Facebook Loves Blowing Bubbles

Designing the Social

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It’s only been about 15 years since Facebook first originated and I had the opportunity to witness Facebook’s growth from ground 0 at the time. For those who weren’t around/alive at the time, Facebook actually used to be very exclusive. You required a college email and needed to go through a verification process. By 2007-8ish, anyone’s middle school nephew or retiree could join. What was once more targeted at particular demographic was blown out to amass everyone.
I bring this up because I’ve always held the assumption that anything I post on Facebook is for everyone to see. It is pure publicity in its most vulnerable state. Anytime I voice an opinion, any one of my ‘friends’ are free to agree, rebut, or even block me for all eternity. It turns out that this default of openness is not the case.

A few days ago I reported on the Mark Meechan/Count Dankula case where this man was convicted of “grossly offensive” content and awaits his sentencing next month in Scotland. I, as an actual free speech absolutist (without exception other than direct calls to harm and violence), was immediately struck by this and besides my Steemit post, tried doing an extensive post on Facebook for the first time in a while.

This was what I had prepared -

Fairly long and containing a number of potential 'triggering' parts. When I went to publish this, I was met with this message -

What? I thought everything on Facebook was automatically public. Was this service encouraging me to only post to a certain pool of friends?

F*ck off. I get it. My words are out there and I might be subject to Twitter mobs. You goddam snowflake generating socialmedia machine.

You know what the kicker was? After I posted, someone had apparently 'shared' my post. When I clicked to see who had, I saw this -

That means there is a setting where you can somehow share something but obscure the affiliation. Wtf?

I did a bit more snooping around, playing with settings on the platform and saw that you can do all manners of things, very carefully tailoring who sees you and what you see. Jesus Christ.

What do you think? Is this the beginning of the end of our beloved Facebook? Has it gone too far to engineer how we experience the world? Let me know your thoughts below.