Should Facebook Have the Power to Decide Who Gets Banned?

I didn’t know that your Facebook account could be banned so easily. My own account is fine, but I discovered that many people have had their accounts disabled. Once your account is disabled (Facebook doesn’t tell you why), you disappear completely. No trace of you, like you never existed on Facebook. This leads me to question the current laws protecting consumers. I’ll discuss that a bit later; first, here are the results of my research on this topic.

When I Googled for “Facebook disabled”, I found many people complaining about their accounts getting disabled. One person created a whole website dedicated to it. This writer on The New York Observer described the social consequences of getting banned from Facebook. Craig Daitch on Advertising Age sounds quite angry about the whole thing.

I found many different reasons for the ban. One of the comments said that Craig Daitch repeatedly sent requests to one person to be a friend. The writer of the Observer article was banned because he cited a part of someone else’s profile on his blog. I also found someone getting banned from using a software utility that saves your Facebook contact info. Apparently, you could also get banned from sending too many private messages to people you don’t know, having too many friends, or just using Facebook too often. In most of the cases, it was Facebook’s automated script that flagged and disabled these accounts. So, be careful, if you are very passionate about promoting your political cause on Facebook.

Although it is important for Facebook to control certain user behaviors (such as Spammers and stalkers), it is also important that we users have some say in how such policies are established and enforced. You might say, “But Facebook is a business. They own it, so they should be able to do whatever they want.” Legally this is true, but I think the laws should be changed for any product where its primary value is derived from the sheer number of users. In many cases, the reason for the popularity is actually the popularity itself. People flock to it not because it is the best product, but because they feel socially pressured to. Microsoft Windows is the best example of this. Most people who use Windows are not particularly happy with it; they use it because they are required to at work, and the businesses use it because that’s what everyone else uses.

It’s like how English became the most popular language in the world. Many students around the world are required to study English in school, but it’s not because English is the best language; it’s simply because it is the most popular. In order to increase efficiency, stay competitive, and promote better communication, we often have to do what others do out of no choice of our own. When such a situation is established for a product or a website, the company who owns it should not have complete control over what they can do with their users. After all, they are deriving great values from us; the values that they didn’t create themselves. What we want in such a product isn’t so much the product they created but the other users. eBay, Craig’s List, Apple’s iTunes, and some Google products are good examples.

These products and websites take full advantage of so-called “user-generated content”. The vast majority of the contents we enjoy on Facebook are not generated by Facebook, we the users generate them. What a sweet business! In comparison, sites like NYTimes.com have to spend a lot of money generating their contents, but they don’t get any more money from their advertisers than Facebook does (for the same number of impressions and click-throughs).

Since we are all contributing contents to Facebook, we deserve to have some say in how Facebook regulates their users. For this to happen, the laws have to change (I think). This goes beyond the concept of monopoly. (Perhaps closer to the legal concept of “public figure”.) Even for a relatively small site, if the contents are user-generated, the users should have some say in its user policies. It’s only fair; don’t you think?

—posted by Dyske   » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page