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August 26, 2010

On Speech & Privacy Twitter Wins Where Facebook Fails

 

 

Why is Twitter surpassing Facebook in popularity (at least for advocates and dissidents)? Well, for one thing it's a free speech zone. And for another, users have control over their privacy.

 

There has been much talk about the way the two sites are formatted, the simplicity of one, the flight by the other to imitate it wherever it can; the  way information flows into the stream and trends can be tracked on the front side and not just the back end by employees and advertisers.

 

As many of us already know, Facebook seems to have earned a reputation for deleting and harassing users who  are outspoken conservatives, including one or two rather high profile ones. This increasingly is earning a reputation for Facebook similar to the unsavory one earned by Google, which routinely hands dissidents over in China to authorities who beat, torture, and murder them.

 

Speaking of Google, a quick web search seems to demonstrate that liberals aren’t complaining about the same treatment from the Facebook gods. (One can be sure that if there were equal treatment, libs would be first and loudest to scream about it.) By Contrast, Twitter’s speech policy seems far more consistent with the spirit of the internet and free-thinking societies in general. With the exception of direct physical threats, Twitter has been pretty good about staying out of the dysfunctional and pathetic game of political content censorship. In fact, some might argue Twitter is too loose, at times, allowing what may be considered libel to be posted without doing much about it; however, as they say, “sticks and stones…” – and most of us would rather have an open forum than some control freak dystopia where site employees regularly give users they don’t like the feeling of living in North Korea.

 

The other key difference is privacy. To Facebook, the user is not the customer; the advertiser is and the user is merely the commodity Facebook sells to the advertiser, as others have already pointed out:

 

This may seem like a bad way to treat customers, but the whole point about Facebook is that users aren't customers. Anyone who supposes that Facebook's users are its customer has got the business model precisely backwards. Users pay nothing, because we aren't customers, but product. The customers are the advertisers to whom Facebook sells the information users hand over, knowingly or not. – Andrew Brown

 

 It is this philosophy that drives Facebook’s disregard for the privacy interests of its users, as evinced by its oft confusing and oft changing privacy policies. In fact, one look at this startling graph (or this one) – both graphs quite popular on the internet these days – shows quite starkly how Facebook has been pot-frogging its users to the idea of sharing everything with everyone on the internet (and the afore-mentioned advertisers, who then make bank stalking you in every conceivable manner). In fact, Facebook’s privacy statement has gone from a little over a thousand words to almost six thousand in just five years. Does such behavior open Facebook up to potential liability if a user unaware their privacy settings have been changed and opened up to the internet is stalked by not a company but a psychopath murderer? Who knows, but certainly one could wonder whether Facebook’s disregard for its users is reckless and short-sighted.

 

Enter Twitter. If I were a political dissident, this would certainly be my first choice. I can choose any user name I’d like and give up only as much information as I choose. In fact, there’s very little room in my bio to share much of anything! While Facebook and Twitter both suffer horrible user support, at least Twitter doesn’t seem to me to act as though it has nefarious plans sometimes for its users. Refreshing, especially in this day and age where it seems everyone is scheming against everyone else and has lost the decent sense of leaving others the heck alone. And while both social media sites make it difficult to organize and archive contacts and posts, Twitter is far friendlier to third party tools for doing both.

 

There are certainly other areas to compare the two sites, but these days when freedom of speech and privacy come at a premium, Twitter is hands-down the better medium for the smart advocate.

 

 

Posted by Martin at August 26, 2010 03:34 AM

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