Gay on Facebook: Nowhere to Hide
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
It's not that you can't have a secret and be on Facebook-- it's that you can't have anybody who knows your secret be on Facebook.
Put another way: even if "Joe" (from the article) were not on Facebook, that wouldn't have stopped someone from posting a comment about his boyfriend.
People talk about other people. You can't control what they say. If these people are publishing their comments (to their "friends", or on blogs, to the general public), you're shit out of luck.
Joe was upset with our friend for sending the tweet, the content of which was a bit careless but totally benign, and my response to him was a combination of devil’s advocacy and good old-fashioned tough love.
Joe's friend could have been just as careless (or ignorant about his sexuality being a secret) by making a comment in front of people who were not aware of the secret.
The issue isn't being online, or Facebook or Twitter - the issue is keeping a secret.
edit: whoops, thenduks made the same exact argument I made here, but better
But that would require real privacy controls and it goes against Facebook's absurd mission statement to open up the entire world (or whatever that embroidery is inside that dopey hoodie).
Somebody letting your secret slip offline means one of your social circles will find out, and if you're very, very lucky it will stop there. But chance meetings do take place; your cousin bumps into one of your coworkers in the airport, notices his company shirt, and says "hey, do you know my cousin lotharbot? Did you know he really likes the Teletubbies?"
Facebook speeds up this process by increasing meetings between people from your different social circles. But fundamentally, the problem isn't Facebook, the problem is your friends letting your secret slip.
It's immediately obvious to me that various people around me who are "straight" aren't, seeing as we have 40 friends in common and 38 of them are gay...
Apparently the article missed this point entirely. Shame. Some university did a study that they could very accurately predict sexuality based on friends, frienships, etc.
That being said, I think most people's privacy is kept because there just aren't that many people interested in you in general. Unless you do something to make yourself a target.
This is one of the things that goes beyond Facebook as a platform and technology and becomes a cultural issue. You can delete your Facebook account or never get on Facebook in the first place, but that won't stop people from publishing photos of you on it. I can't help feeling it has become socially acceptable for your friends or even acquaintances to publish photos of you on the Internet.
Facebook is now an integral part of our culture. Its precipitous growth is owed to the fact that it works only if it’s massive. The more people participate, the more utility it has, and the more utility it has, the more compulsory participation becomes.
And this is precisely why so many people are making a fuss about Facebook's privacy policy and attitude towards privacy. Whether we all like it or not, Facebook has become a part of our global culture and it influences the way we think and behave. If part of its influence is to encourage you to stop caring about your privacy -- or even to simply refrain from reminding you to take care of it -- then we won't need to worry about anyone taking our privacy away; we, the society, will give it up on our own.
I came to mention exactly this same sentence. Maybe it's just that I'm out of the loop—but I'm 30, not a complete technological outsider, and I have never used Facebook or felt any pressure to do so. In what sense is this participation compulsory? I'd have liked to see some more elaboration on this principle that seems often to be taken for granted.
(I'd particularly be interested to hear an argument that couldn't also have been applied to AOL in the early '90's—I really did consider it vital to be there to communicate with out-of-state friends without enormous phone bills, but the notion nowadays of participation in AOL being compulsory is laughable.)
Facebook has become one of those things everyone mentions now and then. You can use it to keep in touch with high school friends (even those you didn't like in the first place), to exchange gossip, to kill time (if you think mindlessly watching TV is the worst you can do with your time, think again), etc. If everyone around you uses it for something and mentions it often enough, you'll feel left out of that. Those of us who can say "well, I'm glad to be left out of that" are a minority.
What I don't get is how that doesn't scare people. You would think that most people wouldn't want all of their life exposed, but maybe most people just don't get it yet.
This has nothing to do with 'social media'.
It may never reach other circles of your friends. In my own case, the circle of my FB friends that I know from technology do not overlap with the circle of friends that I know from sports very much. Something could easily go around one circle and not the other.
But FB merges them: Something on my wall is visible of all of my circles of friends. That's what I took from the article: Social Media kicks down the walls between circles of friends.
I still think this is way out of proportion. Let's use the example of your two circles. Assuming a few/some/most/all of your friends are in the same geographical area, how common is it to run into people from group A while out with group B (and thus open the possibility of group A people making comments you don't want group B to hear)? I know for me situations like this are very common. Just the other day I was leaving a restaurant with friends and ran into other completely unrelated friends who were sitting on the patio.
I don't think that just because Facebook is an easier way for your clueless/inconsiderate friends to let stuff slip is Facebook's problem, is all I'm saying. Facebook is just the highest profile, most widely used method of having a persona online. That comes with upsides and downsides -- if you aren't comfortable with the risks you can simply not partake.
Before social media, your siblings likely wouldn't hear a conversation between two of your friends when your name is mentioned.
One of the other important points to note is that people often have different circles of friends, who may or may not intersect, and even if you control what one group of friends knows, you can't control whether the other group of friends happens to let something slip. A situation that likely wouldn't arise IRL could happen due to the Kevin Bacon degrees of separation rule (sometimes a group of friends will intersect another group through the most bizarre circumstances).
edit: I took too long to type this out obviously. Ha.
Ever since I started adding gay people, I started getting friend requests from other random gay people (I'm assuming who use Facebook for dating).
The FUD among the mainstream press is getting a little tiresome and distracts from the real privacy issues on the site. Instead I'd prefer to see a concrete discussion of exactly what controls/features are broken - that's much more actionable on my end.
Disclaimer: I work for Facebook, but don't speak on their behalf.
I am gay and have noticed exactly what the author is talking about with myself and many others. I don't write anything ever on Facebook (sorry, it bores me to tears, I don't hold Facebook use against anyone though :), but it is completely obvious from my mutual friends, from the fact that my profile says who my boyfriend is, etc, that I am gay.
It is a simple fact that Facebook (and other social networks to a lesser extent), blur together social circles that otherwise never would have blended. For example, both sides of my extended family in totally different areas of the country friend me. These are people who I never bothered to formally come out to (because we aren't in reality that close). Simply accepting their invite is also an act of uncloseting. For someone who actually is in the closet, that degree of uncloseting is possibly very uncomfortable, and hard to know if you are even doing it (is it obvious or not from my mutual friends that I'm gay?). This absolutely is not a kind of thing that happened in the pre-social network world.
But, this also is not, in any way, because of Facebook privacy problems or controls or whatever. It is an inherent property of the kind of very transparent, mixed "all social circles are one social circle" model that Facebook (and other social network sites) have. Maybe other people don't notice this as much because a lot of gay people (especially closeted gay people) were more used to having extremely disjoint social groups which the online world suddenly makes dramatically less disjoint.
Anyway, if you actually read the whole article, the author writes about this as a positive thing, because it makes the closet much harder to choose, since the traditional problem of policing your life to your closet door closed becomes so much harder. The author interprets this in the end as being a social positive since coming out is in a way a political and socially influential act.