| Maybe this type of FB behavior will finally kill that awful web site. Sites like this have become a 'punitive tease' -- it's hard to know when the rug will be pulled out from under you, yet you're lured into using it because "all my friends are on it." There really is a need for a neutral Twitter, a neutral FB. It won't happen though due to entrenched network effects. I suspect the only way FB and Twitter could be killed off is if they: 1) listed all the banned users and the reason each was banned 2) disclose the current "reasons to ban" list 3) and freely admit that banning is a subjective choice for these websites, that the "reasons to ban" list is not fixed. It's only anecdotally we hear about someone being banned, we have no idea the numbers of users, the scope, involved. If you were invited to a dinner party but were given a list of reasons why you'd be asked to leave ('talked down about person X', etc.) and also told "our list of reasons to kick a person out of our dinner party is evolving and is subject to change without notice" -- hey no one's putting up with a manipulative, baiting host like that, no one's going to that party. FB and Twitter, were they to be transparent about the scope of their banning, their DAU would crash. |
Five years ago I published a large collection of public domain documents that had been, before then, locked up behind a high priced paywall by jstor; along with a brief manifesto ( https://github.com/thejeshgn/philosophical_transactions_brow... ) decrying the restriction of important academic work by third party publishers (work which was often publicly funded or is legally in the public domain).
All links to my release or the write up were silently hidden everywhere on facebook, hidden in public feed, hidden in private messages. People who sent them were not informed that their contacts did not receive them.
As a private service Facebook is within their right to behave this way. The only answer is to minimize your reliance on private services to carry your communications. But it seems their billions of users do not understand or care about the control over the lives and, really, minds that they're handing this private corporation. I don't doubt it will change, but it won't happen over night.