On Tuesday September 5, Facebook, the ever-popular online social network used primarily by college students, introduced ‘News Feed’ a feature which instantly notified users of friends’ activities on the network. A second change, called ‘Mini-Feed’ highlights changes on each individual’s profile.
If members acquire a new friend, or join a new group, all the people in their social network, including many of whom they never met, are notified of these changes. This has become alarming to some students who have deemed this feature ‘stalkerish.’
Facebook’s move has sparked a surprising backlash of protests that is rare among teenagers and young adults in their twenties, who grew up in a period of public revelation in the form of blogs, video sharing and reality television. Until now, Facebook has differentiated itself from other online networks by preserving members’ privacy. From the start, Facebook has limited the people who can create personal pages on the site to those affiliated with a college or university (recent alterations have allowed high school students, political candidates, and people in business to join as well).
In addition, it also provides members with three different options to regulate who can view their personal information. Such preferences have distinguished facebook from competitors, such as Myspace or Livejournal, that do not offer such select membership. This is especially noteworthy considering the recent trend of sexual predators that seem to be using social-networking sites to find victims.
However, many believe that the Facebook News Feed goes too far by infringing on the rights of the users, especially in regards to issues of privacy. In fact, within hours of the introduction of the News Feed, hundreds of thousands of Facebook users emailed the company and formed protest groups to express their anger. Their key complaint: Personal information they had posted were being made public. According to sophomore student Sue Lee, ‘I hated the News Feed so I joined a group in protest.’
Another example of this student initiative, according to the Wall Street Journal, was by Ben Parr, a student at Northwestern University who teamed up with another student at the University of Iowa to start a group called Students Against Facebook News Feed, on Facebook, which had accumulated more than 300,000 members in two days. (The current numbers of the member list is up to 721,483). Other members had also circulated an online petition to send to Facebook demanding the elimination of the News Feed or that the users be given an option to disable the new features.
In addition, Facebook’s own blog was flooded with comments, forcing founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg to post a resilient response titled, ‘Calm Down. Breathe. We Hear You.’
Within three days, a new and differently-worded blog was posted by Zuckerberg starting with the words, ‘We really messed this one up. We did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them’
After this blog, new features were added to the News Feed to allow users to hide specific actions from specific users by changing certain privacy options. While Facebook was surprised by the influx of negative responses, many internet scholars were not.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Cliff Lampe, a professor at Michigan State University, said, ‘One of the questions this raises is, ‘What’s the relationship between the designers of a site like this and its users? According to its terms and conditions, Facebook can do whatever it wants to the site, but students, because they’ve created the content, have a sense of ownership.’
People in social networks – especially Facebook – have come to expect to have control over their information. At the same time, the angry response of many Facebook users and the subsequently rapid proceedings has also illustrated how dependent these social networks are on their users. It also illustrated how dependent these social networks are on their users.
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