Why Do So Many People Rely On Facebook For Communications, Given Its Arbitrary Removal Process?
from the questionable-platform-reliance dept
The Washington Post has an interesting story about Facebook's admission that it erroneously took down a widely shared image posted by an anti-Obama group over the weekend. The somewhat viral image (which, as the article notes, isn't exactly the most truthful of images -- but perhaps par for the course when it comes to political speech) was removed after Facebook said it "violated Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities." However, people going through Facebook's official list of Rights & Responsibilities didn't turn up anything that the content violated.Leaving aside the question of exaggerated political speech, this raises the same question that we've wondered in the past: why do so many people rely on closed platforms today, that allow somewhat arbitrary removal of speech? While Facebook eventually admitted its error, this is hardly the first such case of Facebook deciding what you can or cannot talk about. That's a tremendously powerful position that Facebook's users have granted to Facebook in making it their communications platform of choice. Many people will say that this is "the price" that people pay to be on a platform where everyone else is -- and that the convenience of Facebook outweighs such costs. But it's also why so many people are a bit nervous about Facebook these days.
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Filed Under: arbitrary, platforms, speech
Companies: facebook
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Face who? Uh what?
Yes. Seriously.
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Re: Face who? Uh what?
Just because its a popular fad doesn't mean it has value.
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Re: Face who? Uh what?
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My point being, I've been so dismissive of these things for so long, that even if I wanted to join Facebook, I'd never be able to look anyone in the eye or send a friend invite without overwhelming shame. And I'm glad, because nothing about the site makes me want to join the lazy, blind pukes.
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Its free therefore it supports free speech.:-P
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Alternative?
Facebook and Twitter have had their issues blocking content. Blogs/websites? We've seen instances where blogs have been taken down by an over-anxious host faced with a legal threat (even resulting in large numbers of unrelated blogs that happen to reside on the same servers being taken down as collateral damage). Email? Targeted, rather than open and public; doesn't tend well to public discussion. Cell phones/text messaging? Not when governments can arbitrarily order service shut down.
Is there a service that is so open and free, and also so ubiquitous to be truly useful, that can *not* be subject to influence by some powerful party to censor or shut down?
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Re: Alternative?
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Re: Re: Alternative?
Diaspora: ~400,000 users (source)
Facebook: ~1,000,000,000 users (source)
So Facebook has roughly 2,000 times as many users as Diaspora. By Metcalfe's Law, the utility of a social network is proportional to the square of the number of users, making Facebook about 4,000,000 times more useful as Diaspora for communication. Like it or not, Facebook reaches nearly half of more Americans at least once a month, with a good portion using it far more often. Posting to a site like Diaspora or to a blog, or even Twitter won't reach anything near that level of exposure.
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Re: Re: Re: Alternative?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Alternative?
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Also, FB did not start out with all those users. But now it has them and, what, no one should ever use anything else? Fuck innovation. And privacy, control, etc.
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Re: Alternative?
Diaspora is one.
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Re: Alternative?
GNUNet which will have its own networking protocol, Netsukuku, Osiris SP(not open source), Syndie and others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_communication
But I do have a simpler solution for that problem of privacy, just post everything encrypted so if people want to read it they will have to have a key for it.
You don't care about the platform you care only about the data, secure the data and the rest is not important.
I have done this in the past I could go to MySpace and post anything, only the people with the keys to open the message would be able to read them, the keys were exchanged using an secure IM like retroshare or gnunet.
You could talk about anything, the pain was having to write an addon(or script) to parse the text and send it decrypted and back to the browser to be read, once that was done there was no problems.
Now that would be ideal, since you could be more relaxed about that data.
It should be a W3C standard LoL
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Re: Alternative?
If you're looking for a single service that can do all the things you want, you're looking for the wrong thing. Anytime you put so much control into a single entities hands, you're going to have problems. However, the internet is not a single service. It's a collection of them, and to use it properly, you must use it that way.
However, more to your point -- if you want a single service that can do all those things, your best bet is email. You dismiss it as not open & public, but that's not true. Email has been used since before the internet for just this sort of purpose, and mailing list software makes the discussions open and public (as well as categorizing the discussion threads and so on). It's also really easy to use, the software is readily available, and aside from email service itself, you don't need a company to host anything for you.
In fact, this is one of the things I find odd about Facebook and such: when you boil it down, it's really just a very gussied up form of age-old mailing list software made less free and open.
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Re: Re: Alternative?
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Re: Alternative?
Facebook: Long history of repeatedly violating users' trust and privacy by selling their information, ceasing to do so when caught, then doing it again, AND
Arbitrary censorship e.g. recently removing the anti-Obama caricature as described here... yet banning a woman for posting images of herself breastfeeding her child, but protecting the rights of Facebook users to post (lots and lots of) tragic, graphic historical photographs of naked, living, starving, tortured victims of the Axis countries in World War 2. THAT is so inconsistent, absurd. The WW 2 photos weren't posted for any clear purpose, not that I recall.
versus
Twitter: Selective censorship under duress, content accessible regardless of whether or not one is a registered user (I can view very little on FB, as I am not a user).
Blogs/ websites: Far fewer incidents of permanent content removal and loss than on FB, even considering ICS and government action as you allude to. Yes, you might lose access temporarily to your website due to the collateral damage effect, or Wordpress blog (if Wordpress is DDoS'd or otherwise taken offline). In most instances, you'll get things back when the over-anxious host calms down, or Wordpress service is restored. FB is like a black hole: Weird dot php URLs, everything transitory.
Email and cell phones: For most of us, quite decent. Yes, ISP's operate under FCC oversight, but I believe that the FCC and government(s) in general are less arbitrary than Facebook! Applicable outside of the U.S.A. too.
Newspapers: Same as email and cell phones. Major media is less arbitrary than FB.
ALL of the above, be they Twitter, Wordpress, hosting providers, email services, cell phone/ telecom companies, news media or government, are arguably run by more responsible and experienced people than Mark Zuckerberg, who is the uber-controller of FB, both as founder, and as legal owner. Thus ALL of the alternatives that I mentioned (probably lots that I omitted), seem less vulnerable to external influence and irrational censorship than Facebook.
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Most people don't know that there are alternatives and they all get what they see most other people doing it, because it is easier, easier to get help, easier to set up since everybody knows about it, easier to solve issues or so it goes the thinking the one thing they don't really think it is how others can mess up with your data or how that data can be intercepted and used by others, the world is in for a rude awakening.
I can't remember the last time anybody becoming dependent on just one source for anything didn't end up getting screwed, not once in my 40 years.
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I have two choices - be in the know on facebook with everyone else or be left out.
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Re:
This is not entirely true, and is getting less true as days go by. When I deleted my FB account a while back, I thought I'd be missing out -- but you know what? I'm not. I still keep up with all my friends just as much as always, and when something happens I would have missed b/c I'm not on FB, one of my friends fills me in.
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About 90% of what goes on in the world is irrelevant to your daily life, just as it is irrelevant to everyone else's daily life. I don't have a facebook account and I know that I'm not really missing out on anything, if it's something personally important the people I care about will pick up a phone, send an email, or simply tell me the next time I speak to them. I read the news and commentary on things that may affect my daily life here on TechDirt and on a few other sites that cover the laws of the land, who's who politically, and the world economic situation. While I don't have a Facebook I know some who do and they've shown me plenty on there from time to time, it's a plethora of generally useless personal information. I don't need to know that someone I went to high school with 30 years ago who lives 1,000 miles away and I haven't seen since graduation anyway got a new tattoo, went to the movies, or got a divorce.
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You sure it isn't the thrill of imagining you have a zillion "friends"?
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Buh? Bwa hahahaha ha *cough* haha. In the know on Facebook, lol.
Sorry, that was terribly rude of me.
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Re:
Not even remotely true. I miss out on my personal web browsing habits being sold to advertisers? No. I miss out on FB failing to protect my privacy? No. I can't communicate with others? No, email still works. I can still read Usenet News, I can still use IRC, I can still browse the web.
You drank the Koolaid is all.
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Hundreds of millions of "lazy, blind pukes" can't be ignored.
One of most dismaying aspects to seeing the big picture is to grasp that masses of dolts will go along with almost anything, and then the few with sense are easily ignored.
But where does Google differ in its arbitrary power? -- You don't know what all Google censors and slants behind the scenes; they have the mysterious "automatic algorithms" to shield them from scrutiny, and evne when caught can in effect claim "a wizard did it". But for certain, Google censors with "tweaks".
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Re: Hundreds of millions of "lazy, blind pukes" can't be ignored.
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Re: Hundreds of millions of "lazy, blind pukes" can't be ignored.
Examples, please.
I've yet to see a site that requires FB to comment (they all have some other way to do so), and I've not heard about employers requiring facebook accounts.
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Re: Hundreds of millions of "lazy, blind pukes" can't be ignored.
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Re: Re: Re: Hundreds of millions of etc.
As others said earlier, having choices is better. Best to avoid a situation where there's intense concentration of activity, and dependency, in a single entity.
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It's a dataminer's haven. I laugh at the idea that some future employer might want my farcebook login. You know, to check up on what kinda person you are and what you might be saying about them. Or schools that somehow think what you say as public speech relating to them is their concern.
That's gonna be really hard to do without an account. I have no interest in making one either. Farcebook's idea they can track you off site with the little like button isn't going to work when it's connections are blocked on this computer.
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Because most of us are not consistently interesting
I can post nearly anything that isn�t illegal or hardcore porn on my personal web site... but no one will see it.
I could start a blog... there might be two people who even know what RSS is that would add me to their readers.
Most of us don�t generate enough consistently interesting content to hold an audience by ourselves. Facebook is like an open mike night or a community talent show�it aggregates the small amount of interest each of us could generate alone into something that can maintain attention.
Facebook has captured its arena so thoroughly that Diaspora and Friendica and the like have little chance. The successor of Facebook will be something that obsoletes what it does; doing what Facebook does better (more openly, more securely, whatever) will never overcome its head start in user base. At this point, they can (and do) dick us around quite a bit without having to worry much about fallout.
Anything that�s important to me goes on my web site. My biggest complaint about Facebook is that I can�t really integrate the content and presentation I control into the feed they deliver to others... but I can see how Facebook has no incentive to make that possible, and good reasons to throw up roadblocks for anyone who isn�t a paying sponsor or partner.
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It's kind of like how people used myspace because lots of people were on myspace.
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Sometimes you have to
I finally signed up for it to be able to keep up with my grandkids scattered around the country because that's all they use,(you know your kids and grandkids never call,right?)and that's all I use it for. The only info I keep there is my name. No worse than a phone book listing without the phone#.
As to the data collection and Government snooping, that's alway been there and I haven't been locked up or shipped off to gitmo yet and no one has drained my bank account.
So they collect data...so what? Everyone does...Even Techdirt is showing six trackers as I type this.(all blocked)
Since I joined Facebook I still get up every morning and do the sames things that I always do...nothing has changed.
I live in a major metro area and everyday on the local news I hear about the muggings and murders, the thefts and home invasions, the scams and frauds, fires and storms. Believe me, compared to the real life just outside my door, Facebook and the Internet is like a walk in the park.
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Faceplant
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FB
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/rant
Other than that, I'd say that John Fenderson is right on spot. We shouldn't rely on a single service. I'm trying to find a way to duplicate the posts on my blog so I'll have a copy on Blogger and some other place such as Worldpress in case some moronic policy or a bogus DMCA takes my stuff down. I'm also trying to use different picture;video upload services for the same reason. Youtube cannot be trusted alone.
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Re:
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I wish there was a alternative because..........
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