John Jones

John Jones, November 2008
The University of Texas at Austin
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In 2006, Facebook introduced a new aggregating feature to the site. Called “News Feed,” this feature collected all of the actions made by the sites’ users—pokes, changes made to the user profile, joining or leaving groups—and published these actions as individual items in a feed on the home pages of that users’ friends. When News Feed was first introduced, it was widely disliked by users, and the poor introduction required Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to release an apology in which he advised users to “‘Calm down" and "Breathe”, while the News Feed system was altered to allow for granular control of what items were published in the feed (Zuckerberg, 2006).

In a 2008 article, danah boyd argues that social convergence—“when disparate social contexts,” like the online and offline worlds, “are collapsed into one”—provides an explanation for the initial backlash of Facebook users against News Feed (boyd, 2008). According to boyd, News Feed altered the structure of information on the site, particularly along the dimension of privacy. It allowed simultaneously for the exposure of behaviors that users had previously thought were hidden as well as an invasion of those users’ personal boundaries.

If we are to accept a privacy-based theory of social convergence, that theory has to deal with the fact that the Facebook community quickly adopted News Feed as one of the most popular features of the service. Now, whenever a user logs onto the service, the News Feed is the first thing they see, and it’s use on the site seems to have done little to slow the growth of Facebook or to encourage users to abandon the site. What are we to think of the effects of exposure, invasion, and social convergence in light of this fact? One helpful way of examining this issue is by comparing it to another of Facebook’s tools, the advertising platform Beacon. In this talk, I will argue that it was the particular characteristics of the Facebook community—not privacy concerns—that led to the ultimate acceptance of News Feed and rejection of Beacon.

Introduced in late 2007, Beacon is an advertising platform that shared users’ activities on outside partner sites with those users’ Facebook friends. When users completed an activity on a partner site like Fandango or Blockbuster.com, that activity—buying a movie ticket, renting a DVD—was published in the News Feed. Like News Feed, the introduction of this service prompted a fierce backlash from Facebook’s users. However, unlike News Feed, Beacon was never adopted as a central part of the service.

To investigate why this was the case, let’s briefly return to the example of News Feed. According to boyd, the reason users felt that their personal information had been exposed and their privacy invaded was that the technological change in Facebook had allowed for actions which were previously semi-anonymous to be broadcast across the site (boyd, 2008). In other words, because these actions were surrounded by the noise of other activities and could only be found by other users who actively looked for them, they seemed private to users, even though they were in fact open to their friends and those in their networks.

But what do we do with the acceptance of the News Feed by Facebook users? Does the acceptance of this feature suggest that boyd misjudged the extent to which users felt exposed and invaded? Or does it suggest that social convergence does not very well describe the introduction of News Feed to Facebook?

I would argue that the answer to both of these questions is “no.” Facebook users were in fact quite upset over the introduction of News Feed, and boyd’s description of social convergence seems to apply in this case. However, I think the variable that she misjudged is that of privacy. If we think about social convergence in terms of community, I believe we can easily explain why News Feed succeeded and Beacon failed.

Let us consider the unique features of Facebook. The site was originally reserved for Harvard students. It was slowly opened up to the students of additional colleges, then to any college or high school student. Now the site is open to anyone. Additionally, Facebook has since its inception had a zero-tolerance policy for fictitious or pseudononymous profiles. Unlike sites like MySpace, where users can create profiles using any name or entity, Facebook users can only sign into the site using their real names. Unlike Friendster, which introduced a similar policy after Fakesters—fictitious profiles—and Fraudsters—profiles of persons created by others—were well-entrenched on the site, Facebook has had this policy from its inception.

Policies like these, as well as the uncluttered, unmodifiable site design that characterized the site for many years, resulted in a particular type of community development for Facebook. On the one hand, the site had an aura of exclusivity that it developed when it was only for college students, and which persisted in its opt-in mentality even after the site opened up. By default, profiles were only visible to users’ friends, and open profiles were only visible to other members of the users’ network, typically his or her college. Further, when one encountered someone on the site, there was a reasonable expectation that that profile represented a real person, not a fictitious or fraudulent personality created by the user. Of course, some users created false identities on the site, but when they were discovered their accounts were suspended, and, since the site policy always prevented this kind of behavior, there was no wide-spread backlash against these suspensions.

To sum up the characteristics of the Facebook community: 1) it was closed, originally to non-college students, later to non-friends; 2) it was not anonymous; no Fakesters allowed. In short, the site created a community around the idea of semi-private interactions with real people. As with most communities, users accept the initial structure of the community and resist later refirgurings of the community, particularly those that seem designed for marketing purposes.

If we think about social convergence, then, we realize that the problem isn’t with privacy, per se; rather, social convergence affects online groups at the level of community. It turned out that Facebook users didn’t really care about their privacy with other users in the community—i.e. their friends and people in their networks. When News Feed made their information more accessible, they eventually embraced this change. However, in the case of Beacon, they roundly rejected having their behavior outside of Facebook shared with their Facebook friends. While News Feed was initially resisted, it turned out to support the goals of the community, sharing information with friends. Beacon, however, did not support these goals, seeing as it was designed around products and services from outside the site which were then imported into the site and given the same status as communication from individuals.

In short, social convergence doesn’t seem to be what worries users; rather, they disprove of changes that contradict community values. In the case of News Feed, Zuckerberg was right: users just needed to calm down to see that the service reinforced community values. In the case of Beacon, however, he was wrong: the service went against the community values of exclusivity and interpersonal connection, opening up the site to connections with outside users and attempts to treat brands and services like persons.

Sources

boyd, d. (2008). Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence. Convergence, 14(1), 13–20.

Zuckerberg, M. (2006). Calm down. Breathe. We hear you. Retrieved from http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2208197130