interested RSVPs on an event’s page, you would have the option to say whether or not you plan to drive. If you do, you can input details as to how many passengers you can take, if you just want to offer a ride to friends and what time you’ll be leaving.

As you might expect, Facebook can pair passengers and drivers based on personal details like common interests, where you went to school and more to decrease the chances of awkward silence. After your pals (or soon-to-be pals) are all locked in, you’ll receive navigation info to guide you to the pickup spots. While a patent app doesn’t mean the company will actually implement the feature, this makes a lot of sense for Facebook. Using the Events pages as a primary interface could allow the folks in Melo Park to include ride sharing and carpooling relatively easily. For now, though, you’ll have to rely on hailing an Uber through Messenger.

Via: Tech Insider

Source: USPTO