::fibreculture:: Governance in Facebook

[Ned Rossiter]

'Facebook giveth, Facebook taketh away'

Glenda Kwek
The Age
October 29, 2007 - 10:37AM
http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/facebook-giveth-facebook-taketh- 
away/2007/10/29/1193555573838.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
Without rhyme, reason and with no recourse, the social networking  
site Facebook has taken to purging the ranks of its members,  
blackballing them for the most petty breaches of its terms of service.

Facebook’s actions are startling because they go against the  
unwritten laws of cyberspace, that users of free service sites have  
the freedom to express themselves in whatever way they like. And  
users don’t usually get booted from a site unless they commit a  
serious cybercrime.

Coupled with a lack of transparency about why certain users are  
expelled from the site and not others, and with little or no avenue  
for appeal, the consequences of being banned from Facebook can be  
quite devastating.

Just ask Jason, a Facebook user from Melbourne, who experienced the  
wrath of the company. His expulsion after sending “unsolicited  
messages to numerous users”, a charge he denies, cut him off suddenly  
and permanently from his online friends.

"The worst part is since my account became disabled, I had no way of  
contacting my friends that I had been in contact with on Facebook if  
I didn't have any other email address.

"I may someday in the future rejoin, using another email address, but  
for now I've given up on Facebook because it's just too much effort  
to put in," he told smh.com.au.

A lawyer, who asked not to be named, was similarly punished for  
“violating” the site’s terms of use, after painstaking efforts in  
Facebook to build up new contacts in the Scandinavian country he was  
moving to.

Frustrated, he looked up the terms of use, but found no answers.

“The conditions are so nebulous and leave so much to Facebook admin's  
discretion that they realistically could do anything they wanted and  
attribute it to these guidelines.

"… [It's a] pretty straightforward breach of one of the most  
fundamental tenets of any just legal system - that people should be  
able to know the law in order to prevent them from breaking the law."

Facebook was set up in 2004 by Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg. It  
has grown to be the second most popular social networking site with  
46 million users and was recently valued at $16.8 billion after  
Microsoft bought a 1.6 per cent stake in the company.

It allows users to add friends as contacts, join groups, share videos  
and even play games with others. But those who socialise the most on  
the site are the ones who are falling foul of Facebook’s rules.

“The people who are getting their accounts disabled appear to have  
been very active users, leaving lots of messages and importing lots  
of notes. Facebook probably sees that kind of activity as ‘spammy’,  
and seeks to control it,” says Jason Preston of webcommunityforum.com.

Most Facebook users smh.com.au spoke to said they were sent warning  
messages before they were disabled temporarily or permanently.

But for some, justice (in injustice, they might argue) was summarily  
and swiftly carried out. And like a large faceless organisation, they  
received no response to their pleas for mercy or understanding.

Thor Muller, who runs the site getsatisfaction.com, said of a dozen  
disabled users who contacted him for help, at least half never  
received a response from the site’s administrators on why they became  
persona non grata on Facebook.

But Facebook is not like a police state without any offenders. A  
quick search by smh.com.au found numerous fake identities, with names  
such as "Stupid Dog", "Ura Pigface" and "Fools About". Groucho Marx,  
who passed away in 1977 and famously said "I refuse to join any club  
that would have me as a member", has 11 different accounts on Facebook.

Even Prince William, the heir to the British throne, does not use his  
real identity or name in Facebook.

smh.com.au also spoke to some users who don’t use their real names on  
the site. “We all have that right and can choose to use it wherever  
and whenever we like. Facebook should stop playing vigilante and  
relax,” says one such user, university student Amber Weyman.

Whether Facebook continues to be a permanent part of our lexicon or  
becomes yesterday’s news remains to be seen. It needs its users for  
revenue – "Every user on Facebook is worth an 'x' amount of dollars  
for Facebook in the long run from an advertising perspective,” says  
UK digital media consultant Chris Brinkworth – but its users also  
need it.

And for those who no longer have a face on Facebook, the future can  
be a difficult, and lonely, one.

*smh.com.au made repeated attempts to contact Facebook for comment,  
but received none. An email from the company stated that "due to  
limited spokesperson availability, no one is available any time soon".