For anyone working in technology, marketing, PR or advertising, Sunday’s BBC2 documentary on Facebook was unlikely to provide much new information about the company’s well-documented history, legal battles and privacy concerns.
Despite this, the programme brought up a few deeper and apparently unanswerable questions about Facebook’s business model and its users’ social response, which I found really interesting:
Does liking something mean I agree to advertise it?
Some of Facebook’s revenue comes from ‘sponsored stories’. These appear on the right hand side of your profile and will go something like, “BBC Frozen Planet – Amy, Kelly and Ben like this.” Companies pay Facebook to show you which of your friends like their page, effectively getting your friends to advertise the page to you.
The difficulty here is whether liking a page – often for some benefit, such as entering a competition or getting some free benefits – is equivalent to recommending that page to your friends. There’s an argument to say that it’s not. I might like a restaurant, for example, but wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to my friends because I don’t think it’s their sort of thing. There’s also a separate issue here about awareness – it is not always obvious to Facebook users that their likes are being used in this way.
Do we really have that many friends?
The average Facebook user has 130 friends, according to Facebook’s own data. There has been much argument about this, including a video entitled ‘You need to get off Facebook’, which disputes that people have this many friends. One of the arguments runs that this is distorting the notion of friendship and causing some societal damage in doing so – this is debatable and very difficult to prove in the short term. Another position is that having social connections with so many people that normally you would lose touch with puts a lot of pressure on people by making them feel the need to keep up with all of them and their activities. The implication is that this can cause stress and difficulty maintaining close friendships with a smaller group.
Is there a cultural shift towards a lack of privacy?
There are plenty of concerns about Facebook users revealing too much about themselves online – whether this is material that might damage job prospects, details of when they are going on holiday or phone numbers made available to anyone who searches. While Facebook provides privacy options to allow users to opt out of sharing information, the trend has generally been that especially younger users tend to share a lot of data online. Privacy experts are concerned that these users may cause themselves problems in the future by revealing things they later regret. It is not clear how legitimate this concern is but anyone who values their privacy will be concerned about the apparent cultural shift towards revealing lots of personal information.
All of these questions are practically impossible to answer in the short term, which means we need to guess at what the future holds for our privacy and friendships – and guess how to mitigate any problems. The fact at the heart of this is that Facebook has changed and challenged the way we socialise, disrupting accepted practices. As yet, it is hard to predict the impact that Facebook and other social networking sites will have on society in the long term – but there is reason to suspect that significant changes are underway.
Image (c) bbc.co.uk
I missed the programme, but am hoping to watch it this week. It certainly stirred up lots of reactions (including, according to the Mail, viewers incensed by Emily’s multiple wardrobe changes) in the press and on social networks. There was an interesting piece in the Independent that highlighted one of the issues that you touch on Lauren – advertising. When Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s VP Public Policy was asked about it (i.e. about people unwittingly promoting companies or products to their friends because they’ve clicked ‘Like’), he failed to come up with a convincing answer and revealed that Facebook doesn’t have a clear policy about what to say on this issue. I think they need to get one, fast.