How Facebook May Secretly Foil Your Activist Plans

[PeoViejo]

by Kevin Mathews
September 15, 2013
7:00 am

"In these two cases, Facebook personnel explained that the boycott pages did not meet the Terms of Service since they did not represent a person or corporate entity. “To protect people from spam and other unwanted content, we restrict pages that represent ideas or positions – rather than discrete entities – from publishing stories to people’s News Feeds,” said a spokesperson.

Surely the nearly one million BP boycott fans wouldn’t consider updates from the page “unwanted,” particularly when they chose to follow the page in the first place. They’re calling for protection from oil spills, not spam. By claiming that corporate pages fit in well on Facebook, but anti-corporate pages have no place, the site’s stance is quite clear.

As civil rights activist Audre Lorde wrote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Perhaps we’ve been naïve to believe that using a platform created by a corporate entity would help activists to break free from corporate oppression. While moving away from Facebook seems inevitable for some activists, it’ll certainly have some consequences for at least the short term. Because Facebook is so ubiquitous and its members tend to check in multiple times a day, it makes reaching a wide audience fairly simple."

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/how-facebook-may-secretly-foil-your-activist-plans.html

[Laelth]

1. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth

[RoccoR5955]

2. You just have to be creative enough

to work along the edges of their terms of service, so that they cannot adhere to them, and delete your posts. I have been doing this for years, both on FB and other sites. Once you get the hang of it, it's rather easy.
Then when they tell you that it is against their TOS, you have your ducks in a row, and proceed to shoot them down. They then have to put the post back.

[liberalmike27]

9. Yea, I post political stuff all the time

I've never had them stop me from posting anything. Boycott Wal-Mart, how I hate this corporations or that, the corporate government, etc....I've never had them complain or take down anything.

I heard BP had hired trolls to harass people on FB who were doing this sort of thing though, or complaining about the 2010 oil spill, and it's horrible results.

[TBF]

3. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Twitter and Facebook are helpful for keeping in touch, but it's going to be good old fashioned organizing that keeps us together and provides the platform for change. The cool thing though is that if we can get the word out others will know we're organizing (and this did happen with Occupy) and will also rise up.

Of course saboteurs will also rise up (also see Occupy) so we have to be prepared for that as well. We've just added some tools and have to be careful in how we use them. That's all.

[DesertDiamond]

4. Now that you mention it, it's weird that every time I share something from DU I never get a SINGLE

"like" - even though they're about subjects I know my FB friends agree with. I wonder...

[CJCRANE]

5. That's absolute BS on Facebook's part. They do allow pages that represent ideas or positions.

I found a page that represented extreme religious fundamentalist ideas with no indication of who owned the page.

I'm sure if you do a simple search on FB you can find lots of groups based on ideas.

[PeoViejo]

10. RepubliCON Family Values

as long as it fits their narrative...

[marble falls]

6. Just one more reason to unfriend Facebook.

[Wilms]

7. ^