The popular college networking site Facebook is known as a place for students to touch base with friends, post pictures and is often just a useful tool for procrastination. In September, it became a place for protest.
Within two days of the introduction of new features called the “News Feed” and “Mini-Feed,” more than half a million users – mostly college students – joined forces against new features they accused of everything from being annoying clutter on the home page to invading their privacy.
The new features were introduced on Sept. 5. When users log in to their Facebook home pages, the News Feed is the first thing they see. It provides a detailed play-by-play of every action taken by that user’s friends. From simply adding a new musical artist to their list of likes to breaking up with a significant other, the feature many users describe as “Big Brother,” or “stalkerish” tells it all. The Mini-Feed feature is similar but shows up on each individual profile and only has “stories” about that user.
Ben Parr, a junior at Northwestern, thought the new features were an invasion of users’ privacy. Around 8:30 a.m. the day the feeds were introduced, he started a user group called “Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)” and left his house. By the time he came logged back on to the site, thousands of people had joined.
By 10 p.m. the following day, more than 500,000 people had joined his group, and similar groups were popping up all over the site. Ironically, as students joined anti-News Feed groups, their friends were notified through the News Feed itself. At one point during Wednesday afternoon the group was adding approximately 1,000 members every two minutes.
Parr said he started the group because he felt the News Feed went “too far.”
“Networking services need to balance privacy and information and this time they broke the balance. I hope they restore it,” he said.
When he started the group, Parr was not thinking about how many people would be upset with the News Feed, but he was soon overwhelmed by not only the huge response to the group but by the number of people sending him e-mails and friend requests.
“How could I not be surprised?” he said.
Users began to advertise a planned protest of Facebook, suggesting that all users boycott the site on Sept. 12.
Melanie Deitch, Director of Marketing at Facebook, described the site’s user base as “very passionate and vocal.” She said any new feature generates a lot of feedback but that developers expected a big response to the News Feed because it is “one of the biggest changes we’ve ever had.”
Facebook’s customer support staff tracks user feedback and is using it to determine whether changes can be made to make the News Feed seem more secure, Deitch said.
Deitch emphasized that the News Feed and Mini-Feed do not publish anything not already available on the site and said who can see the News Feed is based on a user’s privacy settings. There is, however, no way to opt out of the News Feed entirely, and although users can delete stories about themselves from the “mini feed” on their own sites, there is no way to delete information from the main News Feed, something users posting on Parr’s group emphasized.
Deitch said Facebook takes “great care” in listening to the users and said that the e-mails the site has received regarding the changes account for only 1 percent of the user base – yet at the time Deitch spoke with the Emerald, membership in Parr’s group represented 5.6 percent of facebook users.
As the number of people in the group skyrocketed, users began to suggest that the ability to mobilize against an annoying Web site feature could be used for a greater good. Several members of Parr’s group began posting messages asking students to join a group called “Fight Newsfeed but Fight AIDS.” The theory behind the new group is that if the 500,000 users dedicated to protesting the News Feed all donated $1, they would raise more than half a million dollars for AIDS relief.
Another user linked to a group for students who disagree with the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war.
Jake Thorn, a recent graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara, formed a group called “Students for Changing the Post-MiniFeed World.” He said student reaction to the News Feed has gone “haywire” because it is an issue that hits much closer to home than other issues such as the war in Iraq but that he and the other founders of his group saw a chance to turn a massive outcry into something more meaningful.
“We saw all this energy going into the Mini-Feed controversy, and we wanted to channel it into something more productive,” he said. “It’s easier to bring activism to students than students
to activism.”
Thorn said the objective of his group is to get together anyone who cares about social justice issues and he expects that members of the group will decide together which causes to support.
“We want to be the starting point for the discussion,” he said.
On Sept. 7, an updated statement on the page for Parr’s group said it is remaining neutral and is not endorsing any other groups, but that did not stop users from continuing to post links to other political and social action groups.
Several students suggested a feature such as the News Feed should be used for more important purposes than “stalking” their friends.
“Also, if facebook wanted to really do a relevant news feed- don’t tell us who broke up with who, tell us what is going on in the world. That’s relevant,” Katie Wojtowicz, a student at Scranton University, wrote in a message posted on Parr’s group.