Facebook: Friend or Foe?

Orwell’s new “Big Brother” has a cheerful, beguiling face, but most people have begun to catch a glimpse of the sneer behind that innocent smile and now want to declare war. Whether it be some hopeless conspirators’ paranoia, envy or just a side effect of inventor Mark Zuckerberg’s monstrous success, the result is now seen by the billions of eyes who watch it: Facebook, the social network that gathers at least 500 million virtual friends across the planet to exchange sweet pictures of newborns, less sweet images of yourself naked, political propaganda and increasingly more commercial messages, is at war.

It’s at war with itself and with users upset by the massive and growing invasion of their privacy, as well as with some outraged governments such as Pakistan, which blocked it because of the “blasphemous cartoons” of the Prophet. It’s at war with the techies, with the major bloggers and now with Hollywood, which is wrapping up production on the first blockbuster featuring complaint and criticism about Facebook: the movie will be called “Social Network” and will not have your typical happy ending. Far from being the big “keyboard friend” it was five years ago when the boom began, it now runs the risk of becoming the new version of Orwell’s “Big Brother.”

The playful, innocent picnic and class of 1990 graduates’ reunion mood on Facebook is slowly being poisoned by an atmosphere of reciprocal and collective suspicion. This stems from the belief that the enthusiastic handover of the private details of your life is the Trojan horse through which the apostles of Facebook can invade the privacy of their so-called “friends” in order to sell these private details to the highest commercial bidder. This is not friendship but an exchange of goods. Facebook, behind its face, is a lucrative undertaking — very remunerative — that has also attracted substantial investments from Russia; a Russian firm paid $200 million to buy 1.96 percent of the company a few years after Microsoft, the former “Big Brother” of computers, dropped a $240 million check. The income estimate for this year — still an economic crisis year — is $1.5 billion, whereas the total market value when Zuckerberg is supposed to take the company public on Wall Street in 2011 is the surreal amount of $15 billion.

If you read articles in newspapers — taking into account the envy that traditional, gasping newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal feel towards these omnivorous creatures — and the articles on the blogs and magazines specializing in new technologies, like PC World or the CNET site, you get the feeling that Zuckerberg — a Harvard student who invented the concept of social networking to break the lethal boredom and loneliness of the college dorms — is turning into the reincarnation of the ’80s and ’90s enemy, Bill Gates. Not the most pleasant comparison and thousands of miles away from a comparison to clever, mystical “Zen” Steve Jobs or from the legend of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the two former students who created Google. Zuckerberg is portrayed, in the unauthorized and unsuccessful attack by the Facebook apostles’ biography (which is the basis of the script for the new movie in production), as a greedy, selfish, insatiable wheeler-dealer seeking to exploit to the last detail the success of his invention. It is a profile easily applicable to dozens of CEOs — presidents of many successful businesses — who are not famous for their brotherly, ecumenical fraternity. The American motto “Nice guys finish last” is never outdated.

However, the users and followers don’t care, or didn’t, whether the patron of their church was a self-centered, unpleasant guy or a likeable rascal. They wanted — from the most unknown spotty teenager in a Nebraska trailer to political leaders like Hillary Clinton or Silvio Berlusconi (who also arrived, at least in name, to Facebook) — the peak of communication and relationship with the rest of the world that is physically unreachable. Most people, if not everybody, were ready to pay the price for the break from the scourge of isolation or the difficulty of traditional communication with this handover of privacy, seduced by the obvious element of exhibitionism and the feeling of protagonism (the thousands of “friends” who look for you) on offer. Now the price is getting too high. The price is total surrender of your identity, your life and your privacy, inside an intangible Internet world with eternal memory.

Nothing will be really be forgotten or deleted on the Internet: the funny picture of the small orgy at the bachelor party or the bold phrase directed to your online friend in India or Malta. Even the inevitable acronym — an American bad habit — was born: TMI, “too much information,” and with this excess of information the Facebook war exploded. It asks for too many details, too much private information in return for the vertigo of “friendship” and “communication,” as the Californian San Jose Mercury News, a newspaper that watches over the world of chips and bytes, wrote.* This book of faces is too intrusive: the probe digs deeper and deeper into its members to put more focus on its customers’ habits and tastes, then to sell them with a major profit to those who want to target their advertising messages with precision, instead of posting the message casually. Facebook is a “work in progress,” a mechanism, a program that evolves every day. It makes its “friends” the guinea pigs on which to experiment continuous changes — to see which ones work and which ones have to be abandoned. Everyone is a participant and a guinea pig at the same time in the biggest laboratory in the world.

When Facebook recently introduced a new gimmick called “instantaneous personalization,” politically influential organizations like MoveOn that played a huge role in mobilizing voters for Obama in 2008 and individual commentators from Silicon Valley stood up, accusing Facebook of “a subtle attack on privacy”* behind the backs of the cuteness and superficial vanity of its faithful users. The counterattack by Facebook — after a few irritated and characteristic replies by the founder to those who dared criticize the new juggernaut of the Internet — was the promise of making the users’ defense of privacy easier, cranking out a new, gigantic edition of its “privacy policy,” which clocked in at 5830 words and is 23 pages longer than the U.S. Constitution. Promises abound now because the Zuckerberg army is afraid — it knows moving from the “good” side to the “evil” one is a serious threat to its church.

If you listen to Facebook’s spokespersons and public relations officers — who are many in number perhaps in direct proportion to the attacks — this “war” is a pure invention of the media, bloggers and envious people in search of cracks in the armor. Certainly the shocking cases like that of British teacher Emma Jones, who committed suicide after finding old pictures of her nude posted by her ex-boyfriend, are tragedies too rare and isolated to draw generalizations. However, the conflict between the hunt for more and more personal information to exploit commercially and the fear of baring your soul, much less your body, in front of billions of eyes, is inevitable. At least three sites limiting the invasion of Facebook have already been born, but the true engine that drives this empire will be difficult to block because it’s neither Mark’s greed nor Big Brother’s invasion. It’s the people who offer themselves up despite the risk and measure their value according to the number of “friends” they can recruit. A computer program that can protect people from themselves doesn’t exist.

*Editor’s note: These quotations, accurately translated, could not be verified.