Chris Peterson

Via Eva Galperin for EFF:

Speaking last week on a panel discussion about social media hosted by Marie Claire magazine, [Facebook Marketing Director Randi] Zuckerberg said,

“I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away. People behave a lot better when they have their real names down. … I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.”

Let me note at the outset that Randi Zuckerberg was not completely wrong. People do tend to behave better when they have their real names – or, more specifically, their “real life” – attached to the things they say or do on the Internet.

That’s because shaming works. I don’t think that’s a controversial statement. And Facebook has gotten a lot of mileage out of shaming. They don’t call it shaming, of course. They have some fancy name for it – RealSocial or something, I forget – but Chris Kelly, the former Facebook Privacy Officer, used to talk about it all the time. Here’s him describing the policy in high-minded terms in The Facebook Effect:

We’ve been able to build what we think is a safer, more trusted version of the Internet by holding people to the consequences of their actions and requiring them to use their real identity.

So, premise: tying people’s online identities to their “real” identities will, through shaming and social norms, make them behave better, or, more precisely, more like they do “in real life.”

I don’t think anyone disputes that.

The problem is in the conclusion: that, because this premise is true, “anonymity on the Internet needs to go away.”

Eva, the author of the EFF post, already hit most of the usual (but worth reiterating!) points why the conclusion is total bullshit: because “activists living under authoritarian regimes, whistleblowers, victims of violence, abuse, and harassment, and anyone with an unpopular or dissenting point of view that can legitimately expect to be imprisoned, beat-up, or harassed for speaking out” benefit from anonymity and pseudonymity (which the Facebook policy also prohibits). It goes without saying that anyone with an elementary education – and I mean literally an elementary education, we’re talking Federalist Papers here – should be able to appreciate the importance of hiding your name in order to speak your mind. And it goes without saying that we should all be glad that Randi Zuckerberg is not part of the IETF.

But I’d like to make one other connection here.

This fetishization of onymity (yes, that is the antonym of anonymity!) is not an isolated blemish on the face of Facebook. It is but one of several symptoms of a deeply rooted disease: Facebook’s love of radical transparency.

Read danah boyd on Facebook and radical transparency before you read any more of me, but the practical upshot is that Zuckerberg – Mark this time – has said repeatedly that, basically, the world would be better off if everybody was open about everything all of the time, and that anything short of that was a “lack of integrity”.

Now, anyone who has read their boyd, Warner, Goffman, Meyrowitz, or even Jarvis (or even me) will realize how almost unbelievably dumb – or shall we say “conceptually incoherent” – this statement is. No one actually lives like that. That’s not how social norms work. That’s not how privacy works. And Zuckerberg, of course, does not himself live a radically transparent lifestyle either, or else you’d be able to see a whole lot more on his Facebook profile.

But I want to underline the fact that the Zuckerbergs are not merely wrong in their pathological obsession with radical transparency and “real identity.” They are wrong in a way which actively hurts people. Again, not to crib too heavily from boyd here, but there are reasons why things like pseudonyms and privacy settings matter. They don’t really matter to people like the Zuckerbergs – people who have money, education, protection, and prestige. They matter to the subaltern.

Think about it for literally one second. What it means to be “radically transparent”, and how it affects one’s lived experience, depends entirely on one’s position in society. More concretely: being “radically transparent” about, say, sexuality, means very different things to a straight male student and a closeted gay student in a homophobic, conservative high school context. That’s a very simplistic example, but a very powerful one. And dismissing those concerns is more than merely incorrect. It harms those who are the most vulnerable.

If you ever wondered why Facebook is one of the most hated companies in America, you can stop now. The answer is evident. It’s captained by fools – or brigands. And when (not if) the karmic collapse comes – when something finally arrives to take Facebook’s place – there will be no love lost for it.

Nor will it deserve any.

e: a Facebook employee who I know and trust sent me some thoughtful comments via email. Without quoting them in full, they boil down to: despite whatever crazy things the Zuckerbergs might say to reporters, we engineers actually spend a lot of time trying to work within the existing privacy infrastructure, and to make it better as we can.

And I believe that’s true. Facebook has actually has pretty powerful privacy settings for a long time, even if they are hidden and poorly publicized. But I don’t think (most) of the rank and file engineers at Facebook are into radical transparency. I think they are basically smart people working on a really tough and complex piece of software, and they’re trying to keep it working and keep making it better, and don’t have enough time to make grand announcements about anonymity or really set policy going forward.

I just think the fish is rotting from the head.

This video of Matt Damon responding to a reporter from Reason.TV, an arm of the libertarian Reason Magazine, has been making the rounds today.

Put the video itself aside for a moment. Because what’s really interesting are the reactions to it.

See, the video above was posted to YouTube by GLteachers, the YouTube account of a Minnesotan teacher’s union, presumably because the teachers believed, as did I, that Damon won this particular exchange by speaking compellingly to the integrity of public school teachers and the frustrating tendency to reduce talk of teachers to platitudes about incentives.

But this video was itself an excerpt of a longer one posted by ReasonTV of the rally, compiled of several interviews. Given Reason’s ideological orientation – and the reporter’s confrontational tone with Damon – this was apparently done in order to editorialize, for their viewers, how wrong or ridiculous ardent supporters of public education are.

When I edited my high school newspaper I remember being admonished to just report the unbiased facts. Of course, the “reporting the unbiased facts” is a conceptually incoherent ideal. It’s not only unachievable, it doesn’t make any sense. Being an editor means imparting bias. Imparting bias – at the very least a bias as to what is newsworthy and why – is an editor’s function. It’s what editing is. News, like the law, is a bramble bush; a skilled editor, like a skilled lawyer, is just choosing what to be bound by, and what to escape from.

But what struck me about the reactions – the complete and utter opposite reactions – to this video was something else about the process of digesting information. Even after the editorial spin has been spun, different people, coming from different perspectives (cough hermeneutics cough), will understand the same content in wildly different ways. Put thusly, the observation is obvious. But this is one of clearest practical demonstrations of the principle I’ve ever seen. Two different groups, watching the same video, coming to wildly different conclusions.

Cass Sunstein worried that the Internet would fracture deliberative democracy by splintering the common civic experience into echo chambers and radical cells. He feared that the “Daily Me” – news and views tailored to your own preexisting interests and beliefs – would make true conversation impossible. If folks don’t have (and can’t operate from) the same facts, his argument goes, they can never even hope to come to some sort of resolution.

Sunstein wasn’t wrong. But he might have been irrelevant. Studies have shown confirmation bias to be so strong that, when presented with information demonstrating popular political misconceptions to be factually incorrect, subjects’ belief in the validity of their misperceptions strengthened. Put another way: showing people that what they believe politically is incorrect doesn’t make them deliberatively and thoughtfully reconsider their beliefs. It makes them double down on their wrongness.

I don’t think you can find a better example of the power of confirmation bias – that is, the power of prior beliefs to drive different understanding and interpretations of data, even objectively identical data – than the two vastly different interpretations of this video.

That said, I personally am of course completely unbiased and completely correct. I am also an ardent supporter of public education – the correct position – and so I thought that Damon got the better of the ReasonTV reporter.

And, because I’m never above snark when it comes to libertarians who hate on public education, I would also note that Reason is thus not only wrong on the facts (i.e. the value of public education), but also wrong on the commentary about the facts (i.e. the argument the Reason reporter lost to Damon), and ALSO wrong on the metacommentary about the commentary about the facts (i.e. whether or not the reporter won or lost, as evidenced by their decision to post the video to their website).

In a Twitter mood today. #ReasonTV #AnalysisFail

Via TPMLiveWire/Gawker:

Yesterday, we published an item based on a former Newt Gingrich staffer’s claim that Gingrich assembled his 1.3 million Twitter followers–a number that he’s taken to bragging about–in part by buying fake Twitter followers. A lot of people did not think that was true! But today social networking search firm PeekYou announced that it had crunched the data and come to the conclusion that roughly 106,055 of Gingrich’s million-plus followers are real people. The rest are fakes.

Our source yesterday told us that about “80 percent of [Newt’s followers] are inactive or are dummy accounts created by various ‘follow agencies'” paid by his campaign.

Ok, I admit it. I’m jealous that I didn’t think of running a Twitter account creation / retweeting astroturf operation of this scale before. Astroturfing a retweet campaign yes; wholesale Twitterbot campaign, no.

Welcome to Boston Ocho.

This article about the implications of Google+ came across my desk today. It’s a quick post discussing the potential implications of Google+ for higher ed recruitment – whether or not you could (or should) Hangout with prospective students, etc.

It’s a good article, but it’s also premature.

The thing about Google+ is it isn’t a thing yet. By that intentionally inarticulate statement I mean we don’t yet know what the norms and expectations of Google+ are.

Norms and expectations of sites are always changing. What Facebook was in 2006 is very different (for better or for worse) than what it is in 2011. And it’s always a moving target.

But at least with Facebook, if you have the faintest idea of what you are talking about (which admittedly many don’t) you can only be so wrong. You can only be so far ahead or behind of a known target.

Not so with Google+.

You might look at Google+ and say “well, it’s just like Facebook, except that it’s got a slightly different privacy architecture, and it’s also just like Twitter, except the asymmetrical following has a different social substrate, and it’s just like Skype, so none of this is really new, they’re just all in the same place now.”

This argument is alluring. It’s also wrong. When all of these admitted analogues are in the same space it’s an entirely different dynamic. A jewelry store, a Burger King, and a Hot Topic are all distinct social spaces. Together, they’re a mall. And the sociology of a mall is not the sum of the sociologies of its stores. It’s something else entirely.

The same argument was made about Facebook in its early days (oh, it’s just photos + messageboards + email). It was wrong then. And it’s wrong now about Google+ – and it’s wrong exponentially. Facebook was a service built atop a combination of popular web standards. And Google+ is a combination of those services.

Google+ may yet flop. But I don’t think it matters if it does. It’s the first well-designed combination of all of these services. Whether or not it “kills Facebook”, it’s worthy of study and interesting on its own. I can’t remember the last time I was this excited about a change in the social media field. It’s going to be incredible to watch.

Via my good friend Eric Stern (@Firehed):

Nine of the top ten grossing apps on the iOS app store are “free”. This scares me.

Sure enough:

In-app purchases are powering “free” apps to the very top of the charts. Lower the costs of entry, shift them to the point after which sufficient loyalty has been developed. Crazy brilliant.

Got an email not too long ago suggesting comments were broken. Upgraded WordPress and Akismet; hopefully this fixes it!

I mentioned in this blog post about how a lot of the excitement around Google+ seemed driven by a dislike of Facebook.

Well, according to a new study released by the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, Facebook is the 10th most hated company in America. It is hated somewhat less than the airlines and Comcast and somewhat more than (gulp) major investment banks.

I haven’t seen this study’s methodology. But it’s a striking finding.

So I haven’t had an invite to Google+ go through yet, partially because of demand, partially because I think folks have been inviting me with my GApps account and Google+ isn’t compatible with that from what I see. But a lot of my friends have it, and have been talking about it on Facebook (very meta).

Before I go making any grand statements, I realize that my experience is limited and defined by my friends – specifically, my affinity group tends to overrepresent tech-savvy early-adopters.

Still, I’ve been stunned by the response to Google+. Seems like half of my friends already have it and are glowing about how great it is, and the other half desperately want in because they have been looking to leave Facebook.

My best friend Shane, like everyone else in our generation, was a ferocious Facebook user at first. But once things began getting icky three or four years ago, he changed his profile to this:

It’s still early, but I’m beginning to wonder if that alternative has finally arrived.