How Facebook May Secretly Foil Your Activist Plans - In recent years, Facebook has become an unexpectedly crucial tool for activism. The social media platform allows activists to efficiently connect and communicate with one another in order to arrange meetings, protests and boycotts. Unfortunately, activists who once found that Facebook helped make organizing easier are now encountering obstacles – and the resistance is coming from Facebook itself. With little explanation, Facebook has been disabling pages related to activism. In some cases, administrators who set up the pages are no longer able to add updates. In others, the pages are being deleted entirely. Understandably, activists are frustrated when a network of 10,000 like-minded individuals is suddenly erased, leaving no way to reconnect with the group. Realistically, that’s the downside of relying on a hundred billion dollar company. Facebook is a pro-business enterprise with countless partnerships that undoubtedly pressure the site to limit the types of socializing progressives may engage in, particularly activities that might harm advertisers’ profits. For example, this year’s March Against Monsanto events have been popular with people across the globe, but not Facebook. An upcoming invitation for a rally in St. Louis, Missouri where Monsanto is headquartered was wiped clean from the social networking site. The administrator of the event received a very unspecific notice that the event “violated Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities,” yet it is not clear how the event would have violated any terms. What is clear, however, is that Monsanto advertises on Facebook and may have had some influence on the matter. When the “Boycott Target Until They Cease Funding Anti-Gay Politics” group became extremely popular, employees at Facebook didn’t erase the page, but effectively shut it down anyway by putting severe restrictions on it. Not only was the page’s creator unable to edit or update the page, followers of the page could no longer start new discussions or post links and videos. A similar page that called for a boycott on BP was also rendered similarly useless after receiving the same posting constraints. In these two cases, Facebook personnel explained that the boycott pages did not meet the Terms of Service since they did not represent a person or corporate entity. “To protect people from spam and other unwanted content, we restrict pages that represent ideas or positions – rather than discrete entities – from publishing stories to people’s News Feeds,” said a spokesperson. Surely the nearly one million BP boycott fans wouldn’t consider updates from the page “unwanted,” particularly when they chose to follow the page in the first place. They’re calling for protection from oil spills, not spam. By claiming that corporate pages fit in well on Facebook, but anti-corporate pages have no place, the site’s stance is quite clear. filmsforaction.org/news/how_facebook_may_secretly_foil_your_activist_plans/#.UthXbCkXZy4.mailto
Posted on: Mon, 27 Jan 2014 02:37:42 +0000
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