In the beginning, both Facebook and Bebo used the same word to refer to a user’s individual page: wall. Before chat-functions and newsfeeds, social media was all about posting messages, photos, and drawings on one another’s walls. Public still, but personal too. About connectivity rather than projectivity.
After Facebook hit its stride, Bebo became the social media equivalent of black death Europe (Bebonic plague, anyone?). Much like the citizens of Pompeii were immortalised in pumice and ash, Bebo Stunnahz from 2005-2007 were frozen in time as their emo-fringed, traintrack-toothed, hastily forgotten selves with words like ‘Rawr’ and ‘rand0m’ etched like epitaphs into dead profiles.
We gave up our Flashboxes and our Top 16s for something more minimalistic yet far more all-encompassing. We traded our self-designed homes in the suburbs for Soviet shoebox apartments, each user consigned to that same colourblind blue and white design.
Your own FBI file
Bebo was fun. Bebo was colourful. Bebo was customisable skins and 20 About Me sections. Bebo didn’t demand your real name and indulged you in making quizzes for your friends to take to see who knew you best. Facebook can, at times, feel like logging into your own FBI file.
Is there anyone in the world who feels comforted rather than deeply unsettled when their newsfeed is punctuated by ads for products you’ve been discussing in a chat-box that you’re really trying to pretend is private? Or when your new coworkers turn up in your ‘Suggested friends’ even though you haven’t told Facebook where you work? Every time one of these things jumps out at you, it’s like when a stranger somehow knows your last name.
The closest thing that Bebo had to a newsfeed resembled Facebook’s ticker bar. A real-time, un-manipulated, chronologically-ordered stream of updates that now doesn’t exist anywhere across anywhere across Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. All of these sites now use an algorithm to decide what its users see first much in the same way newspapers will put the day’s top story (exactly the same phrase Facebook use) on the front page. The key difference? Newspapers are edited by humans. Facebook has turned over that responsibility to a programme with no sense of responsibility.
With Facebook taking up the pole position of proxies through which people access the news, major media outlets are dancing to the tune of a privately-designed algorithm, the appropriateness of which has been called into serious question. A 2016 headline is stacked with SEO-friendly words that help a story climb the newsfeed, often at the expense of accuracy.
Facebook’s algorithm
When you share an article you find to be particularly illuminating, Facebook’s algorithm will then notify people who have previously expressed interest in those kinds of articles i.e. those who vehemently agree, and those who vehemently disagree. As a system for finding new perspectives, it is terminally flawed.
We’re all fed the same informational meals in the form of whatever our mutual friends have assigned the most likes, thereby arousing the algorithm sufficiently to ejaculate the holiday photos or engagement announcements into our newsfeed breakfast. This is exactly why the Washington Post has called on Facebook to hire an executive editor.
Facebook allows its users to temporarily set their Newsfeed to “Most Recent” before reverting to the “Top Stories” display without the user’s permission. It is impossible to make this change permanent, as Facebook puts its faith in the wisdom of the algorithm to work out your preferences by ignoring a preference you’ve explicitly stated.
Say what you will about Bebo, but those guys put you in driver’s seat. They literally let you list out your top 64 friends, something which in retrospect is incredibly messed up, but they let you do it. They gave you Luvs to share, and your Luv that didn’t have to be earned like Facebook’s zombification of the original. Nobody had to jump through any hoops and make a simultaneously self-deprecating but boastful post about a promotion or a graduation in order to win one.
Fake news
Facebook has faced a recent bombardment of criticism for the proliferation of fake news across its platform, concerns that Mark Zuckerberg has dismissed as almost inconsequential — despite the inescapable density of articles that anyone with a shred of common sense should be able to identify as total bullshit.
It hasn’t helped that many major news sources have reported that Facebook built a tool for censoring real news in order to wedge themselves back into the Chinese digital marketplace. Taken together, these two stories suggest that Facebook isn’t too worried about the fake news epidemic. After all, they’re just the platform — they are the television set, not the news network. Only problem is that they’re a television set that, thanks to an algorithm decides what station you watch for you, which is a bit of a problem, particularly if the people responsible won’t admit it’s a problem.
Until Facebook is prepared to scrape itself clean of fake news, give its users more control over how they use it, and at least have the decency to pretend it doesn’t know all of our secrets: we want Bebo back.
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