The Dangers of the Connected Age

I was going to write a post on the outsized fear of the web versus the real dangers when David Pogue did it for me yesterday here. The bottom line, which I tell critics and skeptics all the time, is that dangers exist online, just as they do offline, and yes, that makes it scary, but it is a very, very small percentage of the amount of activity going on that is good and at times awesomely great.

Pogue cites the PBS Frontline documentary, “Growing Up Online” and what they found about teens online. What they found is that teens are immersed, I like to say marinating, in social media. No news there for anyone who has come into contact with a person under 30 in the last few years. And that sometimes, some of these teens either do mean things or experience meanness by others. The poster child for this meanness is the horrific story of the MySpace Suicide by Megan Meier, who was the victim of a hoax approved of by a neighboring teen’s mother.

I don’t want to excuse cyberbullying, it’s awful and mean spirited. But too many people use these rare instances as excuses not to engage with social media tools. It is too easy to dismiss them as dangerous or silly when they are, in fact, at the heart of a digital revolution that is changing everything that we do, see, hear and learn about. We are in the nascent stages of this revolutionary and norming expected behaviors very quickly — from not sending out too many joke emails to your friends and family, to making it very clear when you’re joking online since it can so hard to tell from text, to making sure to talk to your kids about the real dangers online and watching what they’re doing and where they’re surfing. It’s a work in progress — but it’s also a pathway that we need to take enthusiastically with open hearts and minds.

Is the IRS Silly, Racist or Partisan?

This week the IRS announced that is investigating the United Church of Christ, Senator Obama’s home congregation, for campaigning on his behalf at their annual meeting last year to determine if the group acted non-nonprofity – meaning against the tax code regulation that bars nonprofits from supporting political candidates. Here is an article from the Chronicle of Philanthropy explaining the kerfuffle.

I recall a similar incident in 2004 when near the end of the election cycle the IRS also loudly announced that it would be investigating the NAACP for a speech made by its chair Julian Bond. According to the IRS, the investigation was brought to look into “Specifically in a speech made by Chairman Julian Bond, “in which Mr. Bond condemned the administration policies of George W. Bush on education, the economy and the war in Iraq.”

If condemning the Bush Administration is a crime, then most of America is going to jail.

The investigation of the NAACP took two years and ended up with no action on the part of the IRS, although it cost the NAACP an enormous amount in time and legal fees. As reported in the Chronicle last year, the IRS has beefed up its investigation arm, adding 100 investigators to bring the total to a little over nine hundred.

So, one has to wonder about two things based on the IRS’ actions:

1. Is the timing of the announcement of the Obama investigation intended to suppress support for and activity on behalf of his candidacy for president. And, if the Republicans are going to use petty, little levers like this to hold onto power, watch out come September

2. When is there going to be a real conversation about updating the tax code to better reflect changes in the sector and in politics. If every one investigator is responsible for around 800 nonprofit groups, does looking into campaign fliers being distributed outside of a church really make good sense? What about refining the tax code to deal with the blending of nonprofit and for profit lines, or spending more investigative time weeding out the really bad apples (there are a few, alas) who give the rest of us a bad name.

This is at best a silly use of tax payer money, or at worst a pattern of political intimidation by this administration.

Diebold Releases November Election Results Early

If anyone deserves ridicule and mockery it is the folks at Diebold with their hackable, proprietary election machines. Here’s a delicious satiric video by the funny folks at The Onion on Diebold releasing the election results now for the November presidential election. Enjoy!

Facebook Customer Service: A Black Hole of Algorithms

It’s like the premise of a science fiction novel; what would happen if all of your friends disappeared in an instant?  It would be like a neutron bomb that killed everyone around you, except you, and there you were standing all alone.  Derek Blackadder had an experience like this on Facebook several weeks ago.
Derek is a forty-nine year old organizer in Canada for CUPE, the Canadian Union of Public Employees.  The job of union organizers is to actively reach out and attract new members.  This was, of course, all done face-to-face in the past, but Derek and his colleagues had been wondering about organizing on Facebook.  If social networking sites are the new portals for community connections and actions, particularly for younger people, and were now being used to organize support for causes like breast cancer and literacy, then they figured they should investigate how the site can be used for organizing workers.  So, Derek created his own profile on Facebook and began to friend people who were on groups that focused on labor issues. Admittedly, Derek was friending at a frenzied pace.  He quickly amassed 450 friends, but — and here’s the key — about three quarters of the friend requests he was making were accepted.
Derek received a warning from Facebook that this pace could lead to suspension of his privileges on the site, but they offered no sense of how an acceptable pace was defined.  In essence, it was an “or else” threat.  Then, on January 11th, Derek received this message:

Hi Derek,

Facebook has limits in place to prevent behavior that other users may find annoying or abusive.  These limits restrict the rate at which you can use certain features on the site.  Unfortunately, we cannot provide you with the specific rates that have been deemed abusive.

Your account has been disabled because you exceeded Facebook’s limits on multiple occasions when requesting friends, despite having been warned to slow down.  We will not be able to reactivate your account for any reason.  This decision is final.

Thanks for your understanding,

Bella
Customer Support Representative
Facebook

I inquired through Facebook’s press page about the process for rescinding an account. Malorie Lucich of Outcast PR, an outside firm used by Facebook, sent me the following reply, “When it has come to our attention that a user is misusing the site by violating Facebook’s Terms of Use, we will take appropriate action, which may involve the disabling of an account.  If a user feels that their account has been disabled in error, they may write to our user operations team at appeals@facebook.com.”  Seems as though Bella and Malorie didn’t get the same memo on whether rescinding accounts is final or not.
While what happened to Derek seems a bit arbitrary, there are valid reasons for Facebook guarding against someone who seems to be abusing the site.  Any site has the right and responsibility to ensure that its environment is safe, particularly when it is a mecca for young people.  If Facebook were to become a place where unpleasant things happen often — sexual predators friending children, unwanted friends hacking into social networks — then the presumed multi-billion dollar value of Facebook, which is based on the social networks and not the software, would start to decline rapidly.
I asked Derek about the reasons that Facebook rescinded his membership  He said he was surprised by the cancellation by his privileges and the instant and seemingly irrevocable loss of his whole social network. After the news broke of his situation, aome bloggers, like British blogger Johninnit, implied that Facebook’s actions were anti-union (see post here).  Derek was quick to put that to rest, but then he raised a series of very interesting, and somewhat disturbing, concerns about the site.
Who’s the Boss?  The first issue was the clear and overwhelming power differential between users and the company.  As Derek said, “Facebook and MySpace share the same limitations, and that is that they are not controlled by the people who are using them.”  There have been instances when Facebook users have shouted very loudly, mainly about the release or use of their personal data, and the company has changed course.  But, as Derek found out, Facebook is not really a democracy, and at any moment it can pull the plug on your social network with no explanation or appeal.

What’s Commercial? The lines between for-profit and nonprofit activities and between downtime and work time are blurring across society.  Facebook struggles with the same issues.  The terms of service on the site explicitly state that Facebook activities are intended only for noncommercial use, but those rules were created during the first iteration of Facebook when its use was restricted to high school and college students.  There were unintended, or at least unplanned for, consequences when the site opened to all comers last year. What was originally envisioned as a friend-to-friend commons for kids in high school and college had become a much larger universe of people with a variety of different professional and commercial interests and relationships that were not part of the original intent of the site. Facebook then ran face first into the complicated intersection of commercial and social interests around causes.  In the late spring of 2007, the Causes application was launched to allow Facebook users to friend and fundraise for their favorite social causes.  Derek raised interesting questions as to whether these causes are a commercial or social activity.  If a nonprofit organization raises money using the Causes application on Facebook is that a commercial or social activity?  If a group of Facebook users who are all, say, caterers, create their own group and then decide that they want to work in concert on safety or payment issues while not formally calling themselves a union, is that be a social or commercial activity?   When Facebook opened itself up to everyone and allowed developers to place their own applications on the site last year it unwittingly created all kinds of new issues for itself.

Who’s the Customer on Facebook?  Facebook is no Wikipedia, and not just because their functions are so different, but because their ethnology, the very essence of their being, is so different.  Facebook is a commercial site, meaning it serves advertisers and users in equal measure.  Its users are its customeres only to the extent that their eyeballs on ads serve as their commerce.  Wikipedia is a community of users that largely monitors itself for the benefit of all.
Unfortunately, Facebook seems to have taken the opposite tack, and judging from the contradictory responses of two of its staffers to Blackadder’s situation, isn’t necessarily providing consistent customer service.  Even with its large investment from Microsoft last year, its main corporate interest seems to be going public or being bought, and the key to doing either one of those things is to continue to add millions of users while starting to convert their presence into advertising income and otherwise keeping costs down.  Wall Street isn’t interested in customer service per se, only in profits and, more importantly, future profits.  While users on Facebook may have a community, or belong to many mini-communities, they don’t have a clear relationship with the company.
Whose Data is It Anyway?  Derek Blackadder isn’t the only Facebook user to have a tussle over his social network.  Last month, Robert Scoble, a self-proclaimed tech geek blogger, had his account rescinded and then returned when Facebook objected to his adding his own code to the site to export his friends to another social networking site.  The New York Times reported that Nipon Das went through many hoops to erase his data on Facebook only to find that  the company keeps archived user data on backup servers.  The article describes the contrasting view of other social networking sites use of user data with that of Facebook. “MySpace and Friendster, as well as online dating sites like eHarmony.com, may require departing users to confirm their wishes several times — but in the end they offer a delete option.”  It is perhaps one of the worst kept but least well understood secrets of the Internet that a user turns over their personal data to the site they entered it into.  And yet, Facebook, of all of the major social networking sites, seems to have taken the ownership and use of private data to even greater lengths. It may be clear to for-profit companies that their goals are primarily financial, even if it means pimping data users’ believe to be their own.  But for users, it is not at all clear that they don’t own their own friends and information – even if the fine print says otherwise.
As Derek found, sometimes Facebook users form communities in spite of the company. A rather tongue-in-cheek Facebook group called, “Free the Blackadder One!” created by John Wood, a friend of Blackadder’s encouraged members to email Facebook to reinstate Derek. They finally did – but with no explanation as to why they reversed their “decision is final” stance.
As anyone who has wrangled with the site knows, customer service at Facebook is a black hole of algorithms. Users are cut off when some calculation is tripped and the user is flagged for abuse and charged by automatic emails. Even more unsettling than Derek’s rights being taken away in the first place was the way they were reinstituted.  What made the “final decision” unfinal?  Was it because there was a protest?  How large does a protest have to be to reverse the irreversible?  Who makes these decisions, how and why?  Companies can operate capriciously and continue reaping profits.  Communities can’t, or if they do, they won’t continue to be growing, trusting, vibrant, robust meeting places

The Most Exciting Week Ever!

What could be better than a week that began with this:

Can you believe that the Giants Won the Super Bowl!!!!!

And now it’s Super Duper Tuesday, but, it’s also Fat Tuesday! Honestly, what could be better than this.

Now, a few things to watch on Election Day:

1. How in the world are they going to count millions of ballots in California that have been mailed in (predictions of up to 13% of the total ballots) , plus the ballots that have to be counted at central locations because municipalities didn’t have time to replace decertifid voting machines. That means that ballots in six of the largest counties in CA will be transported by truck to central county locations to be counted. Gonna be a long night in CA!

2. Number of machinery malfunctions in this era of the 8 Track Tape voting system. See article here about a computer glitch in New Jersey that kept the governor waiting an hour to vote. $4 billion since Florida 2000 and we’re no closer to a better system.

3. The number of people, particularly young people, who were left out of the election because they didn’t meet the early registration deadlines. (See article here.)

4. On the bright side, Why Tuesday, a terrific, energetic and creative has a video here of how to make the entire primary process better.

Let the delegate counting begin!