Facebook and the Imperative of Sharing - Oxford Scholarship 2019/1/14, 2)36 PM

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The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social

Media
Jose van Dijck

Print publication date: 2013

Print ISBN-13: 9780199970773
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2013
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199970773.001.0001

Facebook and the Imperative of Sharing

José van Dijck

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199970773.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords

The third chapter relates the history of Facebook between 2004 and 2012, more
particularly the evolution of the notion of “sharing” over the years. Sharing is an
ambiguous term: it relates to users distributing personal information to each other, but

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also implies the spreading of that personal information to third parties. As the terms
“friending” and “liking” were imputed with specific techno-economic meanings,
Facebook’s ideology of sharing pretty much set the standard for other platforms and
the ecosystem as a whole. Users contested Facebook’s expanded notions of privacy and
information control over the years by resisting changes at the levels of technology and
governance, as well as by protesting new business models, such as the insertion of
promoted “friend” stories in their Timelines. Facebook’s distribution of “social” norm
has been widespread because its Like and Share buttons have been effectively exported
to other platforms, promoted by the frictionless sharing stratagem.

Keywords: Facebook, friending, Like button, third-party sharing, privacy, information control

3.1. Introduction
In May 2010, Mark Zuckerberg told Time reporter Dan Fletcher that Facebook’s
mission was to build a Web where “the default is social” in order to “make the world
more open and connected.”1 Other senior managers publicly underlined the company’s
ideal. Barry Schnitt, Facebook’s director of corporate communications and public
policy, revealed in an interview: “By making the world more open and connected, we’re
expanding understanding between people and making the world a more empathetic
place.”2 And Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operations officer, in an interview with
the British The Guardian proclaimed: “We have really big aspirations around making
the world a more open and transparent place; we define our aspirations more in terms
of that mission than in terms of the company’s aspirations.”3 Facebook’s mantra, that
their mission is not just a corporate one but one pursued in society’s interest, was
endlessly repeated in the run-up to the company’s initial public offering (IPO).4

With a claimed 835 million users worldwide in March 2012, Facebook is the largest
social network site in the United States and in Europe, with the highest penetration
among Internet users.5 Size and dominance are certainly the most important reason
for choosing Facebook as the first platform to dissect; what makes this choice even
more compelling is that owners and users have been very outspoken in articulating
norms for online social networking. The values of openness and connectedness are
quintessentially reflected in the word favored most by Facebook’s executives: sharing.
In the context of connective media, sharing is an ambiguous term: it relates to users
distributing personal information to each other, but also implies the spreading of that
(p.46) personal information to third parties. The social meaning of sharing is often
pitched against the legal term “privacy,” which Mark Zuckerberg peculiarly refers to in
the same Time interview quoted from above as “an evolving norm.” Used in contrast to
openness, the word “privacy” connotes opacity, nontransparency, and secrecy. If
analogized to connectedness, the term connotes individualism and a reluctance to
share. Counter to Zuckerberg’s claim, I argue that sharing, rather than privacy, is the
evolving norm. This norm is not simply “out there” in society and reflected online.
Instead, owners and users have been negotiating the meaning of sharing from the very
start of the Harvard-based college network in 2004 up to its Nasdaq debut in 2012.

But how did a specific ideological meaning of sharing—along with “friending” and
“liking”—become dominant during this period? Analyzed through the multilayered
prism of six interdependent elements, the transformation of these terms becomes
apparent. By implementing various coding technologies and interface strategies,

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Facebook inscribed how online social interaction should be conducted. Users, from the
very onset, countered this steering with a mixture of compliance and resistance. In the
ensuing struggle, formatted content, governance policies, and business models
appeared prime tools for intervention. Facebook’s ideology of sharing pretty much set
the standard for other platforms and the ecosystem as a whole. Because of its leading
position in the SNS segment, the platform’s practices substantially influenced the
social and cultural norms that bolster legal values such as privacy and control over
data.

Changing the meaning of sharing turns out to be vital to altering legal rulings
concerning privacy and to accepting new forms of monetization. Whereas the term
“privacy” commonly refers to the judicial realm, “sharing” involves social as well as
economic norms, cultural as well as legal values. Therefore, the mass adoption of
Facebook as the preferred Western engine for social networking deserves close
scrutiny: How did the platform contribute to the normalization of a specific notion of
sharing before this meaning becomes ubiquitously accepted and “legalized”? Looking
at Facebook’s powerful position in the ecosystem, one can hardly underrate its impact
on networked manifestations of sociality.

3.2. Coding Facebook: The Devil Is in the Default

Technology
From a technological point of view, the two meanings of “sharing” relate to two
different types of coding qualities. The first type relates to connectedness, directing
users to share information with other users through purposefully (p.47) designed
interfaces. Facebook’s interface allows its members to create profiles with photos, lists
of preferred objects (books, films, music, cars, cats), and contact information; users
can also join groups and communicate with friends by means of chat and video
functions. Several features channel social interaction, including News Feed, for
updates of stories from people and pages, the Wall for (public) announcements, Poke
for attracting attention, and Status for informing others about your whereabouts or for
announcing changes in your (relational, professional) status. Features such as People
You May Know (PYMK) help you find friends; Facebook automatically signals which
other people you may be interested in contacting and adding to your list—suggestions
based on algorithmically computed relationships. Tagging names to people in pictures
helps identify and trace “friends” across the network. The second type of coding
features relates to connectivity, as they aim at sharing user data with third parties,
such as Beacon (now defunct), Open Graph, and the Like button.

Distinguishing between the two types of sharing and their coding structures serves to
address the issue of information control: who is allowed to share what data to what
ends? Platform owners have a vested interest in complete openness on the side of
users; the more they know about users, the more information they can share with third
parties. By aggregating and processing data into targeted personalization strategies,
they create value from data. Users, for their part, may deploy the platform to invest in
maximum connectedness: the more connections users make, the more social capital
they accumulate (Ellison, Steinfeld, and Lampe 2007). In many ways, Facebook’s
connective functions provide empowering and enriching social experiences. However,
users’ interest is not always served by complete openness; users may want to control

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third parties’ access to the information they voluntarily or involuntarily entrust to

Facebook. As a result, Facebook has a stake in promoting the first type of mechanism
while diverting attention from the second type: the more users know about what
happens to their personal data, the more inclined they are to raise objections. Owners’
power over coding technologies thus gives them a distinct advantage over users in the
battle for information control.

The transformative meaning of sharing becomes poignantly discernable in Facebook’s

history of coding features, both of the first and of the second kind, but for the purpose
of this chapter, I will concentrate mostly on the second. During the first years after its
inception, when the site was launched at the Harvard campus, Facebook’s virtual space
overlapped with the relatively protected space of educational settings. Sharing
information by default meant sharing your information with designated friends and
with other students. Starting in 2005, Facebook opened up the site to users (p.48)
other than students and cautiously began to place (banner) advertisements in that
protected social networking environment. The introduction of Beacon, in November
2007, caused quite a stir because it explicitly promoted the sharing of user information
with commercial agents. Forty-four commercial websites, including Fandango, the
New York Times, and TripAdvisor signed on to Beacon, allowing Facebook to send
automated updates on purchases from these sites to a buyer’s friends listed on
Facebook. Users were enrolled in Beacon by default, and initially they were not offered
an opt-out option. Only after vehement protests did Facebook give in to users’ demand.
Zuckerberg issued apologies, and in September 2009, the company shut down the
service altogether.

The problem with Beacon was not that Facebook was not open enough about its
sharing intentions; the problem with Beacon was that the company was too explicit
about the intentions inscribed in its protocol. Users easily detected the conflict of
interest arising from their personal purchasing data being distributed to all their
friends and beyond. A second miscalculation was to openly identify the commercial
agents involved in this scheme; by implication, Facebook was seen as serving the
interests of companies rather than its users. But, most of all, it was a mistake to
implement Beacon as a default in a social networking environment that, back in 2007,
had not yet accepted “sharing with third parties” as a common standard. Facebook
quickly adapted its strategies. Instead of conforming itself to the reining norm, it
started to work on changing the very norm, replacing the narrow meaning of “sharing”
with a more expansive one. Part of this new strategy was to open up the platform’s
technical potential to other companies interested in connecting with Facebook’s users.
Through the launch of Facebook Platform, in 2007, the company provided a set of
APIs and tools that enabled third parties to develop applications supporting
Facebook’s integration across the Web, which they massively did. Since then,
developers have generated millions of active applications connecting Facebook to other
services and platforms. The contextual meanings of “connectedness” and “sharing”
thus shifted from interaction inside the social network site to interaction with all
virtual life outside Facebook’s territory.

In May 2010, Zuckerberg announced two new features that formed a natural next step
in this process: the introduction of Open Graph and the Like button. Both new

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interface features implied a definite move from the first to the second meaning of
sharing. The Open Graph API allows external websites to deploy user data collected on
Facebook to create personalized experiences on their own websites. Social plug-ins, as
they are called, aim at connecting disparate corners of the Web and pulling them all
together. Part of this integral effort to identify and align heretofore incongruent
objects, (p.49) people, and ideas is the development of a standard to give every object
—whether human or nonhuman, concrete or abstract—a unique ID: the OAuth 2.0
authentication standard, which Facebook adopted in collaboration with Yahoo and
Twitter. The standard allows users to share their private resources (e.g., photos,
videos, contact lists) stored on one site with another site without having to supply their
credentials, typically username and password.

Connecting people, things, and ideas is also the principle behind the much-debated
Like button, a feature that lets users express their instant approval of a specific idea or
item and share it. For instance, if you discover a movie via a movie database, you can
tag it there and this preference automatically appears on your Facebook friends’ News
Feeds. Three months after its introduction, more than 350,000 external websites had
already installed the feature, much to its inventor’s benefit. All user data collected on
these external sites, including IP addresses, are automatically routed back to Facebook.
In fact, Facebook records any user’s presence on a site with a Like button, including
nonmembers and logged out users; a Like box allows Facebook to trace how many
users and which of their friends have pushed the button. The visible part of the
interface calls attention to user-to-user interaction, suggesting that information stays
within the first meaning of sharing. However, invisible algorithms and protocols
execute the programmed social task of “liking.” Personal data are turned into public
connections, as the Like function is ubiquitously dispersed to many items on the
Internet. Because of its omnipresence, symbolized in the generic thumbs-up icon,
Facebook is no longer seen as the exclusive owner of this feature. Unlike Beacon, the
massive adoption of the Like button has turned personal data sharing by third parties
into an accepted practice in the online universe; hence, the Like button epitomizes the
profound modification of a social norm.

Underlying these features are proprietary algorithms EdgeRank and GraphRank,

which filter data produced by users and shape them into a meaningful stream of
information for that specific user. In a detailed analysis of EdgeRank, media scholar
Tania Bucher (2012a) shows that the algorithm favors certain users over others; for
instance, friends with whom a user interacts on a frequent basis or on a more
“intimate” level (e.g., via the Chat function) count more than friends you contact
infrequently or who merely appear on your Wall. EdgeRank provides a filter that
implicitly ranks the importance of friends. The problem is that users cannot know
exactly how this filter works. All features added to Facebook have resulted in mostly
invisible algorithms and protocols that, to a great degree, control the “visibility” of
friends, news, items, or ideas. The objective is obviously (p.50) to personalize and
optimize one’s online experience; but the aim may also be to promote something or
someone, although that aim may be hard to trace. You have to look under the hood,
into the technical specifics of features, to understand the implications for users and
society at large. This has not always been easy because Facebook has been reluctant to
share information about its proprietary algorithms.

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At the press conference announcing the Like button and Open Graph, Zuckerberg
explained their rationale in terms of sociality, rather than in terms of technological
progress or market value. He said: “The Web is at a really important turning point
right now. Up until recently, the default on the Web has been that most things aren’t
social and most things don’t use your real identity,” adding that introduction of these
changes would lead to a Web that is “smarter, more social, more personalized, and
more semantically aware.”6 The term “default” in this explanation does not refer to
technological or economic potential, but to social attitude. Indeed, the ubiquitous
implementation of software entails a cultural rather than just a technological
transformation (Fuller 2003). Facebook produces tools because people expect the Web
to serve its users in a personalized way, helping them connect to all things they want
and like, and to all people they know or would like to now. Underneath this user-
centered rationale of connectedness is the owner-centered logic of connectivity:
Facebook’s interface foregrounds the need for users to be connected, but partly hides
the site’s mechanisms for sharing users’ data with others.

Users
Facebook’s unique selling point over the years has been its rapidly growing user base,
not only in terms of sheer numbers but also in terms of diversity and global reach.7
Behind these impressive numbers hides a more complex story of who these users are:
their demographics, national and global distribution, and their online behavioral
patterns. As explained in the previous chapter, this book is not concerned with actual
users as empirical subjects, but tries to track how the usage inscribed in platforms
triggers explicit users’ responses. Over the past eight years, Facebook users have
manifested themselves on the Web, commenting on their site and reacting to the
changes implemented in its interface. How have users appropriated the normative
architecture of Facebook’s coding technologies? Did they support or criticize the
(changing) social norms of sharing inscribed in the platform’s interface? Let me first
explain users’ motivations for joining and enjoying Facebook before turning to various
modes of resistance.

(p.51) The steadily growing masses of users signing up for the service are proof of the
site’s becoming a centripetal force in organizing people’s social lives. The principal
benefits for users are, first, to get and stay connected and, second, to become (well)
connected. Even though human contact through Internet sites has never replaced
offline sociality, SNSs have arguably replaced e-mail and the phone as the preferred
media of interaction for the younger generation (Raynes-Goldie 2010). “Getting in
touch” and “staying in touch” are now activities completely centered on SNSs; the
services facilitate the bridging of space and time and help people to keep updated on
their friends’ lives. Facebook’s design makes subscribing feel like hooking up to a
utility. Once a member, the social push to stay connected is insidious, especially for
young people, because not being on Facebook means not being invited to parties, not
getting updated on important events, in short, being disconnected from a presumably
appealing dynamic of public life. SNSs, as researchers confirm, have become a leading
space for accumulating social capital (Valenzuela, Park, and Kee 2009).

By the same token, Facebook has become a primer for promoting the self as the center
of an extensive network of friends; the notion of “friending” relates to bonds that may

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also exist in real life, but equally refers to weak ties and latent ties. In online
environments, people want to show who they are; they have a vested interest in
identity construction by sharing pieces of information because disclosing information
about one’s self is closely linked with popularity. Psychology researchers Christofides,
Muise, and Desmarais (2009) have argued that “identity is a social product created not
only by what you share, but also by what others share and say about you…. The people
who are most popular are those whose identity construction is most actively
participated in by others” (343). Since Facebook is the largest social network, it offers
the best potential for what Castells (2009) calls “mass self-communication.”8 In
contrast to other mass media, SNSs in general—and Facebook in particular—offer
individual users a stage for crafting a self-image and for popularizing this image
beyond intimate circles. Popularity and disclosure are two sides of the same coin, and
they mirror the double meaning of “sharing” as argued above.

The verb “friending” has become virtually synonymous with Facebook’s demarcation of
online friendship, and, as is the case with “liking,” the concept is ambiguous and
embattled. As described in the previous section, friendship is not only the result of
spontaneous, human-based (inter)actions, but also the result of programmed sociality
—relationships suggested by PYMK buttons and friends-of-friends algorithms. This
“friendship assemblage” of technology and user thus defines “who our friends are,
what they have done, and how many of them there are” (Bucher 2012b). (p.52)
However, if we look at concrete users’ articulation of friendship and their perception of
online relationships on Facebook, researchers find that users actively engage with the
site, building social capital by smartly playing out the various levels of friendship as
well as exploiting the site’s potential for self-expression and self-communication
(Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe 2011: 888). As Ellison and her colleagues conclude,
users differentiate between Facebook friends and “actual” friends when gauging the
quality of friendship. Indeed, even if users are aware of the fact that Facebook actively
steers their online experience of friendship and converts their social capital into
economic capital, they may still enjoy it.

The meaning of “friending” as inscribed in the interface is thus not simply accepted but
also appropriated and contested by users. While a majority of Facebook users comply
with the site’s protocols for online sociality—which after all benefit their self-interests
—a substantial part of its membership shows concerns about how data are used.9 A
small but vocal group of users have explicitly objected to the site’s changing interface
features. As briefly mentioned earlier, the company was flooded with protests when
Beacon was introduced. Action group MoveOn.org organized a petition, and less than
two weeks after Beacon’s announcement, 50,000 users had joined a collective protest.
In 2008, a class action suit was filed against Facebook and some of the 44 corporations
enlisted in the Beacon scheme, resulting in the shutdown of the service and a
settlement in court. User protests have occurred pretty regularly since the Beacon
debacle, but never have had the same impact. When Facebook made substantial
changes to its News Feed feature in 2009, over one million users joined the “Change
Facebook back to normal!” group.10 But whereas 50,000 protesters in 2007 still
formed a substantial percentage of all Facebook users, one million protesters in 2009
represented only a small minority of the site’s exploding user base. The protest caused
only a ripple, and News Feed remained as implemented.

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Another form of resistance favored by Facebook users critical of the company’s data
control strategies was to intervene at the technological level. There have been a
number of attempts to thwart Facebook’s control policies. For instance, hackers found
out that Facebook distributes cookies to track user preferences even when users are
logged out or haven’t subscribed to Facebook.11 Other forms of resistance include what
Galloway (2004) would call “counter-protocological attacks”: users write scripts that
intervene with Facebook’s interface design and intentionally block protocols. An
example of such intervention is an app, offered on the site userscripts.org, that allows
users to dismantle all Like buttons.12 Yet another kind of manifest intervention is the
site UnFuck Facebook, run by a college (p.53) student who deploys the Facebook
Platform to publicize scripts that help users to remove ads and lists of recent activities
from their log files. Facebook, needless to say, immediately strikes down challenges to
its default settings. As the founder of UnFuck Facebook intimated on his site on
November 15, 2010:

I’m fairly certain Facebook has been intentionally breaking this script. Every
time I release a fix a few days later Facebook changes to break the script. I did
this several times and I’m just tired of fighting them.13

Resisting or subverting default settings requires both technological ingenuity and

persistent motivation. Facebook has every interest in preserving its default settings
that make information as open as possible.14 The fight with defiant users over
information control is played out over the tiniest technological details.

A subtler form of Facebook criticism is for journalists to discover and disclose strategic
technical details of the platform’s invisible tactics. For instance, in October 2011, USA
Today journalist Byron Acohido was able to compile from interviews with senior
Facebook staff technical details about how the social network keeps tabs on its users.15
He found out that Facebook tracks loyal users as well as logged-off users and
nonmembers by inserting cookies in your browser. These cookies record the time and
date you visit a website with a Like button or a Facebook plug-in, in addition to IP
addresses. Correlations between personal data and web-browsing habits could be used
to reveal consumers’ political affiliations, religious beliefs, sexual orientations, or
health issues. When confronted with these findings, Facebook claimed it was using
these tactics for security reasons, but, obviously, tracking these kinds of correlations
could also become a tempting business model.

Some users disgruntled with Facebook’s strategies decided to quit the site altogether,
either as individuals or as a collective sign of protest. But quitting Facebook by
unsubscribing is easier said than done. Etched into the engine’s default is a protocol
that sends deserters a number of automated messages containing pictures of “friends”
who say they will miss you if you deactivate your account. Few users are resistant to
such guilt-tripping, but even if they are, it is not sure they will be able to quit the site
for good. To delete your account, you have to really search to find the suitable links,
and if you merely push the “deactivate” button—rather than opt out of getting e-mails
by pushing “delete” buttons—you can still be tagged and spammed through
Facebook.16 A group of vocal resisters called for collective action when they named
May 31, 2010, Quit Facebook Day.17 (p.54) The pledge was posted by users who
deeply cared not only about privacy issues but also about the future of the Web as an

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“open, safe and human place.” More than one year later, almost 40,000 users had
actually resigned their membership—a number evaporating in the face of the site’s
monthly accumulation of users.

Over the course of eight years, there have been regular skirmishes between Facebook
owners and users over the control of the site’s default settings. Whereas Facebook has
given in to some demands (Beacon), it has ignored others; the platform pushes three
steps forward before users’ demands force them to take one backward. What becomes
clear is that coding technologies and user appropriations are tools to promote one
meaning of sharing over the other. Facebook wants its preferred meaning of sharing,
implying complete openness and maximum exchange of data with third parties, to
become the “shared norm.” Some users have publicly and vocally disputed this
interpretation. Even though most protests are framed in the press as privacy concerns,
the responses signal a wider scuffle between users’ and owners’ interest in information
control.

Content and Cultural Form

The gradual shift from user-centered connectedness to owner-centered connectivity
brought along a change in the organization of Facebook’s content from a database
structure into a narrative structure. In the platform’s early years, content was
generally organized around user connections, news and friends updates, and active
discussions. Facebook’s interface, as British researcher Garde-Hansen (2009: 141)
observed, was presented as a database of users and for users where “each user’s page is
a database of their life, making this social network site a collection of collections and
collectives.” For some users, their page presented a personal archive, a way to share life
histories and memories with selected others or open it up to the public at large. For
others, SNSs appeared to be a “stage for digital flâneurs,” a place to “see and be seen”
(boyd 2007: 155). Content diversity allowed users to appropriate the site to suit their
own purposes. Over the course of several years, the platform’s owners clearly strove
toward more uniformity in data input and began to introduce specific narrative
features in the interface—a transformation that culminated into the implementation of
Timeline in 2011.

With the advent of Timeline, every single piece of data previously uploaded on
Facebook—text, picture, video, sound, but also Likes, Pokes, and so on—was
automatically transferred onto the new compulsory (p.55) format upon opening it.
The new interface no longer looked like a random database (Manovich 2001) but is,
rather, organized as a biography chronicling one’s life up to the present. The resulting
narrative is a construction in hindsight, a retroactive chronological ordering of life
events. Starting with the most recent months, months are slipping into years when you
scroll toward the bottom. The entire left side of the page is filled with events, “stories of
your life” in the form of pictures, posts to friends, music that you like(d), recipes you
exchanged, all your likes and pokes, updates, maps of the places you have been, and a
lot more. The narrative presentation gives each member page the look and feel of a
magazine—a slick publication, with you as the protagonist. With the introduction of
Timeline, Facebook has crept deeper into the texture of life, its narrative principles
imitating proven conventions of storytelling, thus binding users even more tightly to
the fabric that keeps it connected.

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Users responding to Timeline noticed this effect and commented on how memory and
emotion are made part of the Facebook experience. The Timeline format cues
members to post pictures from the pre-Facebook days of their youth—a baby picture,
family snapshots, school classes, old friends, college years, wedding pictures,
honeymoon—and thus experience content in terms of their life’s story. As one blogger
explains:

Years-old memories flashed before me—old friends, old places, things I hadn’t
thought about in ages. I got sucked back into the past the same way I would have
in front of my mother’s old cedar chest, a trunk packed full of childhood
tchotckes and pictures that holds our family’s history. This innocuous social web
tool had just made a powerful and convincing bid for more than my information
or my time. Facebook was grasping at my emotions by way of my memories, and
it was doing a damn good job.18

But while the transformation to Timeline caused enhanced feelings of intimacy,

memory, and connectedness in some members, it roused suspicion and discontent in
others, especially with regards to the release of more personal information. When
switching to Timeline, every formerly inserted piece of data was set by default to
“public” even if you had previously set it to “friends only.” Users received a grace
period of seven days to make decisions about their content’s revamped presentation.19
With every piece of data—both new and old—one had to decide to whom it would be
accessible: to friends, a wider circle, or the general audience. And while research has
demonstrated that Facebook users have gradually become more skilled in the
techniques of audience appraisal (Marwick and boyd 2011), it is still likely that a large
number of users accepted the automatic conversion of (p.56) their privacy settings,
either because they did not know how to modify them or because they did not care.
Critical users expressed their discontent mostly on account of involuntary loss of
privacy; for some users the transfer to Timeline was also a wake-up call that “brought
home to me just how much I had shared in the way of status updates, photographs,
groups I had joined and Likes I had made.”20 Users also voiced concerns about the
consequences if identity thieves used this feature to cajole information out of naive
users.21

Facebook’s new content architecture smoothly integrated the principle of narrative

with the principle of connectivity. Apart from the fact that the narrative structure of
the site’s interface renders users’ content presentation more uniform, the architecture
also streamlines user input of data, thus facilitating data management and enhancing
the application of algorithms. For instance, unified data input makes it a lot easier for
companies to insert personalized advertisements for diapers in the Timelines of
women with babies and toddlers. Another feature Facebook released simultaneously
with Timeline, which received much less attention, was its Page Insight Data. The
feature enables marketers to access real-time analytics that measure the effectiveness
of their ads interspersed in Facebook’s Timeline moment by moment. Leveraging these
insights, companies can make decisions about what works and what does not,
subsequently tweaking ads in order to optimize their effect. The introduction of
Timeline, more than any other feature after Beacon, exposed content presentation as a
bone of contention between owners and users. With an IPO nearing, Facebook’s rolling

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out of Timeline caused worries that its move would trigger negative concerns, but as
with most previous changes, Facebook soothed resistance by leveraging strategies at
various levels. On one level, it offered users a chance to reorganize their content and
reconsider their strategies to open up and hide information. On a different plane,
Facebook offered advertisers and third parties more and uniformly accessible user
data.

During the first eight years of the platform’s evolution, technologies, users, and
content mutually shaped one another. In 2012, none of these elements were the same
as they were in 2004. Coding and content features affected user behavior, while user
behavior and explicit responses prompted Facebook to adjust its strategies. Features
such as the Like button and the Timeline format also had a profound impact beyond
the platform proper, affecting online sociality as such. But before returning to the site’s
bearing on sociality, we first need to look at Facebook’s strategies to establish a brand
—a trademarked service that governs its user base while monetizing its resources.

(p.57) 3.3. Branding Facebook: What You Share Is What You Get

Ownership
How does the ideology of sharing play out at the level of corporate ownership? When
Facebook was launched in 2004, it was competing with several other platforms, such
as Friendster, Myspace, and Xanga, to become users’ preferred brand for online social
networking. Eight years later, most early competitors have vanished from the scene or
are left behind as “failed” sites with dwindling numbers of users. Few companies have
experienced such a meteoritic rise as Facebook. From 2004 to 2012, the platform has
remained in the hands of its initial owner, Facebook Inc. The company refused several
offers by moguls like Microsoft and Google, and soon became too big to serve as
takeover bait. With 2,000 employees and 15 offices worldwide, the company’s size was
surprisingly modest in relation to its net worth of almost 100 billion dollars at the time
of its initial public offering in May 2012.

The branding of Facebook as the social network experience has grown steadily over the
years. Size brings convenience for users and more advertising potential for owners, as
Tim Wu (2010) has pointed out. Information companies vie to monopolize a niche
from where they can comfortably try to encroach on other areas. As Facebook grew
exponentially, it quickly outpaced competitors’ user numbers through a winner-takes-
all effect; Facebook’s global reach often came at the expense of smaller (national)
social network services.22 The platform has played an important role in spreading
(American) social norms into other national user communities worldwide. Because of
their size and global reach, players like Facebook are not only frontrunners in terms of
trying to beat the competition, but also in terms of defining mediated social habits in
that particular niche.

Although Facebook quickly defeated its early rivals in the SNS market—by 2009, only
Myspace was still holding a foot on the threshold—the company faced major challenges
from large Internet corporations dominating other niche areas, such as search. In 2011,
Google attempted to dethrone Facebook from its comfortable position by launching
Google+. Strategically counteracting Facebookers’ dissatisfaction with the site’s
privacy policy, Google+ introduced the features Circles and Hangouts in its interface—

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features that offered a more refined system for “sharing the right stuff with the right
people,” according to its website’s promotional rhetoric.23 In doing so, Google literally
branded its new service to tackle its opponent’s weak spot: the criticism about its
contested default settings. Facebook almost immediately responded by adding the
features Group Chats and Video Calling, enabling live communication through a
corporate partnership with (p.58) Skype.24 With the seamless integration of other
apps, such as Spotify, users can choose to let everyone see what they are listening to.

At the corporate level, “sharing” has been assigned the additional connotation of
frictionless sharing, a term again played out on two levels simultaneously: first, to
accommodate users’ convenience when they move from Facebook to other platforms
without hitting another key or needing an extra click; second, to please platform
owners by connecting Facebook to third-party applications and make all data available
to all parties. In the words of Facebook’s CEO: “Every app is going to be social. If we
build the best service, there’s massive value there. If we don’t, somebody else will.”25
According to Zuckerberg, making everything social is a corporate ideology that is
increasingly shared by other social media platforms as well as third parties. Apps, like
people, are connectors that boost overall data traffic so all companies can benefit from
the “massive value” generated by expanded connectivity. Facebook’s strategy of
enhancing its power in the ecosystem of connective media thus has a double focus:
Zuckerberg counters (potential) competition by pointing at the inevitability of a
changing norm (“everything is going to be social”) before he invites competitors to join
Facebook in their endeavor to create a “truly open and connected space.”

In the venture capitalist economy of Silicon Valley, partnership deals, even with
competitors, are as important as beating the competition: all companies have a
common interest in making the online ecosystem uniformly accessible and shareable.
Particularly in the last three years, Facebook has enlisted partners in other niches
(games, video chatting, streamed music) in pursuit of promoting overall data traffic
and enhancing connectivity in the name of a smoother user experience. Uninhibited
data flows between platforms are vital to companies like DoubleClick (owned by
Google) and Advertising.com (AOL) selling targeted personalized messages. Facebook
also pushed for global acceptance of its narrative form: enforcing Timeline’s
architecture not just on individual members but also on companies and advertisers,
Facebook drives them to sell brands through stories, for instance via personal tales of a
product experience. By joining the ecosystem’s bandwagon, many platforms attuned
their corporate strategies to Facebook’s normative definitions of sharing and openness.

In the months preceding its IPO, Facebook Inc was careful to craft its corporate image
not as a multinational working in the interest of shareholders, but as a user-centered
business that wants to share ownership with the people who made it grow.26 To
“sharing” was hence ascribed another ambiguous meaning in the context of
shareholder ownership. The contentious relationship between owners, users,
advertisers, and shareholders painfully showed in the wake of the company’s going
public: not only did (p.59) General Motors withdraw its advertising account two days
before the IPO, but a group of disgruntled users also filed a lawsuit against Facebook,
accusing the company of misusing the Like button for sponsored stories without prior
consent or even knowledge of users. The lawsuit was settled a month later, but it did

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not help to boost the company’s public image. Three months after its IPO, Facebook
shares had lost almost half their value, disappointing owners and shareholders alike.
Obviously, the company’s public status increased pressure on its owners to render the
site more profitable, at the risk of further upsetting loyal users who are wary of
increasing commercialization. This friction also shows at the level of governance.

Governance
Facebook’s expanded norm of sharing is not only coded in its interface and user
scripts, but is also crafted in its terms of service (ToS). The site’s policies regulating
online traffic are an eclectic combination of do’s and don’ts, claimer and disclaimer,
rights and responsibilities, and contractual agreement. Since 2007, Facebook’s terms
of service have been a constant bone of contention for its users. Complaints concerned
the level of control over privacy settings, surveillance, and data mining, as well as the
length and complexity of the company’s terms. Objections have come from government
agencies, advocacy groups, and users alike. Perhaps as a result of this criticism, the
company has changed its ToS frequently. Since users are never explicitly notified of
changes, it is difficult to keep up with policy adjustments. The majority of users never
bother to read the terms they have to click-to-agree; most users tend to stick to
defaults or are apathetic about privacy settings (Stutzman and Kramer-Duffield 2010;
Madejski, Johnson, and Bellovin 2010). Nonetheless, Facebook’s terms are a vital ploy
in the battle to define what sharing is.

If we look more closely at Facebook’s governance, the first thing to notice is that there
are at least five different ToS levels: Facebook Principles, Statement of Rights and
Responsibilities, Privacy Policy, Data Use Policy, and Platform Policy.27 All policies are
derived from Facebook Principles. The fundamental ambiguity of “sharing” is etched in
the opening statement, which carefully crafts the company’s mission:

We are building Facebook to make the world more open and transparent, which
we believe will create greater understanding and connection. Facebook
promotes openness and transparency by giving individuals greater power to
share and connect, and certain principles guide Facebook in pursuing these
goals. (p.60) Achieving these principles should be constrained only by
limitations of law, technology, and evolving social norms. We therefore
establish these Principles as the foundation of the rights and responsibilities of
those within the Facebook Service. (Facebook Principles, emphases added)

The statement articulates the company’s service entirely in terms of users’ needs rather
than the company’s interests; “evolving social norms” are explicitly mentioned as a
constraining force—a force outside Facebook’s reach—but in fact, Facebook’s rules are
a major factor in steering these very norms.

In the remainder of the Principles text, the double meaning of “sharing” stands out in
the first two principles, titled “The Freedom to Share and Connect” and “Ownership
and Control of Information.” Whereas the first principle marks one user’s right to
connect to another and to exchange data “as long as they both consent to the
connection,” the second principle actually undermines the platform’s own declaration
that people should “own their information” and should have the freedom “to set
privacy controls to protect those choices,” adding the following disclaimer: “Those

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controls, however, are not capable of limiting how those who have received
information may use it, particularly outside the Facebook Service.” This last phrase
obviously relates to all third parties and companies connecting to Facebook—
connections actively pursued by the company. Over the years, Facebook has indeed
allotted its users more technical control over their data by adding privacy settings; but
these settings do not cover “sharing” in the second meaning of the term, so the effect of
these buttons is illusory if you take into account the disclaimer added in the second
principle.28

This sustained ambiguity in the meaning of sharing has sparked legal dissent over the
lawfulness of the platform’s ToS, stemming not only from users but also from
government agencies and consumer groups. In 2009, after Facebook had announced it
would now treat users’ names, profile photo, friends list, gender, and other profile data
as publicly available information, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC),
along with the American Library Association and several consumer rights advocacy
groups, asked the American FCC to look into these changes. A lawsuit filed in Los
Angeles in August 2010 claimed that Facebook’s Like button intentionally exposes
minors to unsolicited advertising; a similar concern was raised by Canada’s Privacy
Commissioner and the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, contending that all federal
agencies should remove the Like button and similar plug-ins from their websites
because it breaches national data protection laws.29 And in August 2011, the German-
based “Europe vs. Facebook” group called for legal and political action after it (p.61)
found out that Facebook keeps enormous amounts of data on file for a long time, even
though Facebook claims to have removed it.30

Facebook’s response to lawsuits and other allegations over its privacy policies has been
to listen to user complaints and make amends when required by law. As described in
the previous section, the debacle over Beacon resulted in a court settlement, requiring
Facebook to spend $9.5 million on the establishment of a Privacy Foundation, with
appointed users as board members.31 After the complaints filed by EPIC, Zuckerberg
issued a press release announcing the need for “companies like ours” to develop new
models of governance: “Rather than simply reissue a new Terms of Use, the changes
we’re announcing today are designed to open up Facebook so that users can participate
meaningfully in our policies and our future.”32 In a purported move toward online
democracy, Facebook created two user groups to help it draft what would eventually
become Facebook Principles and Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. All users
could log into the “ballot page” to issue their vote on what these principles and bill of
rights should entail—not unlike a virtual town hall meeting. An interesting caveat
issued by Facebook was that the process needed to be finished within 30 days and
would need to draw at least 30 percent of active Facebook users if its results were to be
binding—a totally unrealistic goal considering the fact that the site already had over
200 million subscribers in 2009. Not unexpectedly, the attempt at “open governance”
failed in its intentions, but nevertheless became included as Principle 9: “Facebook
should have a town hall process of notice and comment and a system of voting to
encourage input and discourse on amendments to these Principles or to the Rights and
Responsibilities.” Despite the specified rule, it is unclear to this very day how the
company conducts “town hall meetings” or how it plans to muster “open governance”
in future policy amendments.

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Perhaps most remarkable in Facebook’s deployment of its governance model as an

instrument in the struggle over information control is the company’s strategy of
cementing the notion of sharing in user-to-user traffic. Putting the onus on user
involvement while de-emphasizing Facebook’s interest in commercial exploitation, the
company’s claim to transparency included in Facebook Principles is conspicuously
one-sided. Transparency and openness apparently apply to users who are pushed to
share as much information as they can, but does not pertain to owners reluctant to
reveal information about their plans to share data for commercial purposes. As long as
there is little openness about the platform’s commercial strategies, the company’s
gesture to establish a semidemocratic governance structure remains entirely symbolic.
So how open has the company been about its monetizing intentions?

(p.62) Business Models

To better understand Facebook’s monetizing capacity in the wake of the ideology of
sharing, we need to return to the double logic of connectedness versus connectivity, a
logic that is mirrored by users’ interests in mass self-communication vis-à-vis the
owners’ interest in mass customization. Online social networks generate two more
potential economic values besides connectivity: attention and popularity. In the
“attention economy,” attention means eyeballs or (unconscious) exposure, and this
value is an important part of Internet advertising in the form of banners, pop-ups, and
paid ad space on websites. Gaining popularity is important to people who want to
boost their public reputation; identifying popularity is relevant to companies that want
to seek out influential people or recognize prevalent trends. And yet popularity is not
simply out there, ready to be measured: it is, rather, engineered through algorithms
that prompt users to rank things, ideas, or people in relation to other things, ideas, or
people.

Although popularity has no relation to values such as truth, trust, objectivity, or

quality, it is often equated with these values. For instance, users trust their private
profiling data to Facebook because they are invited to join the network by a friend,
often as part of a preexisting offline network community, and to join other circles of
friends while online. Users gain popularity when they get involved in more groups and
make more contacts; having many friends on Facebook, after all, enhances your
individual market value. The PYMK button uses the popularity principle by culling
name suggestions from automated data and cookies. In other words, popularity rooted
in relative connections between people on the basis of trust is translated into an
automated, quantifiable commodity. When communities of users continuously push
Like and Poke buttons, issue recommendations, forward favorite items, or state
preferences on what’s hot and what’s not, information garnered through informal
networks generates real value on the commodity exchange floor.

The values of attention, popularity, and connectivity have gradually and carefully been
mixed to constitute the basis of Facebook’s business model. Since 2010, Facebook has
progressively opened up user data to extract more value out of the site, risking a
serious loss of users through a steady erosion of privacy and trust (Nussbaum 2010).
Economic success is highly dependent on a mixture of social media as meeting places
(places to make contacts and socialize) and marketplaces (places to exchange, trade, or
sell goods). Facebook’s owners carefully nourished the site’s reputation: a site needs

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many visitors and a high level of connective activity before it can monetize either one
of these values. And yet because SNS sites are meeting places and not just
marketplaces, they are different from conventional (p.63) media. Network
communities that collectively define popularity may be used for their evaluative labor
or as deliverers of metadata, but they cannot be held captive to the attention industry.
When users are no longer interested or when they feel manipulated, they may simply
leave (Clemons 2009). In other words, the long-term viability of Web 2.0 platforms
depends on a pristine equilibrium between attracting and exploiting communities,
between entertaining users and making them participate (van Dijck 2009). The power
of users rises above the normal capability of consumers to abstain from consumption
because they are also value creators; users have the ability to exercise competent
choices, grounded in their understanding of competing and even conflicting incentives
and motivations. This strategic power of users thus poses a major challenge to
Facebook’s business model.

Not surprisingly, the platform waited several years to build a large and loyal member
base and to test which values could render the site profitable. Whereas Facebook
members, in 2007, were still reluctant to accept advertising in their informal
socializing environment, tolerance for commercial infiltration of their social space
expanded over the years. Since the Beacon debacle, the company has tried a mixture of
strategies to monetize connectivity while building its brand. Banner advertisements
appearing on a side bar are the most common tactic; like Google’s AdSense, Facebook
makes use of personalized targeted ads, connecting specific Facebook users to
advertisers based on content interests.33 Open Graph connects the company to an
enormous quantity of data generated outside of its own service through Like buttons
and similar apps, giving them access to a vast reservoir of marketing data, data on
users’ interests, and demographics. The Like button, as we now know, is vulnerable to
Like-jacking and personalized spamming; users may regularly find recommendations
on their News Feed or Wall that are ostensibly sent by “friends” but are in fact
propelled by third parties using an unwitting friend’s Like as an advertising ploy.
Sponsored stories, as part of the company’s narrative strategy, are claimed to be almost
50 percent more effective than targeted ads.34 Users automatically approve this tactic
by signing the ToS.

Advertising aside, Facebook has ventured into several other profitable business
models, such as selling pages to major and minor brands. Virtually all multinationals,
from Coca-Cola to BMW, are using Facebook for marketing and so-called “mouth-to-
mouth at scale” promotion. They pay influential Facebook connectors—people with
many friends—to promote their brand through the many intersecting groups and
networks they are involved in. As Facebook owns an unprecedented reservoir of
customized (meta)data, advertising and public relations are becoming a mixture of
(p.64) science and statistics, and therefore a lucrative business model. Facebook’s
strategy also includes integrated pay services. Granting members of the site access to
online games or apps such as CastleVille or Words with Friends, Facebook receives
one-third of these sites’ revenues. Besides being a social network, Facebook thus
increasingly serves as a gateway and identity provider to selected services and goods.
The platform becomes a closed membership alliance whose members’ data represent
valuable marketing and advertising niches to which companies can buy access (Turow

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2006).

Facebook’s business model is most certainly a contentious balancing act between

stimulating users’ activity and exploiting it; its success ultimately depends on
customers’ willingness to contribute data and to allow maximum data mining. Some
economists have hailed this value as the corporation’s most valuable resource, even
though the specificities of its mining methods are far from clear.35 At the other end of
the spectrum, critics contend that platforms like Facebook are turning the Internet into
a proprietary space where control over tools and services is firmly held by a small
number of media corporations who are “pushing for control and exclusion as a means
to exploit and reorient online users as consumer” (Milberry and Anderson 2009:
409).36 Over the years, information about Facebook’s business model has been
carefully held from the public view. Up to its IPO in May 2012, the firm was
conspicuously quiet about its plans to make its gold mine more profitable; the Nasdaq
offering forced the company to make its revenue streams and data capitalization more
open.37

In the overture toward Facebook’s going public, we can again observe the divergent
meanings of sharing being captured in one seamless notion. In a video roadshow
released several weeks before the IPO, the company pitched its bright future prospects
to prospective investors.38 Facebook’s top managers and CEO, along with two of the
platform’s biggest advertisers (Ben & Jerry’s and American Express), explain their
business strategies in an almost evangelical way, professing the company’s “social”
mission as an economic boon. A spokesperson for the ice-cream company echoes the
rhetoric of Facebook:

Messages on Facebook spread not just from business to consumer, but from
friend to friend. At Ben & Jerry’s, we’re not just a company, we really are a
friend to people. We want a holistic relationship with our community, our
customers. We engage in a large-scale conversation.

In virtually every line of text in the 30-minute promotion video, values of

connectedness and community are equated with connective values, smoothly aligning
business models with user interests. Clients are communities and customers equal
friends, warranting the identification (p.65) of a new category of “frustomers.”
Facebook’s mantra of making the world social is presented as a win-win business
proposition. The double logic of sharing, as we have seen, is not just anchored in the
site’s business model, but penetrates every fiber of the company’s philosophy,
including coding features, user practices, content and ownership strategies, and
governance models.

3.4. Shared Norms in the Ecosystem of Connective Media

The struggle over the meaning of sharing does not just reflect one company’s effort to
code and brand sociality, but also represents a cultural battle to establish a new
normative order for online socializing and communication. Early stages of this struggle
are articulated in the way Facebook has shaped sociality at the same time and by the
same means as it has been shaped by technological advances, legal codes, and market
forces. But the reason that Facebook has managed to impose its ideology on a vast
number of users cannot be explained exclusively by the company’s technical ingenuity

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or its visionary poise, inspiring a young generation’s lifestyle. Facebook’s distribution

of the sharing norm has been widespread because its buttons have been effectively
exported to other platforms, promoted by the frictionless sharing stratagem. Games,
pay services, employment sites, and a large number of other online facilities have
partnered with Facebook to benefit from its size, in lieu of sharing data with Facebook.
Most online companies absorb Facebook’s connectivity principle to offer a free service,
collect data about users as they use the service, and sell advertising on the basis of
these data.

Perhaps more significant than Facebook’s export of buttons and sharing principles is
the platform’s acceptance into so many people’s everyday routines. What used to be
informal social activities in the private sphere—friends hanging out together and
exchanging ideas on what they like—have become algorithmically mediated
interactions in the corporate sphere. The significance of this transition, though, gets
lost in the common vernacular of sharing, friending, and liking.39 In less than eight
years, the meaning of “sharing,” once understood as user-to-user information
exchange, has subtly been replaced by a meaning that naturalizes the sharing of
personal data with anyone on the planet. Among teenagers, the idea of “friending” as
building the largest possible network of contacts—a social badge of honor informed by
the popularity principle—has been steadily on the rise. The concept of “liking” pushes
popular ideas or things with a high degree of emotional value, arguably at the expense
of rational (p.66) judgments for which there are no buttons in the online universe;
“difficult but important” is not a judgment prompted by social media sites. Sharing,
friending, and liking are powerful ideological concepts whose impact reaches beyond
Facebook proper into all corners of culture, affecting the very fabric of sociality.

The normalization of a specific social rule at some point inevitably affects the process
of legalization—of norms turning into laws. Media companies trying to change privacy
laws recurrently invoke changed social norms to back up their argument. For instance,
in December 2011, viewing-on-demand platform Netflix backed a bill in the American
Congress that would amend the Video Privacy Protection Act, issued in the 1980s,
prohibiting the disclosure of a client’s personal information or consuming behavior
without written consent.40 Netflix lawyers argued that the law is outdated because
people share their information all the time on Facebook and Spotify, so why can’t they
share information on videos they are watching? Doctors keen on keeping patients’
private information confidential are puzzled to find that patients themselves publish
the most intimate details of their illnesses on their Facebook pages. On a different
note, job applicants have been asked during interviews to relay their Facebook
passwords to prospective employers so they can check information that was
intentionally set to “friends only.”41 The new norm of online sharing is thus invoked in
other domains to forfeit individual rights or to push legal amendments.

And yet Facebook’s normative dominance is not set in stone but is vulnerable to forces
in the connective environment it helped create. Critical responses to the prevailing
definition of sharing have come from individuals, legal agencies, and also from the
market. First of all, a backlash from users is not unimaginable. Facebook resisters,
according to the New York Times, are growing in number as people’s worries over the
platform’s privacy policy increase.42 There is a mounting awareness among users

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about the need to protect precious private information from the industry’s calls for
“openness.”43 In May 2012, with all eyes on the company’s IPO, a class action suit on
behalf of users was filed in a California court, claiming that Facebook improperly
tracks and exploits its users. The joke “Why did Facebook go public? Because they
couldn’t figure out the privacy settings either” gained viral acclaim. Besides being the
target of American lawsuits, Facebook’s expanding definition of sharing has been the
target of active monitoring by European and American watchdogs, NGOs, and
consumer advocates such as the Center for Digital Democracy.

Perhaps more telling are market responses to the pervasive ideology of sharing. New
services besides Google+ offer alternatives to people who feel (p.67) uncomfortable
with the principles undergirding the platform’s dominance. They target Facebook’s
strength, which is simultaneously its weak spot: its generic user base and
undifferentiated friending functions. Many smaller platforms, such as Path,
FamilyLeaf, ConnectMe, Diaspora, and Pair, offer network services with specific
restraints on the number of users or more user control. Other services envision a
future of networked sociality in which users will be more aware of their data’s value.
Although studies show that many consumers care about the collection of personal data
by an online company, few are willing to pay to protect it.44 A few start-ups, such as
Personal, operate on the basis of people taking control from the digital trails they leave
on the Internet and sell their personal data for services they explicitly want.

Facebook’s operational logic is indeed a powerful force in the ecosystem of connective

media, affecting many other platforms and infiltrating many people’s social lives, but
there are also countervailing forces. And even if the platform seems invincible at the
apex of its popularity, it is susceptible to the vagaries of the same ecosystem that
helped make it big. If the world’s users decide Facebook has lost its coolness, has sold
out your private data, or has yielded to censoring governments, its popularity may
dwindle. If lawmakers and governments get a mandate from citizens to secure more
information control, Facebook’s business models may become less lucrative. If
competing platforms manage to attract substantial user bases and occupy new
specialized niches in the social networking universe, Facebook’s value may easily drop.
In fact, many predicted this fate after the company lost a large chunk of its value in the
first month following its IPO. The ecosystem of connective media has proven a
capricious environment in which a platform’s status is never secure.

But even if Facebook loses its cool as a platform, its ideology has spread so deeply into
the pores of online sociality that its newspeak and mantras will reverberate for a long
time. Facebook’s ambition is not to be an open social network that lets its content and
data be crawled by other engines, especially Google’s. Instead, it wants to be a gateway
to social content, a toll road to a data infrastructure that facilitates all forms of online
commercialized sociality. In the video roadshow discussed in the previous section,
Mark Zuckerberg elucidates Facebook as a core upon which other platforms can build:
Facebook is “a fabric that can make any experience online social.” The company’s
creed to make the world a more connected and transparent place has thus come full
circle: if the world lets Facebook define the norms for online sociality, it will build a
world powered by Facebook.

Notes:

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(1) . Dan Fletcher, “How Facebook Is Redefining Privacy,” Time, May 20, 2010.
Available at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1990798,00.html.
Last checked June 7, 2012.

(2) . Marshall Kirkpatrick, “Why Facebook Changed Its Privacy Strategy,”

ReadWriteWeb, December 10, 2009. Available at
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_facebook_changed_privacy_policies.php.
Last checked June 7, 2012.

(3) . Chris Tryhorn, “Evangelical Networker Who Wants Facebook to Open Up the
World,” Guardian, August 20, 2009. Available at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/aug/20/facebook-ceo-sheryl-sandberg-
interview Last checked June 7, 2012.

(4) . See Facebook’s pre-IPO roadshow video. Available at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA81tRwvoPs. Last checked June 7, 2012.

(5) . These figures are provided by Facebook Internet Stats. Available at

http://www.internetworldstats.com/facebook.htm. Facebook occupies second position
in the Alexa rankings, behind Google Search. See
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/facebook.com. Last checked June 7, 2012.

(6) . Caroline McCarthy, “Facebook F8: One Graph to Rule Them all.” CNET, April 21,
2010. Available at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20003053-36.html. Last
checked June 7, 2012.

(7) . When Facebook announced having surpassed the landmark of 800 million users
worldwide in September 2011, it also emphasized that, in the United States alone, the
site attracts over 140 million unique monthly users. See announcement on home page,
available at http://www.facebook.com/notes/statspotting/facebook-now-has-more-
than-800-million-active-users/204500822949549. Last ckecked June 12, 2012.The
announcement was picked up by many news outlets across the world. For statistics on
monthly visitors, see Quantcast, at http://www.quantcast.com/facebook.com/traffic.
Facebook regularly publishes users’ facts and figures, so we can get an idea of who
Facebook users are and in what quantities they flock to the site. For instance, over 60
percent of all global users are younger than 35, and 75 percent are below the age of 45.
Americans comprise 66 percent of Facebook’s global audience, and of all American
users, 45 percent are male (see http://www.checkfacebook.com/). Penetration of
Facebook in Europe is less than in the United States: of all Internet users, almost 50
percent use Facebook in the United States, as compared to 25 percent in Europe. For a
comparison between European and American statistics, see
http://www.internetworldstats.com/facebook.htm. Last checked June 7, 2012.

(8) . Mass self-communication platforms, such as Facebook, operate in the same

economical, political, and legal space as personal media and mass media—a space
dominated by powerful telecom and media industries. As Castells (2009) explains in
Communication Power: “It is mass communication because it can potentially reach a
global audience, as in the posting of a video on YouTube, a blog with RSS links to a
number of web sources, or a message to a massive e-mail list. At the same time, it is
self-communication because the production of the message is self-generated, the

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definition of the receiver(s) is self-directed, and the retrieval of specific messages or

content from the WWW and electronic networks is self-selected” (55).

(9) . A USA Today–Gallup poll held in the fall of 2011 indicated that nearly 70 percent
of all Facebook members surveyed—and 52 percent of Google users—say they are
either “somewhat” or “very concerned” about their privacy while using the world’s
most popular social network and dominant search engine. Users who frequent the site
more often cared less about privacy than those respondents who used the site less
frequently. See http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-02-09-
privacypoll09_ST_N.htm. Last checked June 7, 2012.

(10) . See, for instance, a news article “Facebook Users Protest over News Feed,”
Guardian, October 27, 2009. Available at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/oct/27/new-facebook-newsfeed-
protest. Last checked June 7, 2012.

(11) . For more information on the hackers’ activities, see “Facebook Tracks Your
Cookies Even after Logout,” HackerNews, September 25, 2009. Available at
http://thehackernews.com/2011/09/facebook-track-your-cookies-even-after.html.
Last checked June 8, 2012. When confronted with the hackers’ revelation, Facebook
defended these practices, saying that the cookies are needed to protect their users’
privacy and safety.

(12) . See home page of Userscripts.org, available at

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/76037. Last checked June 12, 2012.

(13) . UnFuck Facebook is run on Userscripts.org, available at

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/11992. Last checked October 2011; the text has
since been changed.

(14) . Most users never change default settings, which is why they are so important.
Moreover, most users know so little about defaults that they are unaware of the
alternatives for privacy settings. A Columbia University study found that 94 percent of
all college students were sharing personal information on Facebook that they never
intended to make public. See
http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:135406. Last checked June 8,
2012.

(15) . See S. Kessler, “Facebook Reveals Its User-Tracking Secrets,” Mashable,

November 17, 2011. Available at http://mashable.com/2011/11/17/facebook-reveals-
its-user-tracking-secrets/. Last checked June 12, 2012.

(16) . Net activist site Gizmodo published “Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit
Facebook” on May 3, 2010. Available at http://gizmodo.com/5530178/top-ten-
reasons-you-should-quit-facebook. Last checked June 8, 2012.

(17) . See the Quit Facebook Day initiative’s website at

http://www.quitfacebookday.com/. Last checked June 8, 2012.

(18) . Jodie O’Dell, “Once Facebook Launches Timeline, You’ll Never Want to Leave,”

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VB Social, October 6, 2011. Available at

http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/06/facebook-timeline-lessin/. Last checked June 8,
2012.

(19) . As we can read on the Facebook Timeline site: “When you upgrade to timeline,
you’ll have seven days to review everything that appears on your timeline before
anyone else can see it. If you decide to wait, your timeline will go live automatically
after seven days. Your new timeline will replace your profile, but all your stories and
photos will still be there.” Available at http://www.facebook.com/blog/blog.php?
post=10150408488962131. Last checked May 2, 2012.

(20) . See the blog NakedSecurity, which also released a survey among 4,000 Facebook
users showing that 51 percent were worried by the Timeline feature, while 32 percent
wondered why they were still on Facebook. Available at
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/01/27/poll-reveals-widespread-concern-over-
facebook-timeline/. Last checked May 4, 2012.

(21) . On March 30, 2012, John Brownlee posted an interesting story on the daily news
site Cult of Mac about the app Girls Around Me, which simply connects Facebook
profiles to Google Maps and can be used in very simple ways to deceive naive girls into
releasing an astonishing amount of information. See
http://www.cultofmac.com/157641/this-creepy-app-isnt-just-stalking-women-
without-their-knowledge-its-a-wake-up-call-about-facebook-privacy/. Last checked
June 8, 2012.

(22) . A number of national SNSs have dwindled in the wake of Facebook’s exponential
growth. The Dutch network Hyves, for instance, was the largest SNS in the
Netherlands until mid-2011, when Facebook took over its lead position. After this,
Hyves lost substantial numbers of users each year, with a 38 percent loss in 2012 down
to 3 million users, while Facebook’s Dutch membership surged 45 percent to 7 million.
See “Gebruik Hyves met 38 procent gedaald; Facebook met 45 procent gestegen,” De
Volkskrant, May 3, 2012. Available at http://www.volkskrant.nl/vk/nl/2694/Internet-
Media/article/detail/3250173/2012/05/03/Gebruik-Hyves-met-38-procent-gedaald-
Facebook-met-45-procent-gestegen.dhtml. Last checked May 6, 2012.

(23) . See Google+, available at https://www.google.com/intl/en-

US/+/learnmore/index.html#circles. Last checked May 31, 2012. Six months after its
introduction, Google+ had attracted some 40 million subscribers, while Facebook had
just tipped 800 million registered users.

(24) . See M. Ramos, “Facebook Responds to Google Plus,” ByteLaunch, June 7, 2011.
Available at http://www.bytelaunch.com/bytelaunch-blog/social-media/facebook-
responds-to-google-3/. Last checked June 8, 2012.

(25) . Several weeks before the IPO, it became known that Facebook secured a
substantial reduction in the number of its shares that would be sold to retail investors
because it sees itself as a service for, and driven by, users. According to IPO insiders,
Facebook views itself as “the people’s company.” See
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/small-investors-may-get-to-own-a-bit-of-
facebook/ Last checked June 6, 2012.

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(26) . See Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction in the Huffington Post, July 7, 2011. Available at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/07/facebook-ceo-mark-
zuckerb_n_892202.html. Last checked June 8, 2012.

(27) . For Facebook Principles, see http://www.facebook.com/principles.php. For

Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, see http://www.facebook.com/note.php?
note_id=183538190300; for Privacy Policy, see http://www.facebook.com/note.php?
note_id=10150740019045301; for data use policy, see
http://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/. For Platform Policies, see
http://developers.facebook.com/policy/. All parts of Facebook’s terms of use cited in
this chapter were checked on October 26, 2011.

(28) . As legal expert Grimmelmann (2009) concludes, the bottom line of Facebook’s
terms of service is that “consumers don’t, can’t, and shouldn’t rely on Facebook’s
privacy policy to protect their information as they use the site” (1184).

(29) . For information on the Los Angeles lawsuit, see “Lawsuit Says Teens Too Young
to ‘Like’ Facebook Ads,” Agence Presse France, August 27, 2010, available at
http://www.france24.com/en/20100827-lawsuit-says-teens-young-like-facebook-ads.
For more information on the Canadian lawsuit, see
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2010/09/23/facebook-like-invitations.
For more on the German allegation, see Cloe Albanesius, “German Agencies Banned
from Using Facebook, Like Button,” in PCMag.com, August 27, 2011, available at
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2391440,00.asp#fbid=iWNc6eckuX3. All
sites last checked June 4, 2012.

(30) . As the Europe vs Facebook group contends on its website: “It is almost
impossible for the user to really know what happens to his or her personal data when
using Facebook. For example ‘removed’ content is not really deleted by Facebook and
it is often unclear what Facebook exactly does with our data. Users have to deal with
vague and contradictory privacy policies and cannot fully estimate the consequences of
using Facebook.” Available at http://europe-v-
facebook.org/EN/Objectives/objectives.html. Last checked June 8, 2012.

(31) . The establishment of such a Privacy Foundation, however, merely fulfilled a

requirement already mandated by the FTC as a measure to promote online privacy and
secure users’ data. See Sarah Perez, “Facebook Settlement Gets Judges OK,”
ReadWrite Web, October 26, 2009, available at
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_settlement_gets_judges_ok.php.
Last checked June 8, 2012.

(32) . Facebook’s press release is available at

http://www.facebook.com/press/releases.php?p=85587. Last checked June 8, 2012.

(33) . Facebook plans to launch SocialAds, its own online advertising tool that is
supposed to compete with Google’s AdSense.

(34) . This statistic was provided in May 2011 by the company’s own Inside Facebook
page, available at http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/05/03/sponsored-stories-ctr-
cost-per-fa/. Last checked June 7, 2012.

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(35) . A branch of economics called “social economics” emphasizes the importance of

social action and interaction as the microfunctions of business model performance,
and considers their impact to be part of their monetizing capacity (Bates 2008; Zott
and Amit 2009).

(36) . Facebook’s ideology of sharing has also been strongly criticized from a political
economy perspective by media scholar Fuchs, who observes: “Sharing on Facebook in
economic terms means primarily that Facebook ‘shares’ information with advertising
clients. And ‘sharing’ is only the euphemism for selling and commoditizing data”
(2011a, 160).

(37) . See, for instance, Facebook’s official (public) IPO registration statement offered
by Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, and Goldman & Sachs. Available at
http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512034517/d287954ds1.htm.
Last checked June 7, 2012.

(38) . This statement by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, is made in the pre-IPO
video, available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA81tRwvoPs. Last checked
June 7, 2012.

(39) . In 2005, the word “Facebooking” shortly came into vogue to describe the activity
of browsing others’ profiles or updating one’s own. Unlike Google, Facebook does not
promote the use of its name as a verb; its Advertisement Policy includes the rule: “Do
not use Facebook, or any other of our trademarks, as a verb. And don’t pluralize them
either. Trademarks may not be modified in that manner.” See Facebook Ad Policies,
available at http://www.facebook.com/brandpermissions/. Last checked May 3, 2012.

(40) . See The Privacy and Security Information Law Blog, December 15, 2011.
Available at http://www.huntonprivacyblog.com/tag/video-privacy-protection-act/.
Last checked January 3, 2012.

(41) . A Reppler survey among 300 hiring professionals in 2011 showed that 91 percent
of employers actually screened prospective employees on social networks sites—76
percent by looking at Facebook and 48 percent by looking at LinkedIn profiles. For
more details, see http://mashable.com/2011/10/23/how-recruiters-use-social-
networks-to-screen-candidates-infographic/. Last checked June 7, 2012. Journalists
interviewed prospective employees who were asked to release their Facebook password
during a job interview. See “It’s Akin to Requiring Someone’s House Keys: Employers
Ask Job Seekers for Facebook Passwords,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 21, 2012.
Available at http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/its-akin-to-
requiring-someones-house-keys-employers-ask-job-seekers-for-facebook-passwords-
20120321-1vioi.html. Last checked May 5, 2012.

(42) . According to Jenna Wortham in her article “The Facebook Resisters” the rebels
say that “their no-Facebook status tends to be a hot topic of conversation—much as a
decision not to own a television might have been in an earlier media era.” New York
Times, December 13, 2011, Technology section. Available at
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/technology/shunning-facebook-and-living-to-
tell-about-it.html. Last checked December 21, 2011.

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(43) . A Pew study released in February 2012 showed that a rising number of users,
especially women and younger users, are becoming more selective in listing friends
and are pruning their friend lists; unfriending and untagging people has become more
popular. See “Facebook Defriending Is on the Rise,” in ReadWriteWeb, Feburary 24,
2012. Available at
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/study_facebook_unfriending_is_on_the_rise.php.
Last checked June 8, 2012.

(44) . A 2012 study on the value of personal information and people’s willingness to
pay for privacy, conducted by the European Network and Information Security Agency,
shows that less than 30 percent of users are willing to pay extra for keeping
information out of the hands of data collectors. See the report at
http://www.enisa.europa.eu/activities/identity-and-
trust/library/deliverables/monetising-privacy. Last checked June 8, 2012.

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