To Facebook or not to FB; we like interaction but is there a price to pay?

Hi, Waldo –

Yes, I’ve been watching this debacle in Virginia, and it really makes me sad. I don’t know how this plays out. If the GOP could find a spine then they would mount a scorched earth campaign, making it impossible for moderate Dems to pass even simplest laws – don’t cooperate on anything, hold the routine business hostage to an agreement to take guns off agendas. I think if they had a spine then we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. If the Dems would grow a brain (and not that I advise them to do this) then they’d let this rest a cycle before ramping up extremist laws. This would take wind out of sails of the activists on our side, making it easier to play to the center later. “There they go again,” they’d say when it is time. You know the drill, boil the frog. I don’t think D’s have any more brains than R’s have spine so I think they will just grind forward, probably egged on by national socialists who want left-swinging policies in Virginia to serve as some ostensible evidence of how the country is left-swinging overall, maybe helping their national bids. That would go poorly for everyone in Virginia but the nationalistas won’t particularly care. 

Okay, about Facebook. At top level what they write about it is probably accurate. The reality is that a lot of people really do interact on it. It is an open question (in my mind) whether these are people we care about, but there are indeed numbers. I understand why it would be tempting for an organizer to innocently decided to use it for “what it is good for.” 

There is utterly no sense that anything anyone ever does ever is private on FB. Period, full stop. The internet is forever, and the data mining someone agrees to under FB’s terms of service is pretty aggressive. The company business model is based on knowing how to connect an identity with other people, other activities, other groups and so on. 

and it is not far off. You and I are both on a variety of lists already, and at some point it is appropriate for us to stand up to be counted. That said, a lot of groups, agencies and companies will make determinations about us that we won’t even know about based only on connectivity established via things like Facebook. They make determinations based on the pages you visit, the ads you might click on, the people in your circle of friends. These are data about you that other people use to paint their image of who you are. Almost all of this will be benign. They will be that way until they are not. It is tough to stay disconnected from such things too. It isn’t sufficient to just not use the tools or site, rather, we need to not interact with people who in turn talk about us, post photos of us and more. Everyone kind of needs to keep a tight asshole for any kind of privacy. 

There are ways to reduce the effects of data mining done by these companies, but it isn’t the easiest set of tools to use. It is not so simple as just not using your real name or changing an email address. These companies do a spectacular job of joining the data between multiple accounts. I marvel at it from a technical point of view, but am horrified by its social effects.

So I won’t advise you not to connect with them there. I can’t tell you concretely the bad things that will happen from you doing so, and probably those are only knowable after they happen. I can tell you I’m not in any hurry to use Facebook or share data with them. But at the same time, I can also tell you that I hope the organizers (whether that group or VCDL or other) can pull together enough patriots to stop the political insanity there