I’ve spent the past six weeks or so writing about Facebook, which is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. As of right now, I’ve just hit 12,000 words, which — as my friend CJ Eller pointed out on Discord — is long enough to be an ebook. (Here’s a draft if you’d like to read it early, for whatever reason, as well as a copy of my notes, which are uh… huge.) I expected to take a long time from the beginning and be extensive, but when I promised that I’d have it done by the end of the week last week, I was wrong (obviously.) I wanted to take a break from writing the post, itself for a while and instead discuss some of the things I’ve learned in the process.
I happened to choose one of the most newsy times in the history of the social network to write about Facebook. The advertising boycott you may have heard about was/is organized primarily by two campaigns (which overlap at many levels:) Stop Hate For Profit and Change The Terms. Both have made the news this past week. Rashad Robinson, President of Color of Change — one of the organizations behind the latter — was interviewed by Nilay Patel on Tuesday’s episode of The Vergecast:
I know how this works. I’ve been Black my whole life. I know how this works because this is what happens when the police chief’s son breaks the law and the police chief tells his son, “You know, you’re putting me in a bad situation here.” It’s privilege, right? It’s because Facebook, at the incentive level, has an incentive problem. The same way the police chief has an incentive problem when his son is breaking the law and he doesn’t do anything to him the same way he would do something to the Black kid down the street.
The Columbia Journalism Review’s Matthew Ingram spoke with three figures involved in the movement on CJR’s Gallery platform: Jessica González, co-CEO of Free Press, Jenny Domino, legal advisor with the International Commission of Jurists, and Jillian York, director of international freedom of expression for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
