RConversation

More problems in Facebookistan

UPDATE: Click here to read the response to this post by Facebook's Barry Schnitt, Director, Policy Communications, followed by reactions from others, including Rafik Dammak whose account suspension is discussed in this post.

Privacy is only one many problems eroding users' trust in Facebook. Don't forget Facebook's inconsistent and untransparent approach to account deactivation and page takedowns. I recently wrote about how Hong Kong democracy activists have had pages disabled or deleted with no explanation. Robert Scoble recently reported on how a Texas radio show recently had its Facebook page disabled, and that he gets "a new email from someone who has gotten removed from Facebook every week." [This sentence has been corrected thanks to "Wrldvoyagr" in the comments section, below.] Scoble continues:

They need a more mature approach toward customer service. People and content are still getting deleted by spam filters which no one understands or can explain to me and there isn’t good place to go to appeal content deletions. This the problem with not having a federated system that runs on our own servers. Facebook has too much control over our digital lives and that power to delete content really freaks me out.

The problem is especially upsetting for Facebook's international users, particularly those who come from countries where there is heavy censorship and political repression. Rafik Dammak, a Tunisian student living in Tokyo and who is an upstanding and active member of the global Internet community and represents non-commercial Internet users on one of ICANN's councils, announced last week that his Facebook account was suspended without warning. "They don't bother to give rationales, we have to "trust" them," he later wrote on Twitter.  Rafik did e-mail [email protected] to complain, (Updated/corrected details:) Rafik says he was chatting with a friend on Tuesday when suddenly a message popped up telling him to log back in. When he did so, received this generic message (click to enlarge) which began: "Hi Rafik, Unfortunately your account has been permanently disabled for violating Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities [link added]. We will not be able to reactivate it for any reason, nor will we provide further explanation of your violation or the systems we have in place. This decision is absolutely final." The e-mail then continues on with instructions about how to flag abusive content.

While Rafik has no way of knowing for sure why Facebook deactivated his account, he has some theories. In an e-mail exchange, he and Nasser Weddady, a Mauritanian activist based in Boston, described a concerted "abuse-reporting" campaign being carried out against Tunisian exiles, activists, and other Facebook users who the people conducting the campaign don't like. Rafik pointed to a couple of Facebook pages (here and here) which he says are devoted to targeting and organizing abuse-reporting efforts against specific Facebook users. France 24 has a report in French about those groups here. Here's how Nasser explained it to me:

This phenomenon seems to have been first triggered by the mass protest over things like the Danish Cartoons and Mohamed's portrayals. But the novelty now is the extent at which some pro-government elements in Tunisia resorted to this tactic to shut down dissenter groups or individual user accounts, most to seem to be targeted on account of their political views but that is not always the case hence the name in Arabic: Moubid which means insecticide. This is how it works:

- A user with a large following designates a group as "subversive"

-spreads the news to his following by inviting other users with the explicit request to pass it on in order to create a snowball effect

-Facebook agrees to shut down the group most likely based on the number of complaints

As you can see, it is a double abuse: an abuse by users who embark on witch hunts just because someone said those accounts or facebook groups are bad, and an abuse of facebook's opaque policy on designating groups as violating its users agreement.

There was a similar phenomenon during the last Gaza war, when pro-palestinan users accounts and groups were targeted by pro-israel groups and individuals in a similar way as in Tunisia. While, it is very difficult to prove that the Tunisians learned that technique from the pro-israel advocates, the first malicious precedent we know of in the Middle East is that one.

In early May Curt Hopkins wrote an article on ReadWriteWeb about how Facebook's move over the past year to make people's accounts and pages public by default had made it easier for such harrassment to occur. While he quotes Facebook representatives who insisted that they don't deactivate accounts without human review, it's clear that something remains seriously wrong with their system.

This larger context also helps explain the extent to which moderate and cosmopolitan Muslim Facebook users who believe in free speech and who are generally against censorship were so alienated and upset by the fact that Facebook allowed the "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day" page - which on the several occasions when I looked at it was full of obscene and gratuitous anti-Muslim hate speech - to stay up for more than a week. It's well known that Facebook quickly takes down other racist and anti-semitic pages. Yet they allowed a page full of nastiness and hate against the Muslim faith to stay up. We also know from this interview given by one of the page's administrators to Radio Free Europe that Facebook admins were in touch with the page's creators and "not in a negative way," as administrator Andy Freiheit (a pseudonym) put it.

Many things remain seriously wrong in Facebookistan.

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Human rights implications of content moderation and account suspension by companies

Facebook deserves every bit of flak being flung at them for their cavalier and irresponsible attitude toward privacy. Another problem, however, has gotten much less attention: activists around the world who use Facebook to promote political and human rights causes frequently find their Facebook groups and accounts suspended.

In all cases that I've heard of, Facebook has been either unresponsive or unsympathetic to activists' complaints. Since the beginning of this year, pro-democracy groups in Hong Kong have complained of repeated deletion of their Facebook groups. One of these groups was called "Never Forget June Fourth," set up to commemorate the June 4th 1989 Tiananmen massacre. Last month some Hong Kong pro-democracy Facebook users wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg (in Facebook). Readers will be shocked and stunned to learn that neither The Zuck nor his colleagues bothered to respond to this letter:

Dear Mark,

We are users of Facebook with shared interests in the political development and democracy of Hong Kong and China. We have set up a political nature group page named ‘Never Forget June the Forth’. This group was formed to engage in a free exchange of ideas and remembrances around Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, and there has never been an intention to be abusive, or bullying or “take any action on Facebook that infringes or violates someone else’s right or otherwise violates the law,” to quote your own official policy.

Nevertheless, the group of key administrators and creator of ‘Never Forget June the Forth’ is being unfairly harassed by Facebook, which has blocked them from posting new content and working on it at all.

This latest violation of their rights comes on top of numerous other examples of harassment. Some sites have been closed without notice. Facebook has attributed the problems to “technical difficulties,” an explanation that strains common sense.

Therefore we are calling on Facebook to end this harassment (apparently done on behalf of Beijing). We feel, especially in light of what is happening at Google, that both the regional and global press will be interested in this story, should we choose to take it to them.

Please end your harassment, which will prevent us from taking this drastic step. The ball is in your court, and We are certain you can feel the moral weight of how this case may impact your reputation.

Sincerely,

Creator and Group of Administrators

While the group was eventually restored and revived (here) the people involved with it feel that Facebook has failed to communicate clearly with them so that these kinds of problems can be avoided in the future. People still have no idea what happened or why. Many suspect that the abuse-reporting mechanisms within Facebook are themselves being abused by governments and other powerful entities. Some including the authors of the above letter - thanks to Facebook's lack of honesty and transparency  - suspect Facebook is responding to pressure from governments, including Beijing. I myself doubt there is direct collusion between Facebook and the Chinese government, but I have concluded - based on their actions and inactions - that they don't give a toss about the human rights activists using their service, in spite of what their executives say in speeches about Facebook being a force for world peace and whatnot. In this discussion thread one Hong Kong user posted the following set of suggestions for how Facebook might treat activists with more care and respect:

Dear Mark,

I don't want reiterate what people said here. Here I point out a few things.

1. There is no doubt that Facebook is a commerical company. However, it is a leader in social networking now in the planet. It therefore undeniably bears certain social responsibility.

2. There is no clear guideline on when a political oriented group is banned or limited. Today, the removal of a group is all a subjective decision, which is not good enough. I oppose to removal of groups without a public reason, including groups holding opposite political view.

3. Abuse use of report mechanism is a problem. If the report is in fact invalid, and it is an organized act by a gang, there is no punishment at all. This really hurts freedom of speech. This leads to problem that people opens 2nd account to avoid get banned, or form a gang to counter act on the opponent with such report mechanism.

Ok. better to suggest rather than just complaint. Here is my suggestion

A. If it is a political group, pls list out the guideline and restrictions for the admins. What can be done and what can't. What extra limitation can be applied to political group. If violation is confirmed, warnings should be sent to all admins. If several warnings are ignored, FB has the reason to take action. If the group is banned, pls leave a page explaining why.

B. If confirmed case of abuse use of report mechanism, there should be "bad marks" accumulated for that user. Up to certain point, warning is given, and onwards, liable to be disabled.

C. For political group, do we have better option for admin to manage? e.g. ban certain user for 3 days just to let him calm down, or limit certain unfriendly action for 3 posts per 24 hrs. For all posts, unlike option, admin vote count for removal/warnings, and FB operator warnings flag are considered useful.

I think the above required your internal discussion and system modification. But I hope that your company will take my advice seriously.

Rgds
Justin

There are other examples from other regions. In March, Jillian York reported on Global Voices Advocacy that Facebook removed a Moroccan secularist group and its founder. While the group and the founder's personal account were eventually restored, "Facebook did not respond to any requests for an explanation."

I know of a couple of specific instances in which U.S.-based free speech and civil liberties organizations with contacts at Facebook have tried to get Facebook executives to have a conversation with some members of the human rights community to discuss this problem. Their efforts have all met with total radio silence. Facebook has shown zero interest in holding even a private conversation about this issue. Thus I can only conclude one or all of the following: They are in denial. Or they really don't care. Or they are overwhelmed and upset that people won't love them unconditionally and are sticking their head in the sand. Or they have such a Messiah complex that they really think anybody who wants to talk to them about their faults can only be an enemy.  If you have any further conclusions to contribute, feel free to add them in the comments section of this post.

Facebook is certainly not the only company with problems stemming from abuse-prevention and content moderation. There have been several cases in which human rights activists got their YouTube accounts deleted or disabled (the accounts were restored after an outcry from activists). Other activists have had takedown and suspension problems with Flickr, other Yahoo services, and domain hosting companies. But at least Google (YouTube's parent company) and Yahoo have been willing to engage with activists to discuss how content moderation and abuse-prevention mechanisms and procedures might be improved so that they can avoid inadvertent "censorship" of human rights activism taking place on their platforms. Both participated actively in a recent conference call convened by the Global Network Initiative, during which activists and people from the Internet industry held a frank discussion about how company practices can be improved - and how activists might also better educate themselves about terms of service and moderation procedures in order to anticipate and prevent problems. (Click here and scroll down to the bottom of the page for a contact e-mail if you want to get involved with further discussions.)

At last week's Global Voices Summit in Santiago, Chile, YouTube's Victoria Grand joined me, Jillian York, and Oiwan Lam of Hong Kong for a wide-ranging discussion on this issue. I've embedded the video below. At the beginning of the session I asked everybody in the room (probably around 80 people) whether they'd ever had problems with content being removed or accounts suspended on one of the social networking services they use. A couple dozen hands went up. I asked people for concrete suggestions about how netizens (I hate the word "users") and companies could work together on preventing inadvertent suppression of dissent on social networking platforms. Here are a few points that multiple people repeated:

• Automated moderation and abuse-prevention processes will inevitably result in mistakes that hurt activists. Human judgment - informed by adequate knowledge of cultures, languages, and political events around the world - needs to be brought into the mix.
• Companies need to be as transparent and open as possible about how their takedown, moderation, and suspension procedures work. Otherwise they have nobody but themselves to blame if users cease to trust them.
• Companies should designate staff members to focus on human rights. Their job should be to develop channels for regular communication with the human rights community.
• It's almost impossible for globally popular social networking and content-sharing services to hire enough staff with enough knowledge of political movements and disputes in all obscure corners of the world in all kinds of languages. But communities like Global Voices and others with large networks of bloggers and online activists all over the world are ready and willing to help companies keep abreast of political hot-button issues and online movements around the world - and even provide help with obscure languages - so that extra care can be taken, and political activism won't be mistaken for spam or some other form of abusive behavior. We just need to figure out how to set up workable mechanisms through which this kind of feedback, advice, and communication can take place.
• Activists need to pay closer attention the Terms of Service used by social networking platforms, and be more proactive in educating themselves about how moderation, takedown, and abuse-prevention mechanisms work. We probably need a "Guide to avoiding account suspension and takedown for human rights activists."
• It might also be good to have some kind of respected clearing house organization - or consortium of organizations - which can help mediate and resolve problems between activists and companies.
• People who rely on social networking and content sharing platforms run by companies to do political and social activism should engage more actively with company administrators to improve policies and practices. Anticipate problems and help solve them not only for yourself but for everybody else in the community. Act like a citizen. Not a passive "user."

Please share any further thoughts you may have in the comments section of this post. Below is the video from our Global Voices session last week.

Global Voices Summit: Discussion of Content Moderation, Part I:

Global Voices Summit: Discussion of Content Moderation, Part II:

Global Voices Summit: Discussion of Content Moderation, Part III:

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Facebook goes to China... will it censor too?

Kaiser Kuo and Pacific Epoch have both picked up a report in Chinese on China-cbn.com citing an "industry insider" who says Facebook could enter China as early as December. (UPDATE Oct.31: Reuters reports: Facebook to speak Chinese with .cn domain name) It's likely that the Chinese Facebook will be censored the same way all other Web2.0 services are censored in China.

See a recent blog post I wrote describing how domestically hosted user-generated content and social networking services are censored in China - and how the role of censor is shouldered increasingly by the businesses themselves. Also be sure to read a recent Reporters Without Borders report titled "Journey to the Heart of Internet censorship" which seems pretty accurate based on what I know. Of course these web companies have no choice if they want to keep their licenses.

Cherry Zhang at Pacific Epoch writes: "According to the insider, Facebook originally planned to simply translate its existing site into other languages, but now plans to build a separate website in China." Kaiser brings us more detail:

The paper claims that Facebook has given up its initial plan to set up its own China-based site like MySpace has done with MySpace.cn, but will instead acquire an existing SNS in China. Who do you suppose that could be? I can think of a couple of likely acquisition targets…

One person commenting on Kaiser's blog speculates about Zhanzuo, Xiaonei, and Mop. Another writes:

Whatever they do i hope they seamlessly their link Chinese version to their English version. Click …and swithc language. Those who are perfectly bilingual ( which i am NOT) should be able to communicate with their Chinese friends in Chinese and with their non-chinese friends in english … without changing platforms. Otherwise 2 monoligual silos will be created. That would be - from a mutual understanding point of view- a missed opportunity.

"Seamless" will be pretty hard if they're going to have to censor their Chinese-language site in ways that users of the international English-language Facebook would not tolerate. I guess that's why it's rumored they're likely to aquire an existing Chinese SNS with all the "user content management" mechanisms in place: perhaps it's a way to keep their hands at least technically a little cleaner and have greater justifications for not having seamless interoperability between the domestic and international versions?

Really too bad. If they do end up having to create different Facebook "silos" in order to be compliant with Chinese government censorship requirements (and maybe other governments with other language services too), it isn't just a missed opportunity to provide a great global, multilingual service that many people would find incredibly exciting.

The silo-ing of social networking sites like Facebook (and MySpace China already) is a sadly missed opportunity to build bridges of communication and understanding between the Chinese-speaking world and the English-speaking world. God knows we desperately need better communication and understanding between native Chinese speakers and native English speakers these days. 

The Internet presented such early promise of helping people communicate across borders and cultures and political systems. Language barriers are already a huge obstacle and have grown greater as the non-English parts of the Internet have grown rapidly in the past few years. Now political borders are going up in cyberspace as well.

Is this inevitable? Isn't this situation also serving to "ghettoize" Chinese internet users instead of giving them a multilingual on-ramp to a global human network? If I was a Chinese internet user I'd feel like my government is holding me back by controlling the web in China so much that Facebook can't open its doors for me to a global multilingual and multicultural network - a network that would be best not only for my social life but also for my career and business. 

I sympathize on one hand with the argument that there's no other way to do business in China than to comply with a whole pile of requirements to control user-generated content. But still. The Internet is balkanizing. China is just the beginning. This ghettoization and balkanization may be in the short term interest of governments and businesses, but it's definitely not in the long-term interest of human beings. Is there anything we can do about it?

Joining the Club on Facebook

I finally joined Facebook on Sunday night, following up on a month-old invitation from my friend Thomas Crampton to join the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Facebook (I kid you not, there is such a thing). I joined the bricks-and-mortar FCC in Hong Kong for a chunk of money after all, so why not join this virtual one for free? 

I still don't know if Facebook will be particularly useful or worth my time in any kind of logical, professional sense, but it certainly is a lot more entertaining than Linked-In, (the professional networking site whose main use to me is showing off my resume and some of the cool people I know). Upon logging in and setting up my profile, I immediately discovered that a large percentage of the people I always run into at technology and media conferences, lots of Global Voices people, many journalists I know, a smattering of former colleagues, and a number of my students are already there, advocating causes, forming professional or hobby-oriented groups, and adding cool widgets onto their personal pages. Rachel Rawlins scrawled some welcoming "graffiti" on my virtual "wall."  Kaiser Kuo dropped by to ask "what took you so long?" and a guy I hired for a job back in the late 90's snarks: "It's great to see all the grown-ups here! And all the former bosses! :)" 

He's right. Since Facebook opened up to people with non-university e-mails in September the "grownups and the bosses" have invaded in a major way.

Speaking at the World Journalism Education Congress last month, the BBC's Alex Gerlis said that over 3000 BBC journalists recently joined Facebook in the space of a month - partly because of the Virginia Tech shooting and the need to find student eyewitnesses to the events there, but also to network with people who are making news and driving the tech and media industries. Specific shows are also using Facebook for viewer relations. The thing has reached critical mass.

Just the other day, Mark Glaser at Mediashift mused about why older people are suddenly joining Facebook in droves, suggesting several reasons:

• They can feel hip and young by being on a social networking site set up specifically for people younger than them.
• They can experience social networking first-hand after reading about it and talking about it without the experience.
• They can put themselves into the shoes of the younger generation, of their kids.
• Facebook has a clean, simple layout, unlike the more cluttered MySpace.
• Facebook opened itself up to any third-party developer, making itself a more thriving platform.

Meanwhile longtime users of MySpace around the globe, including this blogger in South Africa, are reporting a major migration of their friends from MySpace to Facebook.

Danah Boyd, a Berkman Fellow at Harvard and expert in youth internet culture, social networking, recently wrote a fascinating paper about class divisions between Facebook and MySpace. As she describes it, these divisions have taken shape since Facebook opened up to anybody, enabling high school kids to join for the first time a domain that was once the exclusive territory of college students.

An example of class divisions can be seen from social networking preferences in the U.S. military: MySpace (used mainly by enlisted servicepeople) is blocked by the U.S. military internet connections while Facebook (used by officers) is allowed. 

Amongst high school students, she finds:

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

Read the whole thing, and also see Ethan Zuckerman's notes from a talk Danah recently gave at Harvard here.   She ends her paper with a provocative final question: "what does it mean in a digital world where no one's supposed to know you're a dog, we can guess your class background based on the tools you use?"

What's more, the "good kids" can now network with the "bosses" through the Facebook groups and causes we're all joining - from the Barack Obama group to the Creative Commons Facebook group, to Georgia Popllewell's "Beach House Trinidad"...

Question for any students and young professionals out there: do you find Facebook a useful way to network for jobs?

Question for "bosses": Here's the scenario: You are interviewing two equally qualified job candidates with equally strong references and recommendations. You met Candidate A on a Facebook group while you've never encountered Candidate B before, online or offline. Are you more likely to hire Candidate A? Does it make no difference? Or are other factors more important in your decision? Be honest.

UPDATE: Pete Cashmore at Mashable reports that Facebook users, now at 30 million, doubled since the start of this year.

UPDATE 2: Thanks to Kaiser for pointing out the very funny WSJ article I missed about the awkward moments of a 24 year old whose 30-something boss "friended" him on Friendster, what to do when a client who "friends" you turns out to have semierotic photos of himself on his page, etc. Quote of the day: "When you see your client's pubic bone, something has changed."