David Steven

March 10, 2010

[Important updates below - Facebook says the Daily Mail knew its story was untrue, but printed it anyway. Legal action is promised.]

In the early hours of this morning, the Daily Mail published an astonishing attack on Facebook under the title “I posed as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook. What followed will sicken you.”

Here’s the opener:

Even after 15 years in child protection, I was shocked by what I encountered when I spent just five minutes on Facebook posing as a 14-year-old girl. Within 90 seconds, a middle-aged man wanted to perform a sex act in front of me.

I was deluged by strangers asking stomach-churning questions about my sexual experience. I was pressured to meet men with whom I’d never before communicated.

So I wasn’t surprised that a vulnerable teenager, Ashleigh Hall, was groomed on Facebook before being brutally raped and killed.

The article is written by Mark Williams-Thomas. Here’s his biog:

Mark is a former police detective who has far-reaching experience of working at the centre of high profile investigations. During Mark’s police service, he specialised in child protection and major crime and he is renowned throughout the UK’s police forces as well as the national media for his expertise in these areas.

It’s an odd story. Facebook isn’t really a chat site – and it’s certainly not Chatroulette, where there are plenty of men ready and waiting to jack off in front of you (sfw). Presumably Williams-Thomas set his privacy settings to zero and befriended loads of strangers. But how did those strangers find him (her) so quickly?

Fast forward twelve hours and the online version of Williams-Thomas’s article has undergone some editing. New title: I posed as a girl of 14 online. What followed will sicken you. And new text, with Facebook replaced with an unnamed ’social networking site’.

Even after 15 years in child protection, I was shocked by what I encountered when I spent just five minutes on a social networking site posing as a 14-year-old girl. Within 90 seconds, a middle-aged man wanted to perform a sex act in front of me.

The url, though, has not been changed: I-posed-girl-14-Facebook-What-followed-sicken-you.html

So what gives? If it was Facebook that Williams-Thomas was using, then why turn so coy? And if it wasn’t, how on earth could the Mail have pretended it was?

Update: Via Twitter, I asked Williams-Thomas for clarification. Here’s his reply:

So why was Facebook named in the first place?

Update 2: Apparently the story – with Facebook named – was a front page splash in the print edition, and then a double page spread inside.

Update 3: Just had a call from Facebook – they’re incandescent and say that:

• Williams-Thomas claims that he was 100% clear that his social network experiment had not involved Facebook.
• When the Mail sent him a first draft of the story with Facebook named, he asked for them to make a correction.
• Even so, they went ahead and published a story their own expert had warned them was untrue.

When Facebook protested, the Mail corrected the online story, but not the printed version, which had already hit the news stands. Their online retraction failed to include any apology or explanation of their mistake.

Facebook says that legal action against the Mail is pending. What an extraordinary piece of negligence and/or malice from the paper!

Twenty years ago, I, very uncharacteristically, asked my parents if I could go to an American summer camp. I say "uncharacteristically" because, even then, I hated sports, I hated group activities and, most of all, I hated camping. Nonetheless, I had this idea – accrued mainly from the 1979 film Meatballs, definitely in the top five of Bill Murray's finest moments – that summer camp would be full of dorky, likeminded souls who would become my friends for life.

Unfortunately, I did not go to summer camp in the 1970s. I went in the 1990s, by which point the racket had become so revoltingly expensive that the only people who went were 10-year-olds with trust funds. The whole experience was more Mean Girls than Meatballs.

I have been having feelings of deja vu in recent weeks when I think about Facebook. This, I once thought, was a lighthearted means to help one stay in touch with one's friends and waste more working hours, two activities I always welcome. Unfortunately, it seems that, once again, I arrived too late, because what I got was not what I signed up for.

Oh God, those groups! Those wretched Facebook groups! "Jane Smith has suggested you become a fan of Jane Smith" being a typical Facebook missive, because Jane Smith has an album/film/new hairdo that she would like you to "support". "Can this sausage roll get more fans than Cheryl Cole?" Sorry, but as Harry would say in When Harry Met Sally, I really must go clean my andirons, and I don't even have a fireplace.

But like I said, I'm always open to time-wasting, so these things, while clearly stupid and fascinatingly bold (who knew the usually self-effacing Brits could be so open to gleeful self-promotion?), weren't deal-breakers for me and Facebook.

But now Facebook groups have become about something much more tedious: reactionary campaigning. This has been encouraged, no doubt, by the argument that is commonly used to justify Twitter – that it has "news agenda-setting" benefits which outweigh its narcissism-feeding, attention-seeking and boredom-filling properties. So when the inevitable Facebook group about Jon Venables ("KEEP JON VENABLES IN PRISON FOR GOOD!") appeared on my screen, it was like summer camp all over again, when my bunkmate laughed at me for never having shaved my legs in all of my 10 years.

There are hundreds of Venables-related groups on Facebook, all hysterically screaming about how he "must be hung!", "should rot in prison 4 eva!", should "die die die!" Ah, modern technology. Pros: iPods. Cons: internet lynch mobs.

In one way, these groups do what the internet should, which is offer an insight into human interests. Unfortunately, this particular insight is drearier than any one might glean from the comments on the Daily Mail website. And to be fair, the screedish messages left on the Facebook groups' venomously self-righteous walls don't differ that much from what has been written in old media in the last week despite the lack of facts about the Venables case. Just as how in all sci-fi films from the 60s the future looks exactly like the 60s, social networking sites – these portals into a brave new world – are becoming little more than on-screen versions of the most retro pockets of the old-school media. And frankly, it's hard not to wonder if these columnists and internet pitchfork wagglers really want Jack Straw to slake their prurient thirst with hard information about Venables, as it will put a forcible stop to their hand-rubbing hypotheses. Quite whether it would stop them confusing the concept of "justice" with "vigilante vengeance" is another matter.

The much-publicised Save 6 Music Facebook group was obviously well-intended, but perhaps if half the people who joined it had ever listened to the station before the threat of its closure there wouldn't have been the need for the group in the first place. There was a definite smack of Ed Vaizey-ness to the whole affair, Vaizey being the Daddy-O MP who basically agreed on the Friday that the radio station should be closed only to return to work on the Monday to say, actually, he'd listened to it over the weekend and, do you know, it really was jolly good. Lots of top-hole music. Humorous chat. And no adverts. Do other people know about this?

And therein lies the problem with these Facebook groups. On the one hand, they offer hospitable environments for hysteria to flourish, where high emotions are ramped up with multiple exclamation marks. On the other, campaigns of a more sober-minded bent become pathetically diminished when reduced to a Facebook group, not least because they're not so much preaching to the choir as preaching to the evangelicals. "Support gay marriage!!!" All those years of fighting homophobia, when all we needed was an over-punctuated Facebook group. Harvey Milk, why didn't you think of that?

Listening to the public is part of a politician's – and the media's – job and the number of people joining these groups is reported in related news stories with all the solemnity of a definitive argument. But somehow just tapping a mouse button on a "Become a fan" icon doesn't quite feel like marching to Westminster. And if you find yourself tempted to vote on the popularity of a sausage roll, I'd suggest you introduce more group activities into your life. Summer camp, perhaps?

Facebook already offers its Lite site for low bandwidth users

The world's biggest social network has revealed details of a stripped-down, text-only version of its mobile site called Facebook Zero.

The low-bandwidth site is aimed at people viewing Facebook on their mobile and will launch "in the coming weeks".

The social network recently said that more than 100 million people now access Facebook from their phone.

Analysts at CCS Insight said that the new site could help operators free-up critical bandwidth on their networks.

Data from industry body the GSM Association recently revealed that Facebook accounts for nearly half of all the time people in the UK spend going online using their phones.

The data showed that people in the UK spent around 2.2bn minutes browsing the social network during December alone.

Facebook said the new site "omits data intensive applications like photos".

"We are discussing it... as an option to make Facebook on the mobile web available to everyone, anywhere and allow operators to encourage more mobile internet usage," said a spokesperson for the firm.

Facebook already offers a slimmed down version of the version of its site - called Facebook Lite - for people with slow or poor internet connections. It is aimed at users in the developing world.

The site was announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which runs from 15-18 February.

Those of us who live and breathe technology often accuse the rest of the planet of being populated by spoonfed idiots who have problems comprehending their DVD player, let alone the way that technology is changing the world around them.

Usually, our reactions are an overstatement - just a matter of a people needing a little more hi-tech literacy, and our anger borne from having to provide computer support to all manner of friends who haven't worked out that they should probably try turning it off and on again.

But sometimes your worst fears are given a real form - when you see the responses what is a browser, for example, or as shown by a little incident when the site ReadWriteWeb wrote about Facebook.... with hilarious consequences.

Yesterday RWW wrote a post about how Facebook was partnering with AOL, in a way that would make the site's login procedure more powerful than ever before - headlining the story "Facebook wants to be your one true login".

Suddenly, thanks to the magic of Google, that post became the most heavily-featured result for searches like "Facebook login" - which caused all kinds of confusion.

It looks like a number of users clicked on the top result, expecting to be taken to Facebook's login page (also known as, erm, facebook.com) and instead being presented with this ENTIRELY DIFFERENT site.

The post now has a comment thread of around 300 posts, many from disgruntled Facebook users who have clicked and can't work out what's happened to the site they know and love.

assorted comments by Facebook users who did not realise they were on a different website

While some of the comments are from jokers, many appear to be genuinely confused users. It's the sort of thing that makes you despair - when can't even work out they're not on the site they think they are, let alone understand that they could always reach Facebook by simply typing the address into the browser.

But, lest we simply laugh at the failure of the great unwashed to get the web, let's take a couple of serious points away from the whole thing.

First, it's a bit of a failure on Google's part. If Facebook users want to log in to the site, and Google's returning something that isn't Facebook's front page, then they're not delivering useful search results. That's not great for Google.

Secondly, perhaps we should refigure our idea of how many people actually use the web in this way. While the confused commenters largely seem to be middle-aged non-web-literate people, that doesn't mean they're stupid - just ill-informed.

As Matt Haughey, who runs community site Metafilter, said: "Laugh all you want about ReadWriteWeb, but two weeks ago I watched a 35 year-old friend with a PhD go to Facebook by googling 'facebook login'."

Ever heard of Dunbar’s Number? According to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, it’s the cognitive limit to the number of people you can be friends with. The number is 150, meaning your brain can only handle that many friends, and — shockingly enough — it also applies to Facebook.

Even if you have thousands of friends, that number is really meaningless as far as true friendships go, Dunbar told Times Online. He supports this with traffic data. “The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world,” he said.

This is a well-known concept. The company that produces Gore-Tex fabrics, Gore (as famously explained in Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point), keeps its employees divided into small teams because in very large teams the relationship between people starts to deteriorate.

The number is a bit different for boys and girls, Dunbar claims, without going into specifics. “There is a big sex difference though … girls are much better at maintaining relationships just by talking to each other. Boys need to do physical stuff together,” he said.

Personally, I keep the number of my Facebook friends very small, around 100 — I friend only the people I know IRL — but I don’t feel that having several hundred friends would be meaningless. After all, when you count in the relatives, business contacts and other acquaintances, I’m sure your social circle can grow well over 150. As far as real friendship goes, well, I’m not sure that Facebook is the best indicator, anyway.

This evening Facebook began testing what appears to be their version of Twitter’s retweet feature: “via”. On any article shared by your friend, you can click on “Share” and when you post the article to your profile, Facebook will now automatically say who the article came from. While the “via” content only currently works on shared articles, I’d assume that this feature would be extended to other stream stories if initial user testing proves successful. We’ve written extensively about the Twitterfication of Facebook, and this appears to be one more step in that process.

As pictured below, users are able to opt-out of having the shared “via” content displayed when they post a story, however by default any article you share will also include the name of the person that you found the article from. It’s a form of attribution and it also helps generate a trail of where information comes from in the social graph. This is the first iteration of a “retweet” alternative that we’ve seen, however Facebook has had status tagging for months now, something many users still ironically aren’t aware of.

My guess is that this new “via” feature will also increase the use of status tagging in general as many users don’t know how to attribute others within their status updates. There’s few features at this point which Twitter has that Facebook hasn’t incorporated into their site. While Facebook always tends to generate their own version in order to differentiate themselves from Twitter, the influence which Twitter has had over Facebook in general is significant.

Right now it appears as though all users have this feature although it was only recently turned on (at some point this evening). We’ll be sure to continue our ongoing coverage of Facebook’s Twitterfication.

Criticising social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook is as pointless as knocking people who discuss the weather

• Cory Doctorow
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 5 January 2010 13.15 GMT
• Article history

A woman checks Twitter on an iPhone Photograph: Sarah Lee

Here are some suggested things to say if you want to sound like an idiot when you talk about social media:

• It's inconsequential – most of the verbiage on Twitter, Facebook and the like is banal blather

Yes, it certainly is. The reason for that is that most of it is "social grooming" – messages passed between friends and family members as a way of maintaining social cohesion. The meaning of the messages isn't "u look h4wt dude" or "wat up wiv you dawg?" That's merely the form. The meaning is: "I am thinking of you, I care about you, I hope you are well."

I don't call my parents in Canada and recount the latest additions to my daughter's vocabulary because they need to know that the kid can say "elephant" and "potty" now; I call them up to say, "all is well with your son and his family", and "you are in my heart", and "I love you".

Criticizing the "banality" of Facebook conversation is as trite and ignorant as criticising people who talk about the weather. There's a reason we say "Did you sleep well?" at breakfast and "How was your weekend?" when we turn up to the office on Monday (and it's not that we care about the weekend or the rest).

Yes, people sometimes say consequential things on social media. The Twitter tag #whatTwitterdidforme has lots of sterling examples. But these are rare events that are not Twitter's raison d'etre. People don't join Twitter because they hope that someday they'll be sprung from jail, land a job, or reunite with a long-lost friend. These are bonuses.

The real value of Twitter et al is to keep the invisible lines of connection between us alive.

• It is ugly – MySpace is a graphic designer's worst nightmare

The word you're looking for isn't "ugly", it's "vernacular". Graphic designers are paid to clearly communicate messages (both covert and overt) to strangers on behalf of clients. Kids who bling out their MySpace pages do so because they are exuberant and playful.

These pages are as deliberately ugly as the photocopied punk band-posters that graced every telephone pole and building-site hoarding a generation ago.

The kids who make "ugly" MySpace pages are hardly ignorant of the visual vocabulary of professional design. On the contrary, they have been saturated with professional design since birth, and can recognise a message crafted by a designer on behalf of a client at 100 yards – and what's more, they can distinguish it from a page crafted by a peer at the same distance.

These pages are made by people who know – to the femtometre – exactly how ugly they are. They are supposed to offend your sensibilities. They are intended to make designers weep. Their ugliness is a defence mechanism that protects them from being knocked off by marketing/communications firms, because most designers would rather break their own fingers than commit such an atrocity.

Prediction: in five years, some of these kids will have grown up, graduated from design college, and will be industriously turning out clones that authentically reproduce the exuberant no-design every bit as well as today's high-street shops do Sex Pistols chic.

• It is ephemeral – Facebook will blow over in a year and something else will be along

Totally correct, but this is a feature, not a bug. The technology that underpins social media is changing fast, and social media companies' bone-deep intuitions about what it should and shouldn't do are made obsolete every 18 months or so. Most of these companies won't be able to adapt. They will die, and be replaced by a new generation of social media companies who have better, more contemporary sensibilities.

Only ancient, clueless dinosaurs like Rupert Murdoch are dumb enough to pay hundreds of millions for social media companies with the belief that they will grow to be immortal giants. Only lazy, fat media execs from firms that endured for decades without having to remake themselves from top to bottom think that a complete turnover in the corporate landscape is a failure.

There are plenty of things to worry about when it comes to social media.

They are Skinner boxes designed to condition us to undervalue our privacy and to disclose personal information. They have opaque governance structures. They are walled gardens that violate the innovative spirit of the internet. But to deride them for being social, experimental and personal is to sound like a total fool.