In Your Face, Facebook! And Out of Mine

OK, it’s been building for a while.

But when two of the most powerful women in the media both dissed Facebook (in the same week), I knew something was up. And down.

What’s up is media scrutiny of Facebook about privacy. What’s down is public perception of Facebook (if negative or questioning media coverage can be a proxy for negative public perception).

First of the powerful (in my media world) was Laura Mazzuca Toops, she of the insurance trade publication American Agent and Broker. Her blog post of May 6 2010 headlined “Are we due for a social media backlash?” charged: “Facebook alone is single-handedly doing a lot of harm to the concept of social media. On top of infuriating users by changing its ‘fan’ settings to ‘like’ and generating lawsuits by changing privacy settings, just this week there was another ‘security flaw’ that allowed users to view other people’s private live chats and friends requests.”

But if that wasn’t enough, here came Betty White on NBC’s culturally iconic “Saturday Night Live” on May 8 2010. The self-professed 88.5-year-old, in her opening monologue, credited Facebook for creating a groundswell of consumer sentiment for her to host the show. Then she said in her amusing way: “I didn’t know what Facebook was, and now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it sounds like a huge waste of time. I would never say the people on it are losers, but that’s only because I’m polite. People say ‘But Betty, Facebook is a great way to connect with old friends.’ Well at my age, if I wanna connect with old friends, I need a Ouija Board …. we didn’t have Facebook when I was growing up. We had phonebook, but you wouldn’t waste an afternoon with it.”

Then another: “In my way, seeing pictures of people’s vacations was considered a punishment.”

Zing.

Pretty funny of Betty White, but is she (and our lesser-known insurance trade editor) on to something?

Yes and no.

Ever since Facebook announced “Open Graph” (which allows it to share your Facebook profile across a wide range of other Web sites), it’s been privacy enemy #1. (It was pretty high on the list before that, too.) Noted columnist Chris O’Brien of SiliconValley.com, the Web portal of the San Jose Mercury-News: The latest changes have “sparked an intense backlash among some leading figures in the technology community over the privacy implications this sharing raises, although it’s unclear how widespread the discontent is.”

danah boyd (yes, no capital letters in her names) of the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the author of a Ph.D. dissertation “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics” was more blunt about Facebook’s latest moves: “People are being duped, tricked, coerced, and confused into doing things where they don’t understand the consequences.”

I happen to think that nature will find an equilibrium. In the meantime, lessons learned: Check your Facebook privacy settings (here’s a video showing how). And remember that the companies fueling social networking are for-profit businesses fueled by venture capital funding.

Meanwhile, Facebook is on the verge of reaching 500 million members, up from 120 million users in December 2008.