Facebook is gaslighting the web. We can fix it. - Anil Dash

Anil Dash says that Facebook is gaslighting us: they are feeding us false information to make us doubt our own reason, and specifically false information about their own intentions and actions. Specifically Facebook is spinning stories about why it is changing various policies — like Open Graph, sharing content in Facebook via RSS, and others.

Anil Dash via dashes.com/anil

Facebook has moved from merely being a walled garden into openly attacking its users’ ability and willingness to navigate the rest of the web. The evidence that this is true even for sites which embrace Facebook technologies is overwhelming, and the net result is that Facebook is gaslighting users into believing that visiting the web is dangerous or threatening.

In this post I intend to not only document the practices which enable this attack, but to also propose a remedy.

[…]

This is the network of services designed to warn users about dangers on the web, one of the most prominent of which is Stop Badware. From that site comes this description:

Some badware is not malicious in its intent, but still fails to put the user in control. Consider, for example, a browser toolbar that helps you shop online more effectively but neglects to mention that it will send a list of everything you buy online to the company that provides the toolbar.

I believe this description clearly describes Facebook’s behavior, and strongly urge Stop Badware partners such as Google (whose Safe Browsing service is also used by Mozilla and Apple), as well as Microsoft’s similar SmartScreen filter, to warn web users when visiting Facebook. Given that Facebook is consistently misleading users about the nature of web links that they visit and placing barriers to web sites being able to be visited through ordinary web links on their network, this seems an appropriate and necessary remedy for their behavior.

Read the whole piece. Important.

How Facebook is ruining sharing | Molly Rants - Molly Wood via CNET News

Molly Wood nails the reason that Open Graphs will turn Facebook into Overshare Central:

Molly Wood via CNET News

Let’s say all of us jump on the Open Graph bandwagon and allow app after app to passively post our every Web move. We’ll simply have opened the door to a horde of zombie posts that will overwhelm our interest and deaden us to the possibility of organic discovery.

Sharing and recommendation shouldn’t be passive. It should be conscious, thoughtful, and amusing—we are tickled by a story, picture, or video and we choose to share it, and if a startling number of Internet users also find that thing amusing, we, together, consciously create a tidal wave of meme that elevates that piece of media to viral status. We choose these gems from the noise. Open Graph will fill our feeds with noise, burying the gems.

Frictionless sharing via Open Graph recasts Facebook’s basic purpose, making it more about recommending and archiving than about sharing and communicating. That’s a potentially dangerous strategy—not just because oversharing diminishes our interest in sharing but also because it’s tweaking the formula that made the site a winner in the first place.

So, sharing everything you do, see, read, bookmark, and glance at isn’t a wonderful idea? Oh.

Facebook really changed things up last week. Oh sure, it’s as disrespectful of my privacy as ever, but now it’s enlisted the entire web to help. So I’m done with anything that requires a Facebook login.

Facebook made some big changes in terms of how things look and work, but its inexorable drive to drag us all into publicly sharing everything from everywhere with everyone all the time remained consistent. The most noticeable new features that reflect that are Timeline and Ticker. Ticker delivers real-time updates of your friends’ actions, while Timeline archives everything you’ve ever done on Facebook. But the big change, the true assault to your privacy, is under the hood: Open Graph.

Open Graph is a development tool that lets third-party apps and sites report your activities back to Facebook. It’s meant to extend or replace the Like button. It’s a way for sites and services to jack directly into Facebook from anywhere. If companies use Open Graph, they can publish to your Ticker and Timeline, too, effectively sending tattle-tale updates on anything you do to everyone you know, in real time.

- Matt Honan, Unlike: Why Facebook Integration Is Actually Antisocial

Matt adopts the perfect ‘what the fuck’ voice for this story.

Facebook is proving — again — that it isn’t designed as a platform for us to share and grow and interact. It is a thin veneer of social interaction on top of a platform designed to suck away as much metadata as possible for the benefit of corporations.

Facebook is like television. If you came from a planet where something like TV existed, but had no commercials, and then you landed on Earth, you’d wonder why anyone ever watched it at all. Meanwhile all the Earthlings have been raised watching commercials and hardly notice them, but they are being programmed to buy this beer or that eyeliner.