Online hysteria about Facebook reading text that is deleted before it is posted might not be entirely unfoundedAs Mark Twain observed: "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." And that was a long time before the web. Which brings us to a meme that was propagating last week though social media. Its essence was an assertion that Facebook monitored – and stored – not only the stuff that its subscribers post on their Facebook pages, but even stuff that they started to type and then deleted! Shock, horror!The source of the meme was an article by Jennifer Golbeck in the venerable online magazine Slate. "The code in your browser that powers Facebook," it states, "still knows what you typed – even if you decide not to publish it. It turns out that the things you explicitly choose not to share aren't entirely private. Facebook calls these unposted thoughts 'self-censorship'."Creepy, eh? The peg for Ms Golbeck's article was an academic paper published by two Facebook researchers, Sauvik Das and Adam Kramer. They were interested in studying "last-minute self-censorship" on Facebook, ie content that is filtered by its author after it has been written. Their motivations were not, of course, purely academic.As they put it: "Last-minute self-censorship is of particular interest to SNSs [social networking services] as this filtering can be both helpful and hurtful. Users and their audience could fail to achieve potential social value from not... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2013-12-22 00:00:00 UTC ]