Tarleton Gillespi wrote a brilliant piece in Salon (reposted on Social Media Collective) on one little document that has been recently accidentially leaked. This is a curious document sent to Gawker media from a disgruntled employer that Facebook apparently uses to deliniate the rules and specific examples of how particular objectionable content ought to be dealt with on Facebook. Remember the "flag this" button? This is the guide to how to deal with the content you might have flagged - it needs humans to ascertain if it is indeed objectionable.
There are interesting and thorny issues here and Tarleton deals with these in turn, concerned with lines in the sand that must be drawn across the expanse of sand that is the content of Facebook. While Tarleton concedes that much of this content is a true form of sewage of human expression - the depravity that we occasionally sink to - some of it awful but harmless and some awful and extremely damaging. Free speech itself is a thorny issue - a political quagmire and a kind of "bright impossible ideal" that people with my background would understand better than anyone else. We know that "bright ideals" are impossible to ever reach, that they are necessary as a way to excite the public when explaining unsavory actions elsewhere, but that can not be made available to said public because said public would not be able to deal with it. Free speech is impossible because for it be free, we as people must be able to hear the kind of speech that can suddenly feel viscerally wrong for one reason or another. Free speech is not pretty and protection thereof is a thorny thing to do. In truth, there is no place in the world where there is such a thing that is "legally protected free speech" because everyplace there are legal restrictions on some kind of speech or other for whatever reason.
So speech and especially public speech is complicated and this is even more so for speech that is conducted in the weird parochial space of Facebook where it does not really feel as "public" and yet you might have forgotten the conservatives or radicals or ultra-liberals or gun-toting animal torturers you friended last year who used to be your high school classmates. When images of tortured animals start floating through the feed in front of your eyes or when your perfect picture of a baby breastfed by its mother upsets someone else - there is a kind of recourse offered by Facebook. No need to engage each other with particular forms of social sanctioning and pressure - the kind that physical communities develop to keep their members in line. No need to face the emotional difficulty of direct interaction of this kind. Just "flag this" quietly and anonymously and Facebook will deal with it directly in a way that is ironically "faceless". Social sanctioning is a difficult process and it requires investment and emotional costs from all parties involved. It can damage or substantially change the relationship. It may result in deliberate un-friending and ranting and ganging up on someone by rounding the friends that DID approve of the content. It is a very costly, difficult, at times prolonged, very rarely pretty process. There is a reason why groups and communities do it though - it is a social process that allows not only control of fringe elements or a kind of forced conformity to communally articulated standards and a resultant seeking of other outlets (a forcing of certain types of behavior underground). It is practically the only way for change of social norms and personal belief systems through argument and true emotional pain. Change is hard and social ostracism is extremely difficult both to adjudicate and to endure, and that is why it might force us to think and thinking is often what lacks in the production of such human sewage. In fact, I wonder whether the very option to "flag it" anonymously even allows the authors of the content to post it at all - the costs of posting socially minimal - so you upset you bleeding-heart academic friends with those pictures, so what? They weren't really "friends" just connected on Facebook, known from that ill-fated stint in grad school so many years ago. You KNOW who "flagged it" and it only confirmed your low opinion of THEM...
I agree with Tarleton's arguments in his article - the practice of Facebook is a manifestation of "ongoing longstanding debates about the content and character of public discourse". I agree that in many ways this document is evidence of Facebook taking on the mantle of a custodian of content - as it attempts to navigate thorny national issues in a kind of space it (and we) elevates as beyond national borders and boundaries. The issues Traleton brings about the questions that are not answered by this document and must continue to be asked about the particular of decision making are important. I find it intriguing and troubling that even content that is not flagged is under scrutiny since there are many groups on Facebook that have attempted to build insular networks where sharing of content that Facebook would clearly consider unpalatable is the community norm and the necessary pre-requisite to the kind of process and practice and work these groups perform for their members. This to me says that these groups will eventually get found and locked out as well and here the question will be with what effects for the groups and how many of these may have lead to the kinds of Arab Spring revolutions and how many supported child-porn rings?
Yet what I find fascinating here is how this particular practice is essential for Facebook users to continue to maintain the ragtag enormities of friendship links - the excision of various kinds of social costs associated with such unwiedly forms of connectedness through the opaqueness of feed algorithms and these types of reporting mechanisms. The only way Facebook can continue to grow is if it encourages an antisceptically positive space where any negativity is slipped under wraps and where potential social processes that could result in changes are routed and limited as these same social processes would result in substantial social costs. Facebook is trying to build a system where social connectedness is far less costly than the reality of daily living would have us believe. With what results?
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