We’ve all exercised self-censorship online. We’ve all written something then deleted it before posting. For some reason, Facebook collects and saves it.
Facebook calls these unposted thoughts “self-censorship,” and insights into how it collects these nonposts can be found in a recent paper written by two Facebookers. Sauvik Das, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon and summer software engineer intern at Facebook, and Adam Kramer, a Facebook data scientist, have put online an article presenting their study of the self-censorship behavior collected from 5 million English-speaking Facebook users. (The paper was also published at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.*) It reveals a lot about how Facebook monitors our unshared thoughts and what it thinks about them.
I wonder when some of the Snowden people will finally begin to take a serious look at the far more egregious practice of corporate surveillance and data sharing. It’s far worse than anything NSA doing — with zero court oversight.