Coverage for ‘How to respond when Facebook censors your political speech’

censored, from .mws flickr photostream, used under a creative commons licenseThe two-part series I posted on Tales from the Net and Wired’s How-to Wiki is starting to get some coverage.

Shai Sachs has an excellent piece on MyDD:

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about Facebook “censorship” of free speech. The Blackadder One case I wrote about a couple weeks ago was just an early warning sign of more trouble to come. Recently Jon Pincus has been posting a series of diaries at Tales from the Net and Liminal States about his encounter with problems very similar to those Derek Blackadder ran into when he tried to organize workers on Facebook. Pincus’s posts include a very good trail of documentation of the problems he’s encountering, which make this series one of the more interesting resources on Facebook censorship I’ve seen.

And Elise Ackerman and John Boudreau phrase it nicely in in the San Jose Mercury News’ Tech Notebook:

What is the difference between a Barack Obama supporter and a spammer?

According to Facebook, it can be as little as two “get out the vote” wall posts on a Web page maintained by the popular social-networking site.

That’s what Jon Pincus, a Seattle-based technologist, discovered when he posted information for Hawaiian and Wisconsin voters earlier this week on Obama’s Facebook Web page.

Thanks once again to all those who helped with this!

jon

PS: image from .mw on flickr, found via Creative Commons search. Thanks, .mw and CC!


Comments

2 responses to “Coverage for ‘How to respond when Facebook censors your political speech’”

  1. This came up in Ariel’s interview with Mini on Microspotting, where Mini reflected:

    It wasn’t until being summarily kicked off of Facebook that I realized Facebook has some crazy policies in place and Facebookers are overzealous in enforcing them, to a degree that it’s a relatively hostile place to invest your time and energy into. Take for example them booting Robert Scoble recently. Or Guy Kawasaki being kicked off for a bit. It’s certainly not a Nordstrom experience and I’m a bit baffled how they view their user base: with general contempt?

    And I never heard back from Facebook regarding my dismissal. Maybe they just thought, “Read the rules, duh.” So I had no opportunity to go back and say “Bye” or try to make a list of my friends.

    It’s interesting that of all the situations I’ve tracked down, Mini’s the only one who hasn’t been reinstated.

    Mini quoted my ‘great snippet’ about how “… people see Facebook as Orwellian, panoptic, and generally creepy” and mentioned the guide on WIred, and then wrapped up this subject with

    The fact that such a How-To is needed makes me appreciate, no matter how wonderful it was to connect to Mini-Microsoft readers, Facebook is the wrong place for me to be. I desperately wish there was a Facebook alternative that was a professional environment to reconnect with all my former Facebook friends.

    Indeed, preferably one that’s privacy-friendly, free-speech, IP-respecting, secure, and has a great user experience.

    The rest of the interview’s very interesting as well. As I commented over there,

    MiniMSFT is one of the best-known workspace blogs out there, the ‘review threads’ are amazingly empowering to people across the company and the industry, and a lot of people have been inspired to take charge of their own careers — at Microsoft and elsewhere — so hopefully along with the chance to connect to readers, that outweighs Mini’s disappointment that Microsoft is pursuing a “use its size to an advantage” strategy.

  2. […] users without notification or discussion and ignore feedback fits in with their overall pattern (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 …).  Presumably other commercial social networks are taking notice of the […]

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