So, all of the privacy concerns with Facebook are all over the news and the blogosphere. Here’s another new way: random “abuse” nonsense. Compound that with the fact that they don’t have to answer to anyone and you have issues.
I posted a link (well, WordPress scheduled a post, tweeted about it on Twitter which then got pushed to Facebook) to my post from yesterday and when my friends clicked on the link, the above picture is what they saw. The link if you want to try it yourself is this bit.ly link: http://bit.ly/awxgVd. I’d like someone to tell me that it’s abusive and why.
Of course Facebook doesn’t tell you why. It’s even in their policy that they don’t say it. In fact I can’t even figure out how to mark a post as abusive. If it’s a bug in their code then it’s testament to their poor QA. Either way it’s BS.
Ennie got hit with something like this too a month or so ago. A picture she posted (no one knows which picture) got pulled for “inappropriate.” We don’t even know which picture it might be since that’s apparently secret too.
Huh?
The only reason I even use Facebook at this point is to post status updates (via Twitter) and pictures for friends that are only on Facebook. The main page of it has too low signal-to-noise anyway. I might join the ranks of people that just drop it. I’m not really getting much value out of it and it’s serving to frustrate me with their stupidity.
Because you can ban links to cam-whore/porn/spam domains, but if they hide behind bit.ly or other URL shortening, you can’t ban the spammers/phishers/etc because then you’d ban all people who legitimately use the service. Like us.
So this is a good compromise between doing nothing — and allowing spam URLs to hide behind shorteners; and between doing too much — banning a useful service that has valid non-abusive uses as well.
I’d say rather than get frustrated, simply consider it a warning for the dumb people and use it as a reason to laugh at their dumbness… :)
That is a bit disheartening to hear though…
The odd thing is that every other bit.ly link I sent out in the past works just fine (including the one linking to this very post). Not only that but when I posted this one manually on Facebook they even traversed the link and pulled up the picture I posted along with a snippet.
I think that FB is just getting a chronic case of stupidity.
Hmm. That *is* weird. And not consistent with my theory either :/