This Note was originally posted on my Facebook personal page on April 26, 2011, in response to escalating penalties in the enforcement of certain Facebook policy I disagreed with. After my posting it and sending a link as feedback to Facebook, the situation seems to have improved as an escalated penalty of 14-day length has partially eased after 7 days.
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Spamming other users is a bad internet and social-networking behavior, but while most serious users can agree on that what constitutes spamming isn’t so clear-cut.
Yesterday wasn’t a good Easter Monday as I got slapped with a 14-day suspension from making Facebook friend requests; however that makes it an appropriate time–again–to discuss the subject.
Having visited social networking sites in China and regularly posted on several blog sites there, it is clear to me that that country has political censorship in a ‘stereotypical’ sense: politically offensive postings run the risk of being taken down or the blogs removed, and some of the blogging sites simply outline a list of requirements emphasizing what constitute prohibited political contents for each blogger to adhere to.
Outside of the political censorship rules, these Chinese social-networking sites and blogging sites, where bloggers can make friends like on Facebook, typically do not have restrictions on whom users may make friend requests to, although obviously the site administrators keep an eye on user behavior and resolve complaints.
In contrast, for a long time Facebook stipulated that users could only make Friend requests to people whom they personally know. I once compared that policy to "prohibition" (like with liquor), in the sense that as a business venture Facebook was valued at many billions for its social networking power and potential yet no one on Facebook was supposed to befriend anyone not already acquainted:
"I have previously expressed that because FB’s successful commercial valuation is based on networking potential mostly outside of people connecting to whom they already know, FB’s operational policy should be consistent with it, i.e., use behavior-based anti-spam criteria. Making "prohibition" money isn’t that glorious." (my Jan. 20 comment on Debra F. Cole’s note "FB and the situation with Privacy Issues")
Prior to the above comment I had submitted several Facebook feedbacks in response to 2-day and 4-day suspensions I had received, to make the point that professional networking should be valid on Facebook and anti-spam criteria for Friend requests should be behavior based rather than prior personal-connection restricted.
Then when I was slapped with my last suspension, this time for 7 days, I noticed that my messages to Facebook seemed to have gotten through but then my own predicament was getting worse. So I posted a more serious Note about it, "Lighter, subtly disguised censorship is not a good replacement for censorship — even if the newer form is from Facebook", on February 16.
Being fair, in that Note I admitted what appeared to be improvement by Facebook allowing more room for Friend requests:
"… I have noticed a professional networking-oriented improvement on the part of Facebook, as this time when I am notified of the 7-day suspension the advice is to only send to persons whom I think are likely to accept, whereas the last time it was to only send to persons I personally knew — I submitted several feedbacks to Facebook to argue about this."
I also stated unambiguously that I used Facebook for professional networking and that such Friend requests should not be treated as spam:
"…
Then today while reviewing at Facebook profiles suggested to me on my personal page I made two Friend requests, to Robin Wright of the U.S. Institute of Peace and Canadian TV anchor Beverly Thomson. To my unpleasant surprise, Facebook refused to allow the requests, stating that I should only make requests to whom I know; with two requests in sequence disallowed (not declined as they were not sent to the other persons) I was involuntarily logged out of Facebook and, upon re-login, given a penalty of 7 days without the privilege to make Friend requests as well as the warning that the suspension can be extended for longer if I continue to spam and do not send only Friend requests that I think are likely to be accepted.
And worse, although I did not agree to cancelling my pending Friend requests Facebook automatically deleted all of them — the request to Aung San Suu Kyi included of course.
The truth is that none of my Friend requests has been spam, although not all of them to persons I personally knew — I either knew about them well enough because of my professional interests or studied their Facebook profiles and internet profiles carefully to determine common interests.
The two cases of prohibited Friend requests today are good examples. The U.S. Institute of Peace’s fan page is among the pages I not only "LIKED" but commented on quite a few times, and among my Facebook friends who kindly accepted my requests are a large number of outspoken political commentators such as Bob Woodward, David R. Gergen, David Ignatius and David Frum. Similarly, there are many Canadian TV journalists and authors who have accepted my requests to be Facebook friends, including Robert Fife, Amanda Lang, Annette Goerener, Jill Krop, Stevie Cameron and Peter C. Newman — and Steve Paikin has just became a FB friend yesterday. I don’t see a reason why my Friend requests today should not be forwarded to the two persons for them to decide."
In just over a year’s time of my active Facebook life, I have made several hundred Facebook friends through my professional-networking approach, while in about three months’ time I have made a dozen also friends on my Chinese blogging sites using the same approach. The pace of making friends is slower on the Chinese sites because there users tend to be wary of politically sensitive contents and many of the users also use aliases rather than real identities; however I have never encountered an administrative problem doing it there, in contrast to the half-a-dozen or so suspensions of Friend-request privilege I have received from Facebook.
As in my earlier passages quoted, the case of my Friend request to Aung San Suu Kyi is a great example.
Like people around the world I knew about and had tremendous respect for Madam Suu Kyi but I did not know her personally. In that last, 7-day suspension my pending request to her was automatically deleted by Facebook without my agreement; when the 7-day suspension was over I resent that Friend request, and Madam Suu Kyi has since kindly accepted me as a Facebook friend–even though she did not know me personally but acquainted only through my Facebook page (and my other pages linked to it).
I am proud of achieving something symbolically significant as in my Facebook friendship with Madam Aung San Suu Kyi, something that was once disallowed by not only political censorship but also Facebook’s prohibitive Friend-request-as-spam rule.
Nevertheless, given the suspensions could some of my Friend requests have indeed been complained about as spam by other Facebook users?
Some can and may have been, but a question is what spamming is. With the current official rule anyone receiving a Friend request from someone whom he or she doesn’t already know can complain to Facebook about being spammed.
I myself do not treat Friend requests that way but carefully review them to determine common interests, and as I have said in the passages quoted earlier I myself do not send out requests at random but carefully pre-evaluate each Facebook profile that gets my attention to determine shared interests.
Of the Friend requests I sent out typically no more than 10% were rejected, typically at least 1/3 – 1/2 and sometimes most were accepted within several weeks, and the rest were apparently put on hold by those who received them. I very rarely resent a request to someone who had earlier rejected or dropped it–doing it would be at risk of being legitimately viewed as spamming in my view because it is sent to someone who has said no.
After each Facebook suspension I would resend some of the previously pending requests deleted by Facebook–such as with my request to Aung San Suu Kyi. As a result over the long run the majority of my Facebook requests have been accepted, and I only have 460 friends as of today so I really haven’t sent out that many Friend requests in my entire Facebook life.
But I did realize that it might not be Facebook’s automatic screening criteria alone that treated a Friend request as spam and several such as deserving of a suspension of Friend-request privilege; the escalating lengths of the suspensions even when infrequent, smacked of other motives and prompted me to say this the last time:
"… the way Facebook determines the likelihood and intervenes is still too judgmental, and the longer suspension feels retaliative to me, so I am still critical."
In the two months since I have not neglected from, and if anything have been more conscientious about, pre-evaluating my Friend requests, and so when slapped with a 14-day suspension yesterday–twice the lengths of the last one–for two requests to young professionals in the Washington D.C. area that Facebook automatically judged as spam, I have become more serious about it that Facebook indeed had prior feedbacks it viewed as spam complaints to act as basis for such dramatic escalation of suspension length–escalation that begins to threaten my use of Facebook as a good professional-networking tool.
(To be continued in another Note)
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