News organisations are grappling with what they can and can’t use from the sites, but there is no agreed standard and recent months have seen them make a litany of mistakes.
In January, Steve Herrmann, Editor of the BBC News website, pondered the problem on the BBC Editor’s blog.
“When is it acceptable for us to make use of personal pictures and video available on the internet? In the past, personal pictures of members of the public who become the subject of news stories (particularly tragic events) have usually only been available if supplied by family or friends.”
Social networks have changed all this. Many users of these sites upload personal images, some of which are newsworthy, most of which are not, and some of which are fake. The problem is that social networks blur the line between public and private.
In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre in April 2007 journalists tried to communicate with users of social networking sites and the popular blogging tool LiveJournal in an attempt to talk to people involved in the event.
In the comments under one particular blog post published on the day of the massacre, journalists from CBC, NPR, Boston Herald, MTV, ABC, The Guardian, In Touch and Triple J can be seen vying for an interview with a student blogger. This has since become known as “digital doorstepping”.
The practice of lifting images and video from these websites is known as “scraping”. In November 2007 the Daily Mail scraped a Facebook group for images of “ladettes who glorify their shameful drunken antics” and they quickly found the forum they wanted.
“More than 150,000 girls have signed up to Facebook’s online forum “30 Reasons Girls Should Call It A Night”, where they openly discuss the various states of inebriation – and undress – they have found themselves in.”
The newspaper published a selection of images taken from the nearly 5,000 they found. And they named the young women in the pictures.
However, all is sometimes not what it seems and a number of newspapers have been fooled by fake Facebook pages. In January, French newspapers fell for the fake Facebook page proclaiming a 28 year-old French man by the name of Arash Derambarsha as the “Worldwide President of Facebook”.
In late December 2007, a fake Facebook page of Bilawal Bhutto, the son of assassinated politician Benazir Bhutto, fooled many news outlets including Toronto’s Globe and Mail and Agence France Presse. The newspapers quoted fake statements purportedly from Bilawal Bhutto himself including this:”I am not a born leader. I am not a politician or a great thinker. I’m merely a student. I do the things that students do like make mistakes, eat junk food, watch Buffy [the Vampire Slayer] but most importantly of all . . . learn. My time to lead will come but for now I’m the one asking questions, not the one answering them.”
Although 400,000 UK users left Facebook between December and January, a 5% drop, the site still boasts some 8.5 million users. Bebo claims to have around 10 million users. The sheer numbers of people using these sites is phenomenal. Some argue that the blurring of public and private worlds might eventually mean society evolves an entirely new attitude to the idea of privacy. And as the BBC’s Robin Hamman points out on his personal blog www.cybersoc.com what this means for journalism is not yet clear: “With more and more journalists and researchers using the internet to find first-hand accounts and background material for stories, indeed with some journalists starting to consider social networking sites and blogs part of their reporting patch, it’s an issue that’s unlikely to go away.”
Deborah Bonello in Mexico City writes about how she and her partner were held up at knife point on Valentine’s Day: “It was then that I saw someone coming up the hill towards us. He was wearing a black lucha libre mask… He was also clutching a small knife… Our assailant was clearly very nervous. He was breathing heavily and the hand in which he held the knife shook violently.”
Meanwhile, in Zimbabwe our recent addition to the blogs page Zimbabaloola describes how inflation feels in the run up to Zimbabwean elections in March: “Our house, (a nice house, smart part of town, pool, pretty garden, etc) cost us 2,500 dollars in August 1999. In forex terms that was about 57,000 US. 2,500 dollars is now worth 0.04 of a US cent. That’s 0.0004 of a US dollar. That’s what 50,000% inflation means on the ground.”
Rob Crilly is a freelancer based in Nairobi and he’s been blogging about the recent problems in Kenya and how he needs different drivers for different areas in the new Kenya: “[My Kikuyu drivers] will not take me into Kibera, Africa’s biggest slum. Turn the wrong corner and they risk being lynched for being supporters of President Mwai Kibaki – also a Kikuyu. Likewise the western Rift Valley where their kin have been turfed out of homes in towns such as Kericho and Eldoret.”
Meanwhile, Julius Strauss, who gave up the life of a foreign and war correspondent to live in the frozen north, recently left his wilderness ranch in Canada to spend the winter in Anchorage. He writes: “My rental at Ted Stevens [International Airport] was small, pokey and frigid. It had been washed and left in the car park so that the doors and the boot were frozen. Only when I hit the highway the next morning did I realise what a thrill this little beast would be to drive. Here, in the Arctic in mid-January, it was wearing summer tyres.”
www.fromthefrontline.co.uk
It helps that UK journalists are signing up to Facebook in droves. The BBC group has over 13,000 members and even the Feral Beasts o f the Media group formed in response to Tony Blair’s parting shot to the press has 762 members. But as Ben Hammersley, BBC reporter, technology writer and architect of the Frontline Network says “the real test will be how many people remember their Facebook login details in twelve months time”.
According to ComScore, Facebook has more than 27 million active users and has been getting more than 100,000 new registrations a day throughout 2007. Impressive statistics but Facebook is has a long way to go to catch the big two in the UK – MySpace and Bebo. Bebo has narrowly overtaken MySpace with around 37% market share in the May figures from Hitwise whereas Facebook has less 15%.
Facebook’s popularity with journalists probably doesn’t worry Mr Murdoch and News Corp who bought MySpace for what now seems a paltry $580m (Mark Zuckerman, the creator of Facebook turned down $1.6 billion from Yahoo). What will be worrying him is that the key 18-24 year old demographic is moving to Bebo and Facebook. This shift has coincided with the heavy advertising and overt commercialisation on MySpace.
Another reason that Mr Murdoch should be worried is F8 – Facebook’s recently unveiled development platform. This platform is a set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that allow outside developers to develop new features and applications that can be deeply integrated with Facebook. Examples of this are on the Frontline Network. With a couple of clicks the photos or video with the highest rating by Frontline Network members can be included on anyone’s Facebook profile.
Facebook encourages viral distribution of these third party applications by notifying everyone’s friends in the network when they start using a new application. This means that a successful application on Facebook can grow to millions of users within weeks. What is exciting investors is that Facebook is allowing commercial activity such as advertising in the application and giving 100% of the revenues to the third party developers.
Vaughan Smith, creator of the Frontline Network welcomes the opportunities that the Facebook platform brings. “The Frontline Network has been built to allow media professionals to easily showcase their work – whether words, photographs or video – and have it rated and discussed by their peers. Its other function is to deliver the content to an audience that supports our members’ work and Facebook applications encourage this through viral distribution”.
MySpace doesn’t allow commercial activity in third party applications and doesn’t even have a formal developers programme. Unsurprisingly programmers have shifted their focus and are furiously tapping out code for the Facebook API. There are already hundreds of applications – from the useful such as Travelpod.com letting their members import their travel blogs onto their Facebook profile, to the useless such as Poke Pro which has more ways to “poke” someone than there are positions in the Kama Sutra. Rather than the more traditional poke the so inclined can “lick” “spank” or even “headbutt” someone.
The Frontline Network is built on the Ning platform – another one of the many MySpace invaders. Like Facebook it has a set of APIs that allow developers to build their own applications but unlike Facebook it is very customisable. And like all social networks its success will depend on its ability to connect people who share common values and provide them with the tools to express themselves and tell their stories easily. As Ben Hammersley puts it “the strength of the Frontline Network lies in its peer approval and review by fellow media professionals and its ability to deliver new audiences. And it’s not just a meeting place for teenagers to mingle with people who’ve read Wired magazine this week and panicked”
While Facebook is looking good at the moment there are no safe bets as to which platform will win the longer race. What is sure is that social networking is as important online as it is offline and is here to stay. And this won’t have escaped the canny Mr Murdoch who is more than capable of delivering a slap in the Facebook. There are already rumours that he will merge MySpace with the troubled Yahoo! for a 25% stake. This would bring him a 2000% return on his original investment in MySpace and might even give Yahoo! a desperately needed shot of social and participatory media know how.