Changes on Facebook spur backlash from users in online protest groups

By Erin Brodbeck
Collegian Editor
September 13, 2006

“Facebook is watching you.” “I know what you did five minutes ago on Facebook.” “Facebook: a place for stalkers.”

Distraught Facebook users across the country have joined forces, forming groups on the Web site with names like these in reaction to Facebook’s recent “facelift.”

On Sept. 5, students logged in to the online social network to find the website completely revamped, most disturbingly for some, with the addition of a new feature called the “news feed.”

The news feed allows users, upon log in, to see what all of their Facebook “friends” have been up to: what groups they have joined, profile information they have changed and photos they have added.

A large number of Facebook users thought the Web site crossed the line with the implementation of the news feed. Others have found the feed to be useful. Many students agreed that a feature announcing petty changes like music interests is unnecessary.

“I don’t really care about the information Facebook is putting on the news feed,” freshman Kevin Cevalos said.

Although the personal information reported on the news feed was already accessible on Facebook, any changes are now broadcast to a user’s friends immediately upon log in. Now, if a student breaks up with his or her significant other, students will be made aware of this development, making some users wary of what they share on the Web site.

“I wouldn’t stop using Facebook,” junior Brittany Philbert said. “But I modified my profile so my personal information couldn’t show up on the news feed.”

Students that consider the news feed to be an unnecessary invasion of privacy, or think it is just plain unnecessary, have joined together en masse to express their opinions, and have garnered national media attention as a result.

The student response to the news feed even caused Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg to apologize to users in a letter posted on the Web site on Sept. 8. In it, Zuckerberg vowed to develop more privacy features, but encouraged students to warm up to the news feed.

The apology was largely unexpected by students who joined anti-news feed groups. “I thought it was possible that we could change things, but that wasn’t what I was thinking when I joined,” senior Kim Conklin said.

The largest of these protest groups, “Students Against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)” boasts over 700,000 members from colleges around the country. Now that the group has Zuckerberg’s attention, creator Ben Parr of Northwestern University claims on the group’s homepage that it will continue to exist until the news feed is completely eliminated from Facebook. More than 500 similar groups exist, many with thousands of members.

Even with the overwhelming consensus among members that Facebook has gone too far, some users like the news feed, saying it helps them keep track of their friends, depending on how one defines the word friend.

Senior Joe Weigel is one of these fans of the news feed. “I think Facebook will someday be defined as a verb,” he said, “meaning to stalk someone in a socially acceptable way.”

brodbecke1@lasalle.edu