2 points|josephpmay|12 years ago|0 comments
Keith Hennessey, a Stanford professor, wrote a fascinating article that defends George Bush. Here's the link: http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/. Try posting it to Facebook. You'll get the message "The content you're trying to share includes a link that's been blocked for being spammy or unsafe: http://files.wordpress.com/2013/04/43-paint-splattered.jpg." (The URL is for a file that doesn't seem to actually exist). Clearly, Facebook isn't purposefully trying to block Republican political discourse, and it is likely that this happened because of a spam-threshold algorithm. However, this shows the danger of automatic spam detection, because if enough people don't agree with the opinion presented in an article and decide to flag it as spam, it will automatically get blocked. I'm not sure how this can be dealt with or prevented. Does anyone have any ideas?