facebook

I am torn about facebook.  On one hand I don't like it.  One company with effectively a monopoly having that much control over people's communications, being able to experiment on people, and collect all of that information and sell it or provide it to law enforcement, should not have as much freedom as it does.  Many years ago I set up a profile on facebook but then I quickly closed it back down because of my concerns.  However, over the years more and more people I know rely on facebook for communication.  This has led to me being left out.  My family shares pictures and communicates there.  Friends I know share information.  Also professionally, I am left not knowing about important information related to my job.  I hate being left out of "common knowledge" information at work because my coworkers share it on facebook.  I have tried setting up accounts with alternative social networking sites but my family, friends, and colleagues don't use them so it ends up being pointless.  Finally, now you can't access the functionality of some websites without a facebook account to log into. 

I read a few weeks ago that most people get their news via facebook than news websites.  Not being on facebook this surprised me.  As an exploratory experiment I set up a fake account on facebook not using my real name, image, or any personal information.  A lot of the videos and games are a waste of time (although I did make 6 million rather quickly playing a few online poker games---too bad it was fake money) but wow, there really is a lot of information I've been missing out on.  I was able to get updates from NASA on the SLS project, follow politics, and there was a huge amount of information about the Free Palestine movement that I had not seen before.  I also liked and followed some random things just to throw a wrench in the works so it wasn't too real and close to my interests. 

But then the other side of facebook came up.  I received advertising and friend suggestions targeted at people in the military and places on the west coast.  Facebook sent me advertisements to "meet my Muslim life partner."  I tried out a profiling tool that uses facebook information and it predicted that I was single, conservative, and had an art education.  People that know me in real life know this is not exactly accurate, but I can see how facebook used the information I was connected to, and the negatives that I was not connected to, in order to come up with these guesses.

What is the social effect of dividing people up so that they only see subsets of information from certain perspectives?  I can guess that it might lead to more extremism.  This new ways of providing news does not allow for shared dialogues over a common frame of reference---like reading the Washington Post each day when it cannot be tailored for individual interests but has to be written for all readers.  That being said, in the past the common dialogue has been from a very biased perspective on certain issues---often influenced by the government and liability. 

We have laws in the US about monopolies, especially monopolies over news information, for very good reasons.  I think it is time we started applying them to companies like facebook.  It is too dangerous for one company to be able to categorize people, link them in networks, and provide tailored information to them unchecked.  At the same time, I also see a value in being able to bring people together with common interests so that they can share information and organize.  However, these two aspects are not mutually exclusive.

While I like the old western movies about the lone holdout that wins the day in the face of long odds, I will probably have to start using facebook again.  I don't like being forced into this.  However, being out of the loop is having increasing costs both at home and at work.  I just want to encourage people to push for bringing facebook under news reporting monopoly regulation so I can feel better about this.