Exactly how and why fifty Facebook radical groups’ user profiles were taken down is still being debated, although, perhaps surprisingly, it seems to be that more or less anyone can cause such profiles to be blocked.
As we have said, this is not reasonable and amounts to censorship in the case of legitimate organisations, even when they may be technically in breach of terms and conditions.
But there are two wider questions: firstly, how do you make human rights considerations a priority for private platforms, especially when they are balancing other concerns like Spam or government pressure; and secondly, do we really want corporations making these decisions for us?
It’s easy for us to imagine that laws and public pressure can hold corporations in check, and therefore this is the most important thing to do. In practice, holding corporations to account is very difficult, and power relations tend to hold the day.
This ought to be the lesson we learn from the Internet and digital revolution. Over twenty or more years, we have had a huge rebalancing of power towards citizens, as we are able to communicate and network with each other much more easily. We are able to directly influence political discourse. No longer do a handful of media and political organisations act as gatekeepers to the public. They no longer act as exclusive mediators.
Nothing is perfect, of course, and the net has rebalanced rather than replaced media power of discourse. But let’s just for a moment examine what the nature of our newish powers are:
- We act as distributed nodes in a network, able to talk directly to our peers
- We have the power of our immense calculating machines, computers, and can decide to do whatever we like with them
- We can route round censorship
- There are few weak points in the network, and no single, central point which government can easily pressurise
- If government impose laws and censorship, our morals, rather than government’s power tends to decide whether we avoid that censorship
Let’s now look at what we get from services like Facebook:
- We act as users within a platform, able to talk to our peers through the platform
- The power of our calculating machines is limited by the platform’s decisions about how we interact with it
- We can route around censorship, but are very vulnerable to account deletions, takedowns and service cancellations
- There is a strong single point which government can easily pressurise
- If government imposes laws and censorship, their power tends to prevail
Now there are benefits, especially in finding other people, and using simple tools. But what I would like the activists who feel aggrieved to think about is this: while we all use these platforms without growing the alternatives, we increase the likelihood that our power and autonomy reduces.
Yesterday, a number of people from these groups signed up to the still raw and experimental Diaspora, through independent co-operating ‘pods’ like My Seed.
Diaspora, and other open source social platforms, seek to be a network of independent servers, each hosting some users, who can move between them, and talk to people using other servers. While these platforms are still in their infancy, this approach means they can be decentralised, privacy-friendly and censorship resistant.
While activists should absolutely demand their rights wherever they are, they should also seek to reclaim their power through networks they can control. Do it now!
Mark:
May 01, 2011 at 10:44 PM
Unfortunately, I think that the activist community have been getting their knickers in a twist over nothing on this one. From the available information, it seems that all the accounts which have been shut down are those which are clearly in breach of Facebook's terms and conditions - not because of their content, but simply because they were set up as "profiles", which Facebook reserves for natural persons (ie, real, live human beings) rather than "pages", which are for organisations, causes, campaigns etc.
Galling though it may be for the operators of these accounts to lose them, it's hard to have much sympathy for people who seem incapable of following a few simple instructions. If they'd set them up properly to begin with, the accounts would still be active - there's absolutely no censorship at all going on here, and it's distinctly misleading to suggest that there is.
What may be a more interesting angle is the story behind the choice of these accounts for closure. Facebook doesn't proactively monitor accounts for breaches of the Ts&Cs, instead, it acts on user reports. So what appears to have happened is that someone, or a group of people, have been tracking down activist pages which break the rules and then reporting them in the knowledge that this will almost inevitably take them offline. It's like shooting fish in a barrel, of course, since any account which breaks the rules is going to get caught sooner or later. But it would be interesting to know who's holding the gun this time.
(Incidentally, I've just spent a few minutes tracking down BNP profiles which break the rules, and reporting them. I hope I'm not going to be vilified as facilitating censorship as a result.)
Jim Killock:
May 01, 2011 at 11:44 PM
Hi Mark, what I would say is that the groups whose user profiles were taken down were understandably very angry about it, especially as it appears to be the result of some concerted action. Clearly Facebook's takedown procedure is designed around fake Spam profiles impersonating organisations, rather than organisations who sign up the wrong way.
Mark:
May 02, 2011 at 07:51 AM
I'd disagree with both of those, actually. Well, I can understand the anger of the groups, but the only people they have a right to be angry with is themselves. Facebook is very clear that profiles are for real people only, and the takedown procedure is designed to weed out anything which isn't a real person just as much as impersonators. The reporting system even has a specific option for reporting profiles which are being used to promote organisations or businesses rather than being a person.
Jim Killock:
May 02, 2011 at 01:18 PM
Thanks Mark. You say “the takedown procedure is designed to weed out anything which isn't a real person just as much as impersonators”; but that’s not quite true. There are a set of different abuse procedures, some of which incur requests for action, some behaviour change, and rare ones incur takedown. The rare occurrances of takedowns are meant to be for spammers and serious legal abuses, whereas these accounts merely needed to migrate their status from “profile” to “page”.
The problem is that the two activities (spam and mistaken use of profiles) look the same. I’d argue the sensible thing to do would be to see if Facebook could distinguish between the two, and treat accordingly. This would avoid angst and users-in-error’s political opponents from gaming the process to cause (from Facebook's point of view) disruption.
Andy:
May 10, 2011 at 02:54 PM
I think Mark has picked up on a valid point.
At least Facebook act on real people making a complaint (whatever the right and wrongs) and don't rely on a computer algorithm to auto take-down pages and sites