Will Anderson, a student at the University of Florida, experienced Facebook’s power after he became alarmed when he heard in early 2008 about a bill that had been introduced in the state legislature. It would redirect state scholarship money that was going to liberal arts students like him and divert it to those studying math and science. Like Morales, he took a leap. Anderson started a Facebook group called “Protect Your Bright Futures” and invited 200 Facebook friends to join. Within eleven days the group had swollen to 20,000 members. That’s when Anderson received a phone call from Jeremy Ring, the state senator who had sponsored the bill. He was withdrawing it. “You can’t ignore 20,000 people,” Ring told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
In Egypt, demonstrators in 2009 organized on Facebook to protest a proposed law that would limit bandwidth consumed by Internet users. Shortly afterward, the minister of communications significantly amended the plan to address their concerns. In a country like Egypt, where public protest can lead to torture and arrest, such successes are especially striking. In Indonesia, a woman was arrested for the absurd “crime” of criticizing a hospital in a private email to friends. After tens of thousands joined a Facebook group complaining about this injustice, she was released from prison and the focus of attention shifted to possible malfeasance by prosecutors. These are both countries where in the past, protesting publicly under your real name was risky.
Facebook has now become one of the first places dissatisfied people worldwide take their gripes, activism, and protests. These campaigns on Facebook work well because its viral communications tools enable large numbers to become aware of an issue and join together quickly. When police conducted drug raids in late 2008 on three nightclubs in Stellenbosch, South Africa, a group on Facebook formed to protest the tactics and gained 3,000 members in thirty-six hours. Comedian David Letterman made a sexual joke about Sarah Palin’s daughter, and 1,800 joined a Facebook protest page within days. (Letterman later apologized.) Citizens joined on Facebook to protest a jail expansion near San Diego; a new parking lot in Dunedin, New Zealand; a campground for gypsies in Bournemouth, England; a plan by the Philippine House of Representatives to amend the country’s constitution; and the relocation to Bermuda of prisoners from the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay.
“I call this digital democracy,” says author Jared Cohen. A former student of Bush administration secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, Cohen was hired by Rice to join the State Department’s critical Policy Planning staff. “Facebook is one of the most organic tools for democracy promotion the world has ever seen,” adds Cohen. When he arrived at the State Department in late 2006 at age twenty-four, he was reluctant even to mention Facebook in meetings. People there had barely heard of it. But Facebook kept growing globally. By late 2008 it was being discussed in the White House Situation Room, where President Bush and his National Security Council staff gathered during crises.
During the waning days of the Bush administration, Cohen, Rice, and other top State Department officials took notice of what had happened in Colombia. Could Facebook, they wondered, enable people to come together and take political action even in the most repressive societies? Could it be an effective tool against terrorism? After all, Morales’s Un Millon de Voces Contra Las FARC was an antiterrorist movement.
The State Department started to pay close attention to groups like Young Civilians in Turkey. This irreverent organization, whose cause is tolerance and democracy in a very diverse Muslim country, is made up mostly of students and young adults. Its symbol is a red high-top sneaker, to humorously underscore its distance from the booted military that so dominates Turkish daily life. Facebook has deeply penetrated Turkey’s population—most educated young people are users. Young Civilians has 13,000 members on Facebook, which has become a primary communications tool. In a country often torn by ethnic and religious enmity, the group prides itself on including Turks of all ethnic groups and beliefs, including Kurds, Armenians, and other longtime victims of discrimination. Young Civilians uses Facebook to help organize marches where gays march next to covered Muslim women.
In December 2008, Facebook, AT&T, MTV, Google, and Net video company Howcast brought representatives of seventeen Facebook-fueled youth activist groups from around the world, including Young Civilians, to Columbia University for a two-day conference called the Alliance of Youth Movements Summit. The idea was to help protolerance and antiterrorism groups cross-pollinate and return to their countries strengthened by the exchange. Colombia’s Oscar Morales came to New York and addressed the groups, as did Bush administration undersecretary of state for public diplomacy James Glassman.
“This is public diplomacy 2.0,” Glassman said in a speech. “The new technologies give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the Internet.’ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation. Now the Net itself is becoming the locus of Civil Society 2.0. Meanwhile, Al Qaeda keeps its death cult ideology sealed off from discussion and criticism.” Then he looked out at the group of young Facebookers from Burma, Colombia, Cuba, Egypt, Lebanon, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, the United States, and the United Kingdom. “You are the best hope for us all,” he said. He was applauding what seemed to be a new willingness to take the risk of taking a political stand on Facebook. He talked about it as a change in the balance of global power. Political activism on Facebook illustrates what foreign affairs expert Fareed Zakaria in his book The Post-American World calls “the rise of the rest.” Nontraditional forces are gaining influence worldwide, Zakaria explains, including nonstate sources of power like those manifested in Facebook groups.
Until Facebook came along, there was hardly anywhere on the public Internet where you had to operate with your real name. In most cases anonymity remains rampant. That has often had unfortunate consequences. As Glassman said, Al Qaeda and the malefactors of the world want to remain cloaked and to avoid open discussion with their adversaries. And though it’s less pernicious, think of the impulsive and often vicious anonymous comments on many blogs, or the irresponsible interactions that so often characterized behavior in AOL chat rooms. On Facebook you must have the courage of your convictions.
If you troll through groups already functioning on Facebook, it isn’t hard to find examples of those that are in various ways facilitating cross-cultural understanding. Facebook has already been used, for example, to connect a global group called the Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow—300 young Muslims from seventy-five countries, including a Saudi fashion designer, an Iranian rapper, a Pakistani madrassa reformer, an American blogger, and a Dutch lawyer. They gathered for a global conference devoted to peace and justice in Doha, Qatar, in 2009, and continue to work together as a group on Facebook.
Nonetheless, there are plenty of less friendly groups on Facebook, including those showing sympathy for Al Qaeda. So long as they do not contain explicitly hateful language or advocate illegal acts, they conform to Facebook’s terms of service. Positive messages are not assured of dominating on Facebook.
While a willingness to be public about your views may be admirable, some say that it is in fact too easy to join political groups on Facebook. When you can express a view so readily, with one mere click of your mouse, the conviction behind the expression may be proportionately weaker and it’s often unclear whether the number of people who join a group or cause means very much. Attempting to answer the question, three University of California at Santa Barbara political scientists published in 2009 a paper they called “Facebook Is…Fostering Political Engagement: A Study of Online Social Networking Groups and Offline Participation.” By correlating student membership in Facebook political groups with how involved they became in the real world, they concluded that “membership in online political groups via the Facebook platform encourages offline political participation.”
Politicians too can benefit from Facebook’s
gift economy. Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign used Facebook masterfully. Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, who joined the company full time after graduating, later left to take a senior role in the campaign’s online strategy team. Obama of course had a large Facebook page, which gathered millions of fans during the campaign. But in addition, local and regional Obama campaigns invited supporters to join their own Facebook groups, which allowed them to mobilize local supporters en masse.
Obama so mastered digital tools that some dubbed 2008 “the Facebook election.” Nick Clemons was director of Hillary Clinton’s successful primary campaign in New Hampshire and several other states. Because of Facebook, he felt at a disadvantage. “On the Clinton campaign we could definitely feel the difference because Obama was using those tools,” he says. “Someone says, ‘I’m going to canvass for Barack Obama,’ and gets it out to thirty friends on Facebook. And if five people send it out, it multiplies. They recognized this technology earlier than anyone else, and it had a lot to do with them getting the energy and commitment of that generation of people who had not been involved in campaigns previously.”
Obama remains the most popular American politician on Facebook, with about seven million supporters of his public profile as of early 2010. (“Favorite music: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Johann Sebastian Bach (cello suites), and The Fugees.”) But number two is former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, with more than 1.4 million.
Palin’s success demonstrates that Facebook is not the preserve of any one political orientation. She has mastered the art of Facebook politics. After she resigned from her post as governor of Alaska, she began managing her public presence almost exclusively on Facebook. In August 2009 she catalyzed national conservative resistance to President Obama’s proposed health-care reforms by asserting in a post on her Facebook page that Obama aimed to create “death panels” to determine who could live or die. When the note stirred up a national controversy Palin did not respond at all until, five days later, she posted yet another Facebook post titled “Concerning the ‘Death Panels.’” It got her massive coverage in the traditional media and attracted several hundred thousand new supporters. “Facebook is perfectly suited for someone as polarizing as Sarah Palin,” Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for President George W. Bush, told the website Politico. “It’s the ideal way for her to keep in touch, to rev up her base and go around the mainstream media.” Another Facebook and Twitter master is Scott Brown, the Republican candidate who came from nowhere to win the special election in January 2010 for Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts senate seat.
Facebook has been embraced by many governments as a tool to communicate more efficiently with citizens and employees, in situations both large and small. After Hurricane Gustav hit Louisiana in early September 2008, Facebook targeted users in the affected region and used a special announcement on the top of its home page to ask them all to update their Facebook status with an indication about their safety. It coordinated this information with state and federal agencies to provide real-time data about human needs in the affected regions. It intends to use similar procedures in future disasters. In a less dire example, after thousands were denied access to Obama’s January 2009 inauguration and became stranded in a Washington underground tunnel for hours, some formed a Facebook group called Survivors of the Purple Tunnel of Doom. It quickly gained more than 5,000 members. Shortly thereafter, Terrance William Gainer, the sergeant-at-arms of the U.S. Senate, who was responsible for much of the inauguration security, came onto the group’s Facebook page, wrote a lengthy apology, and engaged in dialogue with some who had been trapped.
Facebook communication is becoming routine for agencies at all levels of government. When the New York City Department of Health wanted to promote the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV, it launched a Facebook page and application that allowed users to send one another a little image of a so-called “e-condom.” The commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard updates his Facebook status using his cell phone when he travels, and the top U.S. general in Iraq maintains a Facebook page to answer questions about U.S. activities there. The White House streams President Obama’s press conferences on Facebook, enabling users to comment in real time with one another next to the event. Even the Saudi Arabian minister of information has created a profile on Facebook, where he accepts journalists as friends, takes their interview requests, and releases information. Now government leaders in many places are starting to talk about making it possible to renew driver’s licenses and interact in other ways with government on Facebook.
Facebook is the biggest of a number of websites redefining news into something produced by ordinary individuals and consumed by their friends. I create some news for you, you create some news for me—Zuckerberg’s gift economy again.
When Thefacebook first launched at Harvard in 2004, on each person’s profile page was a list of all the articles from the archives of the Harvard Crimson in which he or she was mentioned. The feature was quickly removed. In a 2009 post for the Nieman Journalism Lab, Zachary Seward, a student at Harvard back then, suggests “Zuckerberg…realized that Facebook wasn’t a tool for keeping track of news made somewhere else. It was a tool for making news right there, on Facebook.” And that is in fact exactly how Zuckerberg has always viewed the News Feed—a real source of relevant news, both about your friends and about the world. Long before Facebook debuted News Feed in 2006, Zuckerberg had meticulously articulated in his diaries exactly how its updates would be real news, going so far as to create a style sheet and grammatical rules for News Feed “stories.”
News on the News Feed was far more personal than what any professional media organization had ever attempted to deliver. It was ordinary everyday information about what your friends were doing and what they were interested in. Recall the rationale Zuckerberg gave internally for the News Feed: “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” Now your every move on Facebook might become news for your friends.
On campuses, the near-total penetration of Facebook at U.S. high schools and colleges has rendered traditional campus print media—the newspaper and the yearbook—far less urgent. People find out what’s going on and who’s doing what on Facebook. It’s possible that focusing on this diurnal news may make people care less about serious events more distant from them—those people dying in Africa, for instance. It’s one of many important Facebook-related social questions that deserve further study.
Sean Parker, who helped Zuckerberg develop his basic views about the service, is passionate about Facebook’s importance in altering the landscape of media. In his view, individuals now determine what their friends see as much as the editor at the local newspaper did in simpler times. Facebook permits your friends to, in effect, construct for you a personalized news portal that functions somewhat like the portals of Yahoo or AOL or Microsoft. If I see a friend post a link to something in a field I know they’re expert in or passionate about, I am more likely to click it than I am to click something that shows up on my MyYahoo home page. And in the inadvertent spirit of a gift economy, in return I frequently post links to things I find interesting, useful, or amusing. The ever-intellectual self-educated Parker calls it “networks of people acting as a decentralized relevancy filter.” A similar but more anonymous form of sharing is facilitated by websites like Digg, Reddit, or Twitter.
If a message is powerful enough it can spread to a vast sea of connected individuals, regardless of who originated it. Chris Cox, Facebook’s vice president for product and a close Zuckerberg protégé, puts it this way: “We want to give to everyone that same power that mass media has had to beam out a message.” The leveling of the playing field is much in evidence. For example, it was via Facebook status updates that newscasters at CNN first learned of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, a network executive said that day on the air.
So how do traditional media or
ganizations fit into this new person-centric information architecture? Paradoxically, if they are to most benefit from the Facebook environment they have to learn to function within it as if they were individuals. The playing field has been leveled by the site’s neutral way of treating all messages as similar. Any media company, newspaper, or TV station can create its own page on Facebook. But then it faces the same mandate to generate interesting, relevant, and useful messages that an individual does. Activity on a page gets deposited into users’ News Feeds—just like the activity on any individual’s profile. First you have to get someone to embrace you as your “fan,” much like becoming a “friend” of an individual. Then the goal is to get people who see the information you produce to endorse it themselves by clicking Facebook’s ubiquitous “like” indicator or by commenting on what you post. That forwards it further to their network of friends and keeps it virally alive. Largely because of the efficiency of this process, Facebook has become one of the top drivers of traffic to major media websites, often behind only Google. Facebook may also challenge conventional media financially over time—by, along with other websites, drawing away the lucrative brand advertising that has been a mainstay of TV, magazines, and newspapers.
Facing these changes, many major media companies are trying to work with Facebook rather than against it. NBC, for example, in summer 2009 previewed an upcoming new series called Community exclusively on Facebook. Only those who identified themselves as the show’s fans could see the preview episodes. NBC advertised on its own website as well as on Facebook that these previews were available. The service’s penetration among the young and media-savvy demographic presumed to be the show’s audience meant that the preponderance of potential viewers were already on Facebook. So limiting it to Facebook didn’t limit the audience so much as it provided information about exactly who the audience was, since Facebook can provide aggregate demographics of a page’s fan base to companies.
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