I won’t bore you with rehashing the story about the Facebook Terms of Service Fiasco for the thousandth time. Instead, I’ll bore you with my thoughts about the whole thing. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, see The Consumerist for a primer.
I’m very pleasantly surprised by the whole internet rebellion in the face of the new Facebook TOS. While I was researching social networking sites with Professor Holland, it became very obvious to me that people as a whole could care less about their personal information. I had conversations with countless undergrads about Facebook, and none of them indicated any type of concern over Facebook’s control over their information or content. In fact, many of them expressed the view that “if they can use my information to target me with more relevant ads, good for them!” Yikes.
So I have to admit that I was shocked when people actually began to express concern over the TOS change. I think that I have some idea of what happened, but I essentially need to coin a new term to describe the phenemenon. How about “cyber riot?” Essentially, one intelligent guy (or gal) with internet pull decided that he didn’t like the new TOS and started a cascading effect. The social media was quick to the scene, and within a few hours, the story made digg, reddit, propeller, and probably the other social networking sites.
Consider Digg for a moment. One person submits a story and selects the title and caption that everyone who finds the submission on digg will see. The first Digg story mentioning the new TOS was a link to The Consumerist article entitled, “A look At Facebook’s Disturbing New Tearms Of Service.” The caption read, “Facebook‘s terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore.” That story received ~6300 diggs which in my experience translates to around 300,000-400,000 unique views.
Now, I happen to be pleased with this particular use of social media, but one can probably imagine a scenario where the results may be less amicible to traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice. (I’ve always wanted to write that in a blog post.)
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