> Hey thanks for circulating this news, Merijn, > > Just to add that the groups targeted in the purge have now also set up a > petition site and a blog, and no, these are not on Facebook.
(...) As I could find very little about this story on MSM (Main Stream Media), I tried a little bit harder and found this story (for what it's worth, comments welcome): http://www.jonworth.eu/over-50-political-accounts-deleted-in-facebook-purge-its-much-more-complicated/ (http://bit.ly/mKpv8G) Hell, crackdown by the evil Facebook! Shutting down student protest! In cahoots with the authorities! Even Evgeny Morozov is onto it: (Morozov tweet) Look folks, this was a problem waiting to happen. Heres why. Take the story on the UCL Occupation blog: "There appears to be a purge of political Facebook groups taking place. Profiles are being deleted without warning or explanation." Am I supposed to trust a rant that mixes up the Facebook terminology in the very first sentence? Therein I think is the root of the problem. The accounts that have been purged are Profiles i.e. organisations that behave as people on Facebook. The UCL Occupation one still in existence for now is still up, but a bunch of other have been deleted. Some more are listed here at Open Democracy. In short there are three main ways to be on Facebook: 1. With a profile intended for real people, with a name 2. With a group a small to medium size group of people discussing something 3. With a page Like something to get news updates from it As far as I can determine no groups or pages have been deleted, only profiles, and all the profiles were not individual people, they were being used by organisations. Not only is this stupid (as Ive previously explained here) but it violates the Facebook terms of service. So no leg to stand on if one is deleted. Now was the reaction of Facebook right? Probably not the owners of the profiles could have been contacted, suggestions made to convert the accounts into Pages etc. Just deleting profiles generates a strong counter reaction. Someone undoubtedly informed Facebook of the breach, and got the accounts shut down. Facebook, as a company, has form for these sorts of things its to hegemonic to care about individual users. But frankly I have often done the same, and Im sure many people have. When political opponents of mine have bee using profiles rather than pages I report them to Facebook. I of course dont report accounts of organisations I agree with, and just send them a friendly message to warn them. In conclusion, there are errors on both sides here. The accounts in question broke the terms, and Facebook behaved insensitively, but we should not have expected anything else. The lesson: if you do want to use this unpleasant, money making, American walled garden for your political protests, at least learn to use it properly before you start out! [UPDATE - 1.5.2011] By the look of it my take on events was more or less correct. [UPDATE - 2.5.2011] Ive now found The Guardians take on the story, and its even more inaccurate than the initial UCL blog post. Its not that complicated folks! # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
