Pull the plug on Facebook

The massively popular social networking site Facebook has been in the news a lot lately. The site, which currently boasts about 60 million users, found itself at the center of a major controversy surrounding an application called Beacon, which showed Facebook users which products their friends were buying online. This enormously invasive form of marketing was too much for many of the site's users, who organized a massive protest that forced Facebook to drop the application.

But apparently, this episode was indicative of just one aspect of Facebook's particular awfulness. This morning, I received an email from LabourStart, an excellent online resource for union movement news and a center for online union activism, detailing how Facebook banned a prominent Canadian union organizer from its site because he was using it to organize workers. As the email puts it:

"Derek got a note from the good book, telling him he was trying to add too
many friends, and should calm down a bit, or else. Now as a union organiser,
he’s quite likely to want to add lots of friends - it’s kind of what he does. So
he waits a bit and tries again, and is told he can’t add any more at the moment
and to wait and try later. Fair enough. He waits a bit more and tries again,
same message. By now, he’s probably frothing at the mouth and muttering "must
organise, must organise," so he has another go to see if the coast is clear, and
promptly gets himself a ban. That being a ban from Facebook itself - no more
profile, no access to the stuff he’s built up, no appeal."

Why would Facebook's administrators care whether or not someone was using their site to organize workers? Well, it turns out that the company's top executives and investors are right-wing libertarian fantasists. According to a recent piece by Tom Hodgkinson in the Guardian, Peter Thiel, the man responsible for putting up the money necessary to get Facebook off the ground, is an uber-libertarian venture capitalist whose ultimate goal is to use the Internet to free capital from any and all restrictions. "You can't have a workers' revolution to take over a bank if the bank is in Vanuatu," says Thiel. Ugh.

The piece also details the various ways in which Facebook is an eager handmaiden of the American military-industrial complex and a supporter of a domestic surveillance state. Thus, I am canceling my Facebook account and I call on everyone else to do the same.