This Note was originally posted on my Facebook personal page on January 19, 2012, regarding newly revived penalty approach by Facebook in the enforcement of certain policy I disagreed with and had written two previous Notes about in 2011.
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Several months after my two previous Facebook Notes on this subject, "Lighter, subtly disguised censorship is not a good replacement for censorship — even if the newer form is from Facebook" in February, and "Facebook’s way of treating Friend requests (as spam) keeps it level with politically censored social networks" in April, in September 2011 Facebook appeared to relax some of its rules regarding what types of Friend requests would be treated as spam — rules that had severely limited my ability to connect professionally on the social network — and began to allow users to send requests to persons they did not already know, with exercise of caution.
A week later I received an e-mail from a technical recruiter on behalf of Facebook stating, "… You would be a possible fit for our Software Engineering Team in California. Although relocation to California is required for these positions, we would love it if you would consider interviewing with us, to at least see if this door would be open to your future. We are searching for the most talented Computer Scientists in the world…".
I was quite pleased with this sudden friendly gesture from Facebook and so posted a few good words for the company’s recruiting efforts (https://www.facebook.com/fenggao0/posts/154678537956361).
But for myself, I wasn’t exactly that eager to join this company in spite of its much touted initial success and tremendous upswing in the world of business and finance, lest I end up in a position of compromise where I would have to surrender the independent blogging side of my life to the control of an authority — in this case that of a "Bootcamp" enforced company culture.
Yes, a Bootcamp is what Facebook calls its mandatory training for every engineering new recruit from an entry-level hire to a director. It’s not exactly crawling through mud under the hot California sun, only intensive training on programming, problem solving and team work ("Bootcamp: Growing Culture at Facebook", January 19, 2010, Ben Gertzfield), but it is very much company culture centered — "cultural indoctrination" is the term coined by its guru Andrew Bosworth, who happens to be Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s former Harvard teacher ("The grunts are geeks at Facebook Bootcamp", August 1, 2010, Jessica Guynn, LA Times).
So, thanks but no Bootcamp, even if the Facebook recruiter happened to have an enticingly uplifting name from my political blogging perspective: Marianne Dove.
After posting the good words on my personal Facebook page for Marianne Dove, the next day I unexpectedly received a spam warning over a Friend request to someone in the Stanford University area where the Facebook headquarters are located but working for Cisco Systems — having worked in Silicon Valley I knew the latter as the "Cisco Campus" ("San Jose referendum likely on Cisco campus, Vote Could Set Valley Growth Standard", December 13, 2000, John Woolfolk, Mercury News)
So the friction wasn’t over.
Not by a long shot. A few days ago on Friday, January 13, I found myself exactly where I had been on Easter Monday of 2011 — a day my previous Note on this subject had written about. For the second time I was slapped with a 14-day suspension of Friend-request privilege, over my Friend requests to persons Facebook deemed I didn’t know.
In that previous Note I mentioned the experience of having my Friend request to Aung San Suu Kyi deleted by Facebook for this kind of reason, only to have it resent later by me and kindly accepted by Madam Suu Kyi:
"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."
It so happened that on this Friday the 13th shortly before the latest Facebook suspension, I had written a congratulatory post on Madam Suu Kyi’s page, upon learning the news that the United States is restoring full diplomatic relation with Myanmar:
"Congratulations for the first major diplomatic advance since your re-entry into official Burmese politics. (https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=278511922201901&id=100001176982194)"
Now I have to wonder, if not Aung San Suu Kyi, whom should I congratulate for this diplomatic event? The Burmese military establishment that is the real power behind the civilian government whose release of political prisoners prompted the American good-will gesture as well as international praises in the news? ("Western leaders praise Myanmar for political prisoner amnesty", January 13, Deutsche Welle; and, "Praise for Myanmar release of political prisoners", January 14, Aye Aye Win, Associated Press)
Don’t get me wrong though, this is no longer the time of Ferdinand Marcos and Suharto in the 1960s and 1970s. Facebook didn’t exactly punish me for congratulating Aung San Suu Kyi, but for two Friend requests I sent later that day — it’s just that Ms. Suu Kyi kept appearing in the background of this history of my dispute with Facebook over its Friend-request policy and administration.
The two requests were sent to Masako Toki and Houston T. Hawkins, academic scientists in the field of international security, with each of whom I had only one mutual FB friend. Since my last open dispute about it Facebook has become more tolerant if a Friend request is made to a person the requester shares many FB friends with, but I am sure the relative lack of mutual FB acquaintances wasn’t the only reason for which Facebook handed down this latest penalty because I had made other networking requests in similar situations.
It so happened that my good Facebook friend, Prof. Avner Cohen in that field, made an interesting comment on my photo (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1787550946165&set=a.1787549746135.53535.1761327938&type=3&theater) moments after I had posted on Aung San Suu Kyi’s page, and I in turn commented on Avner’s post about Homeland Security receiving green light to monitor American journalists (https://www.facebook.com/cohenavner/posts/212248002198151). At this point the Facebook profile of Avner’s colleague Masako Toki at Monterey Institute of International Studies popped up among "People You May Know" on my screen, and not long afterwards Houston T. Hawkins of the Los Alamos National Laboratory added his comment on Avner’s post:
"Where is Benjamin Franklin when you need him?"
I am no Ben Franklin, so all the more reason to network professionally. But the trouble is that about two weeks earlier Facebook had given me a 7-day Friend-request suspension for sending requests to persons I didn’t know and I in response sent in the feedback that my requests hadn’t been spam at all, so now despite my patience waiting the last one out, I was slapped with an escalating, 14-day suspension — a sequence of penalties just like what had prompted my two previous Notes to argue openly with Facebook.
Sending multiple requests to persons I didn’t know!? How did Facebook know, almost right away and precisely, whether I had known these two persons?
At the time of the two previous open disputes, Facebook’s suspension penalty had come with only the declaration that sending Friend requests to persons one didn’t know constituted spamming, i.e., without the facts to back it up. So at the finish of my previous Note in April of 2011, I guessed that Facebook did collect some sort of complaints from those who did not wish to receive Friend request:
"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."
But for the latest penalties Facebook seems to have gotten better at justifying itself, claiming it received feedback that I had sent multiple Friend requests to persons I did not know.
Now just like earlier, if the persons receiving the requests immediately contacted Facebook to complain about it then Facebook did have a factual basis for, and I have less of a bone to pick with, the suspension. However for the two academic friends of Avner’s receiving my requests on Friday the 13th, I doubt that my reputation was that bad in their eyes or that they were that nitpicky about receiving it; and if I am right, then Facebook has built an elaborate individual user profile that contains other, accumulated personal information — feedback from previous Friend requests included — which it uses to determine whether a Friend request is to someone the requester doesn’t know, and to decide when to begin or escalate penalties.
Sounds McCarthyish, doesn’t it, or at least more than a Bootcamp of the willing?
In my case, my hunch is that the two FB friends of Avner Cohen’s being in the global security field, Avner himself notwithstanding, had to do with the suspension penalty escalating on this Friday the 13th, and that consequent to it my requests to them were deleted by Facebook. It had happened the same way with the deletion of my request to Aung San Suu Kyi when a couple of other requests were accused as spam, and that and related issues prompted my first Note to openly argue with Facebook.
When the recent Friend-request suspensions occurred I was brought to the Facebook Community Standards page to be refreshed with the rules. There, at the end of a long list of prohibited behaviors that include "Threats", "Bullying & Harassment", "Sex & Nudity", etc., is the category of "Phishing & Spam":
"We take the safety of our members seriously and work to prevent attempts to compromise their privacy or security. We also ask that you respect our members by not contacting them for commercial purposes without their consent."
What exactly is spamming is not spelled out in this official standards policy, and I think it has been evolving as Facebook sees fit. The policy does confirm that users can now try to make new connections, but then it may carry a risk of "Harassment":
"We take action when private individuals are bullied or persistently contacted against their wishes. While we encourage you to make meaningful new connections, please keep in mind that contacting strangers or people you’ve never met in person can be a form of harassment."
Like I’ve said in my previous Note, I rarely resend a Friend request if one has been rejected or dropped by the other person rather than deleted by Facebook. Clearly when the user is encouraged to make meaningful connections, a request to someone the user hasn’t met shouldn’t be treated as harassment unless the receiver has a problem with it.
At the very least, I don’t see any rule that contacting persons in professionally sensitive fields when the requester isn’t strictly one of them can be a possible threat and is therefore more likely a spam — that should be for the relevant laws to decide, maybe for Homeland Security if the concern for security becomes so overbearing as Avner, Houston T. Hawkins, I and others were discussing around Avner’s post.
Otherwise Facebook is being overly intrusive into the social contents of its users’.
As a matter of fact, I have suspected this about Facebook all along, beginning a year ago in January 2011 when its typical 2-day Friend-request suspension began to escalate to a 4-day length.
On January 4, 2011, I became FB friends with a number of persons, mostly professional women in Silicon Valley, active with the Silicon Valley Women Federation for the publicity of which I posted a link the day before (https://www.facebook.com/fenggao0/posts/136596769735447). Among them were Aileen Glasgow, Lina Mei, Vicki Young, Julian Xue, Jiayu Jeng and Diana Ding, who accepted my Friend requests despite having no prior relationship and few mutual FB friends at the time, and have become my very good friends in the Facebook community.
But on that same day I was also given a Friend-request suspension of a 4-day duration, prior to which I had received two or three 2-day ones, for sending requests to persons Facebook judged I didn’t know. Among this batch of requests I had sent were a few that were then rejected, or had not been accepted but then deleted by Facebook. But who would have complained to Facebook, or how could Facebook conclude its way? I began to wonder, as my prior personal acquaintanceship — or lack of — with all of them, who accepted or not, had been about the same.
That evening I went to one of my Chinese blogs, this one on Sina.com in Beijing, and realized that one of the persons who didn’t accept, a prominent Chinese American professional woman based in Houston, Texas, was also a Sina blogger and her visit to my Sina blog early that morning — Beijing time which meant January 3 in the United States — left a visiting record — the way some of the major Chinese blog sites has been set up when a blogger is logged in.
My somewhat presumptive, but well-educated sense is that Ling Luo (罗玲), originally from China, whose Sina blogger name is 丹奇, didn’t like something she saw in my Facebook pages — three community pages in addition to my personal page — or on my Sina blog, and the Facebook authority was notified. According to her profiles on Facebook and on her organizational website, Ms. Luo was Chairwoman of US China Relations Foundation based in Houston, Advisor to Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, and Asian Campaign Committee Chairwoman for U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.
That could explain why Facebook’s escalating penalties on my Friend requests have all come with one form or another of political context, about which I felt obliged, from time to time, to write an open Note to express myself.
Some may say that it had most likely been a coincidence, no reason why such a high-level political person would bother to complain about another person’s blogs and pages she had come upon because of a Facebook friendship request.
Well, in certain part of grassroots and community politics the affiliation to an established political power is sometimes what matters. It so happened that a much more prominent Chinese woman with close affiliation with Bill and Hillary Clinton, leading Chinese environmentalist Sheri Liao, in her previous career had done graduate study under my late father at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, as mentioned in one of my blog posts ("忆往昔，学历史智慧 (Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom) – Part 4") — so a Clinton connection isn’t out of the ordinary from my vantage point.
In fact, as Ling Luo campaigned in Houston for Hillary Clinton in 2008, Sheri Liao received the Global Citizen Award from the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, and appeared with Bobby Kennedy, Jr. — himself in a presidential campaign — as well as Houston Mayor Bill White, in a special panel discussion at the Clinton Global Initiative ( "Clinton Global Citizen Awards", Clinton Global Initiative; and, "Kennedy at Clinton Global Initiative", September 26, 2008, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for President).
Some may then say it’s still doubtful that Secretary Hillary Clinton’s political entourage would be so fussy about an independent blogger they hardly knew or had anything to do with.
Well, it’s not so much about Clinton as about the affiliated.
It so happened that Ms. Ling Luo’s own life path during her younger career resembled that of my late father’s decades earlier: both grew up in Jiangxi province just north of Guangdong province, went to Guangdong’s capital Guangzhou to pursue higher education, and then lived in that city of my hometown and worked in a field close to the government apparatus.
But the similarities end there. My father studied Chinese, became an academic specializing in the history of Marxist Philosophy, and toward the later part of his life became a semi-independent thinker — as much as he could in the political environments that he was in. Ms. Luo studied English, worked for the government and for a company, then in the 1990s entered the United States Consulate General in Guangzhou and worked her way to become the chief administrative officer overseeing administration and human resources, according to her own account; besides her prolific blog posts, she has been interviewed in depth by the Chinese media about the successes in her career and in her campaigns for Hillary Clinton and other American politicians, which included helping Hillary Clinton win the big state of Texas to be in a strong position to compete with Barack Obama, and helping Annise Parker win her mayoral campaign to succeed Bill White ("罗玲自述助选希拉里幕后故事", April 7, 2008, 信息日报; "A Chinese American’s Political Adventure", December 6, 2008, Ling Luo; and, "罗玲：跨越美国政坛", April 2011, 朱启, 中国女性 women of China).
In the 1980s when I went to Berkeley for my graduate study, I obtained my visa from that same U.S. Consulate General office in Guangzhou — an important step in my career and life as much as my independent blogging and Facebook posting is now.
So if Facebook’s administrative control and punitive measure can smell McCarthyish to me, I probably don’t even know the true brand.
What I do notice and is intriguingly interesting to me, is that in my past student life I have had exactly two class head teachers with the same family name Luo (罗) as Ling Luo, one in elementary school and one in middle school and both times, i.e., during the reigns of these teachers, I found myself in the middle of a political incident with some potential risk, and with my classmate friend Ling (凌) having something to do with it ("Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 3)").
Further nosiness in this direction would be off topic, but the Chinese word 罗 can mean a "trap net", or perhaps even "Hell’s Angel(?)". Control of the authority can be ubiquitous, but today I can at least do independent blogging, worrying about Facebook’s penalties but not getting closed down.
Anyways, in early January 2011 I took the time to read some of Ling Luo’s Sina blog posts, and was impressed by her clarity in expressing herself and by her sense of conviction in introducing her American cultural environment to the Chinese readers.
One of her blog stories shocked me. On February 9, 2008, the year of her campaign for Hillary Clinton, Chinese student Zhiyuan "Ryan" Chen (陈植渊), president of the Chinese student body at Texas Southern University, a student volunteer leader in Ling’s political campaigns and a core member of the Houston fan club for the Chinese superstar, Houston Rockets basketball center Yao Ming, was shot dead just outside a Chinese restaurant where he and other Yao Ming fan club members were having post-game dinner, in what appeared to be a robbery by two Hispanic men after Ryan stepped outside to field a phone call. The murder is probably still unsolved today.
Two little things stood out to me as particularly outrageous and sad in this story: during the NBA basketball game that February 9 evening Ryan had played a "Good-luck Doll", an official mascot of the 2008 Summer Olympics to be held in Beijing, under the glare of primetime national TV broadcast, while then Congressman Nick Lampson’s Asian assistant Ling Luo presented an official commemoration to the Yao Ming fan club; then after the game was won by the Rockets, Ryan invited Ling to go to the fan club dinner, but fearing her high heels too difficult to walk in to get to Ryan’s car in the parking lot Ling declined, and phoned Ryan the next morning only to find Houston Police Department Homicide at the other end of the line — Ling then saturated herself with the feeling of regret that having Ryan give her a ride home could have changed the outcome of that fateful evening ("中国留学生陈植渊在休斯敦中国城遇害详细经过", February 14, 2008, Zhiyuan Chen 陈植渊纪念专辑; and, "魂兮，归来！ ——-痛悼陈植渊", August 2008, 丹奇).
Some weeks later I went back to Ling Luo’s Sina blog, and saw a new and prominently featured blog post about a latest tragedy that had struck several days after my first visit. Ling did a Chinese translation for her husband Roger Snyder’s article dated January 9, titled "FREE SPEECH IN AMERICA AND ITS CONSEQUENCES — A POLITICAL VIEW", expressing outrage at, and discussing the political contexts of, a mass shooting the day before in Tucson, Arizona that wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and killed several others — including 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green and federal judge John McCarthy Roll.
I made a mental note that the day of the Gabby Giffords shootings, atrocity committed by a young white man named Jared Lee Loughner, happened to be the 35th anniversary of the death of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, who had worked with U.S. President Richard Nixon to start diplomatic relations between the United States and China, something the name of Ling Luo’s Houston-based organization aptly described, and that Rep. Giffords then began her hospital rehabilitation in Houston, where Ling was Asian adviser for Gabby’s fellow Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee.
Life can have a lot of coincidences.
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