Social networking - game the system or recall the product?

An article on social networks, the dissonance between the companies that create and manage them, and their users, and a look at the Rape Is No Joke campaign on Facebook.




Social networking - game the system or recall the product?

And well, we ARE the product.

It doesn't matter if you're on Facebook, G+, hanging out on Dreamwidth or LJ, or still lingering in MySpace. Any social network you don't have to pay for that lets you interact with users, gains data off your usage of it. That data is then collated and sold to marketers and advertisers, surveillance companies and any number of well-meaning or damn-sight-massively-less-than-well-meaning spookshow that wants to fork over the beans for it.

So, you say it, share it, click it, they record it, package it and sell it.

Yet we value these apps for their social aspect - playing games with friends, checking out photos of the party you missed, catching up with distant family etc.

We also value these apps for their contribution to free speech and free assembly. Both Twitter and Facebook have been vital in organising civilian protest or open insurrection against corrupt governments.

So we've ended up having a conversation where the social importance of this type of media is vastly different to the purpose it has been created and given to us. We use A, they sell B.

And so we come to the Facebook campaign Rape Is No Joke.

This campaign was started to stop Facebook comments, pages and events that glorify, celebrate and advocate rape. A worthy cause indeed. Similar campaigns like Wipeout Homophobia on Facebook have been spectacularly successful, and yet RINJ has hit a wall.

The first version of the campaign name 'Dear Facebook: Rape is no joke' was rejected by Facebook. Even now, the group is found at 'http://www.facebook.com/rape.is.no.joke' as the periods between words helps evade the snarky eye of the Zuckerbots. The pages RINJ have asked to be taken down are truly disgusting, yet RINJ have met with fierce resistance inside Facebook. They claim that the pages are in the spirit of pub humour and not really, truly offensive.

Ask yourself a question: you're in a pub, having a beer with a friend. Let's say that friend starts cavalierly joking about how he has comitted a crime of rape before, how much he enjoys it, and how much he's looking forward to doing it again.

Imagine the sick, plummeting feeling in the pit of your stomach as you see the mask of friendship slip away and you realise you're looking at a monster.

Tell me what part of that would be good spirited pub humour.

The sad fact is, RINJ are responding with disgust to the offensive content, as is to be expected from users. Facebook are refusing to take down the most egregious of the pages because they have an insanely high level of traffic, as is to be expected from a data collation service. We're talking A, they're talking B.

Facebook make money off of pages where people discuss rape in the most savage and disgusting ways imaginable. Though they did take down a post containing screenshots of some of the more offensive comments that RINJ posted as an example within minutes. Can't threaten the level of traffic can we?

How very hypocritical.

No social network is any less driven by greed than any other, but most manage to hide their shamelessness a little better than the Zucktroopers do. When Facebook took down an image of a breast-feeding mother, they claimed that they have a blanket policy against ANY form of nudity because of their 13+ audience. They acknowledged that breast-feeding is natural and normal, but that the safest way to protect their young audience was to create stringent rules, from which there could be no exception, no matter how innocuous the content.

If you truly believe that revenue has nothing to do with why they leave these pro-rape pages operating, then you must first answer the question of why a 13 year old boy or girl cannot be shown a breast-feeding mother but CAN be told that it is okay to rape or be raped. If you cannot answer this question, then you must concede that the money factor is at the very least a more plausible motivation.

And so on to revenue. Thanks to RINJ's passionate campaigning, heavy hitters like Sony and Blackberry have already insisted Facebook not place any of their advertising on these pro-rape pages. Ikea and Netflix, among others, have so far refused. Still, it's a good start. That greed-driven neo-zaibatsus like Sony would pull advertising off those pages shows that at best they still have some conscience, and at worst have enough business acumen to avoid being charged with tacitly supporting crime.

This is the lesson Ikea and Netflix must learn. All it will take is one wandering teen coming across the page, and a concerned parent seeing a corporate logo on that page, and blammo! instant tabloid headline '(COMPANY NAME) PROMOTES RAPE ON FACEBOOK!!' A PR and Marketing department's nightmare. Honestly if the PR and Marketing peeps at Ikea aren't looking at this and beginning to feel a little queasy they should be sacked.

And back to the apps. Kudos to the innovators and the coders and investors who developed these apps. They've made a big impact on people's lives. They've kept us in touch, they've helped the oppressed rise up against dictators - truly stirring stuff. But don't sell us a wall of bullshit and pretend you have ethics. You don't. Facebook's ethics begins and end at Zuckerberg's bank account. As long as these pages keep operating, the Zucktroopers are telling us one thing and one thing only. Namely they are telling us this;

F#ck you. F#ck what you want, f#ck what's right or wrong. Don't get in the way of us making money. If we get revenue off a cadre of mouth-breathing sh!tsacks who promote rape, then that's our business, not yours. F#ck your breast-feeding moms, f#ck 'em, we don't get a shiny penny of revenue off that sh!t. Post a lactating t!t that gets 100,000 likes and maybe we'll talk.

Or something similar. I tend to imagine most social networks are staffed by misogynistic young men, and I tend to imagine that's how they talk. I could be wrong, but I'm not going to lay odds on it...

If the social networks are going to sell your data, then as long as you participate they have a product to sell, this gives you at least partial ownership of the product. You could abandon all of your shiny social networks altogether, but if you want to stay in the game, then you have only one option left - game the system. Spread the news far and wide. Join activist groups online that campaign against this crap, and definitely bug advertisers. Advertising may be the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, but it is the blood that flows through the veins of any modern, western business model, and Facebook is no exception. So feel free to show Ikea that they're tacitly supporting people who admit to rape with glee in their voices.

The Zucktroopers won't listen to reason, and ethics don't mean a squirt of piss in the ocean to them. So talk money, talk numbers, and contact advertisers. You're the product, so take control of it and game the system.

Or, you know, sit and politely wait for hatred and stupidity to end it's long and cankerous marriage to corporate greed.