Planting Liberally

There's been a lot of buzz lately about Facebook "censorship" of free speech.  The Blackadder One case I wrote about a couple weeks ago was just an early warning sign of more trouble to come.  Recently Jon Pincus has been posting a series of diaries at Tales from the Net and Liminal States about his encounter with problems very similar to those Derek Blackadder ran into when he tried to organize workers on Facebook.   Pincus's posts include a very good trail of documentation of the problems he's encountering, which make this series one of the more interesting resources on Facebook censorship I've seen.  (As an aside: thoroughly and clearly documenting the problems you have with software is one of the best ways you can help your software or service provider diagnose and fix the problem.  But that's a rant for another day.)

As it turns out, Blackadder and Pincus are running up against Facebook's rather crude anti-spam filters, which, in certain cases, flag a discussion board post as spam if the post includes a link to a web page outside of Facebook.  While one can certainly sympathize with Facebook's desire to block spam on its services, it's easy to see how this kind of crude filtering technology (which is well behind the cutting edge of spam filtering software, by the way) can cause problems for those trying to organize Facebook users for legitimate purposes.  It does appear that Facebook isn't trying to block or suppress speech per se, since spam-filtered posts are often ensconced in a trail of other, non-filtered posts with very free-ranging discussion.  Still, the result of Facebook's crude filters is, as Pincus says, a chilling effect on political speech.

Now Pincus is extrapolating his experience into something which is hopefully more useful to the wider Facebook community - a guide for responding when Facebook censors your political speech, based at Wired's how-to wiki.  If you're having trouble with spam-filtering on Facebook, check out this resource, and if you have more to add, go ahead and do so.

I hope that this resource will lay the groundwork for later resources which help online activists fight draconian online corporate policies in a variety of contexts, like Google account shutdowns and the plethora of Beacon-like Facebook abuses likely to come in the future.  Eventually, I'd like to see a resource that provides top-notch practical and legal advice to social networking consumers, and perhaps serves as a hub for organization, in much the same way that Chilling Effects serves bloggers who are harassed by corporate cease-and-desist letters.  Extrapolating out a bit, such resources could be the starting point for a well-organized online consumer movement which I wrote about yesterday.

For now, though, if you are running into Facebook's spam filters, or if you are having similar problems at other social networking sites, check out the Pincus guide, and add on to it if you have more to contribute. 

I've been hearing a lot of buzz about online activism lately, ever since my post about the "Blackadder 1" case. People are increasingly chafing under a variety of Facebook policies. Recently it seems as though a bunch of Obama supporters have been running up against Facebook's sort-of stupid spam filtering system. Add to that complaints about mysterious deletion policies on Wikipedia - the site seems to support entries about white men and de-emphasize entries about people of color and women. There is a growing need for an army of progressive "online activists", whose job is to push the policies and content of big online sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace and others further to the left. danah boyd has been a vocal critic of Facebook along a number of lines, including their sluggishness in allowing users to totally obliterate their accounts, and has recently tagged Google for the opposite behavior (zapping entire accounts without much warning.)

There are really a wide variety of ways to pursue this goal, and they range all the way from the entrepreneurial (creating our own sites to compete with the big boys) to the activist-oriented (petitioning and emailing site administrators) to the legalistic (suing, using creative techniques to signal disagreement with legal terms), and perhaps, eventually, leading to legislation that goes beyond child predator crackdowns.

I am beginning to think that we need to view these online sites as something more than private arenas which are the sites of purely commercial transactions. They are increasingly becoming a type of public commons, and I think there is, or should be, cause for the government to regulate them, or for users to introduce democratic controls. I don't have the legal brainpower necessary to think up how we'd implement such a system, in terms of litigational or legislative action, but I'm certainly open to thoughts, suggestions and comments, including those of the "what a stupid idea" variety.

More generally, I'd love to hear your thoughts about activism directed at large websites as a whole.

Update: A quick thought - perhaps online activist should start a wiki to track complaints against Facebook, Google, et. al.?  That might be an interesting place to gather criticisms and begin to mount a more fundamental campaign than the quick-fix ad hoc campaignsonline activists tend to run these days.

A few weeks ago I took a look at examples of unions using Facebook, partially inspired by Change to Win's Smack the CEO Facebook application. Over the last few days, a mini-revolt of sorts has rolled through the Facebook labor activist community, and I've got good news: our side won!

The story begins with Derek Blackadder, a Canadian labor activist. Blackadder tried using Facebook to organize a group of workers as his friend, and ran up against Facebook's friend limits. Despite Derek's best efforts to stay within the bounds of Facebook's rules, he was eventually and summarily banned from the social network. John Wood, an activist in London, sprang to Blackadder's defense, posting to his blog about the story and eventually starting a Facebook group to petition for reinstatement. Eric Lee, who helps run LabourStart, sent an email to LabourStart readers encouraing them to join the group and email Facebook administrators.

The response was quick and effective. Within eight hours of Lee's email, over 2,400 Facebook users signed up for the group (membership now stands at 2,683). Within a day, Blackadder had been reinstated.

This brouhaha, happily resolved, comes right in the middle of a debate within the labor community about the value of using Facebook. Indeed, Lee previously wrote a critical post about the use of Facebook, Bandwagons and Buzzwords: Facebook and the Unions. Lee's post was largely structured around the limitations of Facebook groups, which were at the time the most obvious way of organizing campaigns on Facebook. Wood responded in kind, sort-of defending Facebook. Wood's point is that while Facebook has its limitations, unions can still reach a lot of people there, and that we're still in the early days of figuring out precisely how to do that.

In light of this most recent campaign to support Derek Blackadder, I think it's clear that at least some good can be accomplished on Facebook. I also think both Lee's and Wood's posts appear a bit dated. Now that Facebook has allowed organizations to create pages, to ease up on the limitations of emailing more than 1,000 people at a time, and has begun to allow its applications and platform to talk to one another, we will soon see that many of Lee's original frustrations with Facebook are not as relevant as they once were. Clearly, it's true that Lee is correct in arguing that using a third-party system primarily enriches the owner of that platform, but that doesn't mean that the use of the platform can't help unions at all.

More than that, I think labor activists need to think more broadly about how to use Facebook. I'm not sure why this is, but it seems to me that most labor organizers think of Facebook as a way to gather support for a political campaign. Both Lee and Wood draw examples from the world of political organizing, not labor organizing proper, in making their arguments. Few activists seem to recognize the potential for Facebook and other social networks to help organize workers, in other words, to do the heavy lifting of union organizing online.

To me it seems that social networking broadly, if not Facebook in particular, is a technology ideally suited to union organizing. It's a space largely removed from the control of the employer (unless your employer is Facebook or Microsoft, I suppose.) It's a viral medium which taps into pre-existing social connections, many of which are work-related. And it gives users a wide variety of mechanisms to express their thoughts about life, thereby giving them a chance to vent about work-related issues. Finally, Facebook is famously dominated by young folks, and, as we saw in the BLS numbers released on Friday, just under 5% of workers 16-to-24 are unionized.

Clearly, there is room for the labor movement to grow on social networks, and not just on Facebook. (In fact, with danah boyd claiming that there's a class divide between Facebook and MySpace users, perhaps especially not just on Facebook.) We are a far way from figuring out how to do that, but I have some thoughts, some of which I've outlined in my earlier series on using the Internet to strengthen the labor movement.

These days I think that the labor movement will need a many-tiered sructure of web sites and social network outreach mechanisms to effectively organize workers online. Each tier draws prospective members more deeply into the movement: the first tier is for members who are mildly supportive of the labor movement generally, the next tier is for members who are irritated with their workplace and vaguely interested in unionizing it, the next tier for members who are keenly interested in starting an organizing drive, and the final tier for workers whose workplace is under an active organizing or contracting campaign. Naturally, different kinds of mechanisms would be suitable for each tier. A simple site like Younionize might suffice for the first tier, while a much more sophisticated, action-driven microsite might be most appropriate for the last tier. Of course, the details have yet to be fine-tuned, but I think this basic structure adequately fits both the way in which many people interact with the labor movement, and the way many people use the web.

I'd love to hear more thoughts on how unions can use the web, social networking, or Facebook in particular, to organize workers. I think these are important tools which are thoroughly under-utilized, and I think their proper use could help continue the union movement's slow but hopefully steady expansion.

I just caught this story about MySpace's startup incubator in the New York Times (h/t Mashable). The incubator will go toe-to-toe with Facebook's fbFund, which funds companies creating Facebook applications.

I find all of this very exciting, since incubating progressive startups is exactly what I had hoped to do with my own company. (We're getting there, by the way, slowly but surely!) These startups are playing around, naturally, in very much the same waters that I imagine many liberal entrepreneurs like to get their feet wet - namely, new, online media. While it's unclear what kind of ventures MySpace's startup incubator will support, fbFund's focus on Facebook applications is clearly amenable to progressive causes. Facebook applications can be used to promote participation in liberal religions; to organize workers and labor activists to support unions; organize students on college or high school campuses; spread the use of progressive media; and on and on.

Naturally, I'm a little skittish about the fact that MySpace's startup incubator is ultimately owned by News Corp., the ultra-conservative parent of Fox News Channel.  Launching a progressive business under the wings of Rupert Murdoch is hardly a credible strategy for sustainable progressive movement growth.  Nevertheless, if the incubator doesn't take too much equity, it might be a good source of valuable revenue for progressive entrepreneurs.

In any case, I'm glad to see these kinds of organizations getting started.  Especially in light of the decline of Skyline Public Works, and particularly during an election year which is bound to produce a bumper crop of new ideas for building the progressive movement, we need to focus keenly on the problems facing progressive entrepreneurs.  Startup incubation is a valuable service for those entrepreneurs, and we should do what we can to make those services available for progressives.

This isn't exactly a full-blown labor links roundup, but I've recently found a couple examples of unions using Facebook in interesting ways, and I thought I'd share them here.

First is Change to Win's Facebook app, Smack the CEO. Written by CtW online communications director Jason Lefkowitz, Smack the CEO is a fairly straightforward game that allows you to compare your salary to that of prominent union-busting CEOs. When you sign up, the app asks for your salary. After signing up, you're asked to invite friends to join you in the game. As you recruit more friends to the application, their salaries add up; hopefully, after recruiting about a bazillion friends, your combined salaries add up to the CEO's. For disclosure's sake - I've worked with Jason a bit on fine-tuning the instructions and help text for this application, so I have a bit of a stake in its success (although not a monetary one). Although at first I was a little put off by the way it asks for your salary up front, more and more I think it's appropriate. The most popular Facebook applications are really, really simple - they basically involve ornamenting your profile, playing a game, or dressing up the traditional Facebook wall/poke mechanism. This application falls into the game genre squarely, and still it manages to a) educate Facebook users about the wage gap, and b) give users some idea of what union organizing is actually about - adding up enough of your friends to take on powerful people. That's pretty impressive, considering the fairly rigid formula for success as a Facebook application.

Incidentally, Jason and I have discussed using Facebook for more elaborate quasi-organizing. I'd really like to see something like that take shape. For example, I'd love to see a some kind of widget which allows coworkers to gripe about work online, perhaps with some anonymization to prevent recriminations at work. Or I'd love to see a "sign a union card" Facebook application, perhaps similar to Younionize but with the advantage of higher exposure. I've suggested similar kinds of approaches to online union organizing before, but I think it would take a fairly sophisticated online community builder to make it work, since my hunch is that most people are generally very cautious about openly discussing work gripes online.

The second example of unions using Facebook recently was this clever guerrilla event which takes advantage of Facebook's new Pages feature. The idea is to support the WGA strike by signing up as a fan of one of the shows which is currently on strike; I chose The Office. Once the friend request is approved, you can pursue all kinds of mayhem, light writing comments on the show's wall, or changing your user photo to some graphic which indicates your support of the writers. Of course, the idea is to embarrass the networks and encourage them to negotiate in good faith already. This is a pretty simple idea, but I think it could have some potential. Why not replicate this same tactic with WalMart, Verizon Wireless, American Eagle, or FedEx - all of which are currently targets of various union campaigns? Moreover, it seems to me that this kind of campaign opens up a new avenue in eActivism applications. Currently eActivism for non-profit advocacy organizations is limited to some pretty simple functionality - make a donation, signup for an email list, send an email to your congress person, and sign a petition (and actually, those last three actions are pretty much identical). But why not expand the capabilities of non-profit eActivism applications to include this kind of Facebook activism? It'll be interesting to see if the large non-profit web developers like Convio, Kintera or Grassroots Enterprise pick up the slack on this.

Finally, while it's not on Facebook, I encourage you to take American Rights at Work's FedUp with FedEx pledge: don't ship with FedEx this holiday season, unless they change their union-busting ways and allow their drivers to unionize.

Anything else interesting in the world of labor on the intertubes? Add a link in the comments!