Earlier today I participated in an Oxford-style debate in London of the motion “Facebook Is Not Your Friend.” I argued for the motion together with Baroness Susan Greenfield. Taking the opposing view were Ben Hammersley and Lewis Iwu. This was a lot of fun as the Baroness and I have very different takes on this subject. She came at it from a neuroscience and cultural perspective with a concern over what a shift away from time spent in person to time spent online will do to how people think of themselves and others (e.g., will we become less empathetic?).
My own arguments were quite different and came in three parts: privacy, identity and control. Below is what I had prepared in advance. What I actually said was of course slightly different:
Let’s start with privacy. Scott McNealy famously – or depending on your view infamously – said “your privacy is dead - get over it.” And there is a sense in which he was right. Everything we do leaves an electronic trail – increasingly that includes activities in the real world due to our constant companion, the smartphone. And anyone who has access to our electronic trail can not only inspect it but potentially publish it to the entire world with the push of a single button. In that sense our privacy *is* dead. But in another sense it still exists. There are strong human conventions around privacy expectations. For instance, we expect a private email sent to a single recipient to be considered private. That is we would be surprised and upset if that email was posted to the Internet. It’s possible and it happens but there is a convention around that being a breach of privacy. The same goes for text messages and instant messages. Now Facebook is not your friend because it gives you a misleading sense of privacy. Something posted to your 500+ best friends and possibly their friends is hardly any more private than something you shout from the roof top. Yet Facebook with its privacy controls gives you an illusion of privacy. Twitter – and full disclosure we are investors in Twitter – has a more binary and I believe more honest model of privacy. You can publish to the world or you can direct message a single individual. One is clearly public, the other clearly private.
Until fairly recently the norm for identity at web sites was a username. And there was a rich universe of usernames out there. Some people, myself included, chose to use their real name as their username. On most services you can find me as albertwenger. But many more chose some kind of fun name, sometimes referred to as a handle. Similarly, people could choose to be represented by a picture of a cat or a dog instead of a picture of themselves. In other words, we allowed ourselves at least on occasion to be someone else online. Pseudonymous expression was an important part of online speech just as it had been of speech and publishing in the offline world. Facebook is not your friend because Facebook is aggressively pushing its “real” identity model as the default identity model of the Internet. There are a rapidly growing number of services and sites that either support only Facebook login or default to it. Facebook is also promoting its comments solutions to publishers. The lure of Facebook virality is hard to resist, but it makes the Internet a more boring and uniform place and ultimately will have a chilling effect on expression. In particular in combination with the uncertainty about what’s public and private people will think twice about what they do on services that are connected to their Facebook identity.
Finally let’s consider control. The Internet was designed on a set of principles that helped create a network with no single point of control. It is called the “Internet” because it is really a network of networks, or “small pieces loosely joined." That design has served all of us who use the Internet incredibly well. It has unleashed a huge wave of innovation because companies did not have to ask for permission when putting up web sites and services. Parts of the Internet can evolve separately from each other and the connecting standards make that possible. Facebook is not your friend because it is trying to be "the one network to rule them all” by exerting control over the Internet ecosystem. Instead of being an open connector between services, the way Internet standards are, Facebook is an interested party that controls how viral different services are and plays favorites. For instance, it has a special deal that gives Spotify far more exposure than other services. Put differently, unlike the Internet itself, Facebook is not a level playing field. In the short run we may not care that much. But in the long run this control will be detrimental to innovation on the Internet. No one player should have a dominant role or become a single point of failure for the Internet.
I meant to post all of this before the debate but then got busy with meetings here in London. There was a livestream of the debate and tomorrow the video archive should be available on Youtube. Ben and Lewis were able to convince more of the undecideds but our side carried the day in absolute numbers. One of my favorite comments from the audience was: “I find Facebook incredibly useful, but I know it is not my friend.”
