The evidence against Facebook piles up
I am in York at a meeting of the Jisc Emerge programme. There seems to be increasing disillusionment with Facebook. And the evidence against Facebook is mounting. This is from the latest edition of the LabourStart newsletter.
“Facebook, the social networking website, is getting a lot of attention these days. In the trade union movement, there are differences of opinion about how useful Facebook actually is. Some of us are making a real effort to find out by using Facebook as an organizing tool. One of them is senior LabourStart correspondent Derek Blackadder, from Canada. Derek’s day job is as a staffer for the country’s largest union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). He’s one of the people who thinks Facebook is potentially quite useful for trade unionists.
Well, maybe not so much anymore. You see, a few days ago, Derek was banned from Facebook. I’ll let John Wood from the U.K. tell the story in his own words: Derek got a note from the good book, telling him he was trying to add too many friends, and should calm down a bit, or else. Now as a union organiser, he’s quite likely to want to add lots of friends – it’s kind of what he does. So he waits a bit and tries again, and is told he can’t add any more at the moment and to wait and try later. Fair enough. He waits a bit more and tries again, same message. By now, he’s probably frothing at the mouth and muttering “must organise, must organise”, so he has another go to see if the coast is clear, and promptly gets himself a ban. That being a ban from Facebook itself – no more profile, no access to the stuff he’s built up, no appeal.
John has launched a Facebook group to sign people up to protest the ban on Derek. I am writing to ask each and every one of you to take a moment and sign up to join the group. “Eric Lee, who runs LabourStart suggests supporters should join Facebook. He says “I know that most of you are not yet signed up to Facebook. This is good time to see whether we can mobilize the kind of support — the thousands of names — that will force the owners of Facebook to reverse course and allow Derek to do what he does so well: organize.”
I am not sure we should encourage people to join Facebook. It may be time to campaign and organise against the platform owners.
