@ribo

At the request of the UK government, Facebook took down 30 pages linked to prison inmates who were, according to the authorities, behaving inappropriately on the site, including taunting victims’ family members. It took them 48 hours to do it.

In itself this fact is worrisome. At the request of a government Facebook decides, at its own judgment, to curtail the individual freedom of 30 people (for though they are in prison and they are crime offenders, they are still people), without the intervention of a judge to guarantee the respect of fundamental rights. It seems that victims, government and Facebook (!) are the new authorities with regards to online freedom.

But it gets worse, for these new authorities are taking their self-assigned responsibilities very seriously, according to their declarations reported on today’s International Herald Tribune (print-version).

Gary Trodwell of Families United, a group founded by relatives of young murder victims, said:

When someone is convicted of a crime he loses his civil liberty through sentencing…We say he should lose his cyberliberty as well.”

Will Mr. Trodwell run for Parliament to get that law passed?

Even worse, John Straw commenting on the excessive time that took Facebook to take off the pages (48 hours!), he said:

What we’ve got to do is set up a better system with Facebook so that if they get a notice from us that this site is improper the all tehy have to do is not make a judgment about it but press the delete button”

What about given the same powers to China or Iran, Mr. Straw?

Even, even worse, Facebook wants to become the online sheriff, or at least that’s what Sophie Silver, a Facebook spokeswoman, is implying when she affirms that:

Facebook is absolutely committed to keeping its sites safe and clean…[the web could] be a wild an unruly place. Facebook tries to put some rules and protocols on top of the unruly Web.”

Wow, good thing we have Facebook, don’t you think? Otherwise we’ll be all online raped and smuggled by the scary people populating the “wild and unruly” online world!

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Do you know Beth Noveck? She is the xxxx in the Obama administration. She was also the director of the Institute for Information Law and Policy and New York Law School, one of the creators of Peer-to-Patent, and the writer of the book Wiki Government. It is because of the latter that I write this post.

In the book she says:

In devising these practices [open and collaborative consultation of experts online], we have to remain open to all forms of technology, even those that initially seem trivial or irrelevant. Potentially, ubiquitous social networking technologies like Facebook and MySpace, in which participants “friend” and “poke” those in their personal networks, can teach us more about the idiom of participation than the legalistic practices in which so few of us actually participate (page 143, stress added)

We not only have to remain open to these technologies, but we may be relying on them much more than on any other. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter (and others) have developed a set of social networking technologies that are applicable not only to making and keeping friends, but also to a diverse variety of activities, including government. Socialisation is a human constant. Very rarely what we do is isolated from our social environment. Our actions are fed by it and we feed it in turn. Therefore, the change in the dimensions of socialisation by new technologies has consequences beyond our friendships. Using these same technologies for citizen collaboration in government may be a solution to many of the problems we have experienced in participative platforms until now (e.g. low participation, spam, trolling, redundancy, low quality…). For this we’ll need that those that have developed and implement them understand that there might be a business opportunity here.

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