Facebook face-off

Interesting article, although I do think that Facebook groups do have their uses, even if a worryingly large number of people want Jeremy Clarkson to be the British Prime Minister. And I wouldn't take some of the Facebook groups as seriously as Mr Guest does.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/pete_guest/2007/10/facebook_face-off.html

Facebook is not yet a medium for informed debate: by and large the groups are remarkably badly informed, populated through whimsy or a desire to make a superficial statement. It is the Gen-Y equivalent of wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt, but without even the capital expenditure. Most users join because their mates invite everyone they know to join whatever the group du jour is, usually the one with the most amusing name. This is not in any way a substitute for political action, and it is rarely, if ever, translated into real-world effects.

Thankfully. Close to half a million people are apparently part of a global movement for physical assaults on irritating pedestrians as part of the "I Secretly Want To Punch Slow Walking People In The Back Of The Head" group (define "secretly"!).

But the almost total inability of the media to objectively consider the statistics before declaring a Facebook group "a movement" is a more worrying trend. At best, it is simple laziness - an easy, stop-gap example of consumer disaffection that can be plugged into any story. Bad reporting, perhaps, as a simple number on Facebook cannot be said to be in any way statistically rigorous. Of the quoted numbers, not all are even necessarily supportive of the "motion", because it is not uncommon for users to join in order to attempt to put up some counter-argument (though, since bloggers' law applies, they are, of course, shouted down). There is no tally of how many people rejected or ignored invitations to join the group, and even if there were, there is likely to be significant sample bias ... you generally only invite like-minded people.

Internet gossip (and that is what, by-and-large, Facebook groups are) works on an odd system of correlations between sites and ideas, on self-reference and self-promotion, and its trends are caused by snowball effects that act as a distorting mirror for the real world - perhaps concurrent, but by no means accurately portrayed. Draw your own parallels with Cameronite politics.