Last month, Facebook
decided I wasn't a person. When I logged on, I learnt I no longer deserved a personal 'profile', but should
instead have a business 'page' to interact with my public. As far as I
know I'm not a sentient zaibatsu, or a fan site for Cheez-strings, or
a reality show contestant, but Facebook didn't ask or give me
the chance to say this.
I had, by an algorithm
or a human, been classified as non-human and thus my account, as it
was, needed to be removed. With my options narrowed to transition to
a business page or no facebook, I went with transition. I saved a
copy of my years of flirtations, laughs, battles and drunken photos
just in case. This was foresightful, as I would never have got them
back.
As a business or public
figure page, life was very different. I obviously wasn't interested
in other people unless they 'interacted' with me, so no updates from
others. I wasn't a person, so couldn't attend events, or be invited
to them. Messages and post replies were optional and mainly hidden,
unless they crossed a certain algorithmically-determined threshold,
in case I got distracted from counting my money. For (presumably
privacy?) reasons, I couldn't see the number of people who 'liked'
me, or who they were, so couldn't transplant all my friends to a new
personal account.
I could still post
words and pictures, and people could reply. Their replies and likes
and activity was graphed, and I received little updates telling me
which of my posts were 'performing' best and that I should consider
saying more like that, or paying for them to be seen by more people.
About a tenth of my friends saw what I posted: wouldn't I like to
contact all of them? In short, I was the proud owner of an
electronic echo chamber where my friends were ranked and graphed, I
was constantly being invited to buy popularity, and I didn't get
invited to parties. Life as a business was very much like being a
teenager.
More worrying, though,
was how much of my life I lost when I lost Facebook. I'm studying,
and my fellow students share schedule changes, mutual support, and
ideas on a private Facebook group. To learn with my peers I need
Facebook. My shared house is administrated through a Facebook group.
If I want to know about parties, internet downtime or kitchen
storage, I need Facebook. My mum has Facebook to keep up with my
life, and I have friends who prefer Facebook messages to emails. I
joined Facebook in the first place because I was missing invites to
parties. Hey, everyone was on there, and it was just a tickbox, and
seriously, inviting 50 people personally?
Facebook is easy. And
it's good. It's good to share photos and news and jokes with people
far away, and to hear about people's lives without needing to ask.
It's a big world with lots of good people in it and I like to hear
from them without needing mad administrative skills. I missed it; I asked Facebook to explain why they chucked me, and reinstate me. There was no reply, so I tried living without it, and made a new profile a few months later.
We're now
trapped into a service that can eject you without a second thought,
with no reason or appeal. Facebook can cut off from your housemates,
your classmates, your family and friends and they won't even tell you
why. And when you tell your friends what happened (if you can: how
many of your 'friends' do you have emails and phone numbers for?)
they will try to stay in touch, or try and remember to tell you that
the washing machine is being repaired, but it's just too easy to post
and forget.
Ease of use favours a
centralised service run by a single company, and aimed at the lowest
common denominator. Facebook-dependent people are not the ones
running exotic operating systems or working from the command line.
Any centralised service invites dependence upon those running it. Do
you trust Facebook to decide what you see and who you can talk to?
Forget me. Do you trust them to keep your private messages private and not hand material over to law enforcement without good reason?
Homophobes and people scared of breasts have successfully got people and materials banned from the platform. Small businesses and artists can no longer
update their fans with news: unless they pay, only a fraction of people who asked for updates will see them. The Facebook insistence on real names puts people at risk and denies genuine identities in
the name of preventing abuse which still happens. Facebook are not
angels, despite their blue, friendly appearance. And even if you are
happy with them now, they have a history of moving the goalposts.
If you have to trust a
single company to mediate your social interactions, your photo
collection and your past, is this the best one? It may be: we are
running a bit low on good guys, and hell, you need to share selfies
somewhere. You probably won't run into issues, other than a deluge of
Farmville invites, social faux pas and gender-role-reinforcing ads.
Or, you may want to
start cultivating a backup network – collecting emails and numbers
–, and take a record of your data and photos, in case one day
Facebook decides you, too, are not a person.
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