When Facebook announced the “Facebook Governance” voting back in February, Mark Zuckerberg hailed it as an “unprecedented” effort to involve users in the development of the terms of service. Almost two months later the voting has finally begun and around 260,000 individuals have voted on which terms to use. Within one week, 30 percent of the site’s population, or 60,000,000 individuals, will have to vote in order for the decision to stick. In other words, the vote is more symbolic than an actual vote.
It calls to mind the age-old trick of asking the children whether they’d like to wear their red or green pajamas to bed – with no choice about when bedtime actually is. Facebook still holds the quill and frames the choice. But the fact is that most companies wouldn’t dream of going as far as Facebook just has, because the kinds of public pressures that create privacy crises can also be elicited when cynical choices are presented. Facebook has intentionally placed itself in a new zone, borrowing elements of .org and .gov to inform how a .com is run. Coming from .edu myself, I’m disappointed that something initially as academically-related as Facebook – a social networking site for university communities – wasn’t begun and nurtured under university auspices, naturally incorporating public interest values.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
