Evil Facebook

The SST had a number of articles on Facebook this week, with the normal revelations that both murder victim Sophie Elliott and her alleged killer had Facebook profiles, and  Sophie’s father surprised by how openly Sophie discussed her social life on Facebook.

Incidentially I was having drinks with a friend yesterday who used to work with Elliott’s accused killer, Clayton Weatherston.  She described the shock upon hearing what he had allegedly done but, in what may be a commentary on our modern times, her first reaction was to remove him as a friend in Facebook.  Yeah I guess I wouldn’t want someone up on murder having my personal details either.

Anyway one of the articles in the SST was one by Guardian journalist Tom Hodgkinson, whose online rant was impressive only for its size and intensity. He labelled Facebook as evil, mainly it seems because one of its investors is someone he labels a libertarian neocon, whatever that is.

Anyway Peter Griffin does a sensible rebuttal to Hodgkinson’s hysteria:

I could rebut Hodgkinson on each of the points he makes, but I really don’t see any point in that. Yes, the people who put money into Facebook are capitalists, they want to make money, just like the Rockefellers and the Waltons and Bill Gates wanted to make money.

Yes, they monitor your activity on Facebook and target adverts at you accordingly – so does Google, Yahoo and most other large web companies. That’s called a business model. Yes they may be in favour of borderless capitalism but in the age of globalisation, barring a few despots and dictators, who isn’t? As for the extreme libertarianism, who really cares about the philosophical inclinations of Facebook’s backers? It’s your choice to set up a Facebook account and your choice to put on it whatever you want. It’s free to use and you can use it as much or as little as you please. If Facebook moves beyond the comfort zone of its users as it did last year with the Beacon advertising platform, it will get its fingers burnt, again.

And why does Facebook have to replace all that talking and eating and dancing and drinking with your friends? I quite like the fact that I can quickly check up on what friends and acquaintances, many of them spread wide around the world on OEs or more permanent stints abroad, are getting up to.

Indeed.  Facebook is great for keeping in touch with overseas friends, and I probably use it more often than any other medium for arranging face to face catchups with local friends.