Unfriended By Facebook

I thought it surely must have been a joke.

It was a Thursday.  That afternoon, I entered my username and password as I had done countless times before.  But, for the first time, I was stopped.

According to the screen, my Facebook account had been disabled by the Facebook Team.  I was shocked and confused.  Wasn’t that the kind of thing they did when Facebookers uploaded pornography or made threats against government buildings or harassed high school classmates?  My posts consisted mostly of Bible verses, pictures of my church group, my blog entries, items of historical interest, and the occasional witty pun.  Why would Facebook consider me to be worth disabling?

That day I sent half-a-dozen e-mails to Facebook, asking why my account was disabled and when I could expect to have it back.  On Friday evening, I got a response; a response which still shocks me.  It went like this:

After reviewing your situation, we have determined that you violated our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. One of Facebook’s main priorities is the comfort and safety of our users. We do not tolerate hate speech. Targeting people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, or disease is a serious violation of our standards and has resulted in the permanent loss of your account. We will not be able to reactivate your account for any reason. This decision is final.

I was speechless.  For a full minute I stared slack-jawed at my screen.  Hate speech?!? I have never posted hate speech to Facebook!  And even worse was that my account had been, with absolutely no warning, unceremoniously deleted, never to be recovered.

I joined Facebook in the fall of 2005, when it first became available to my university.  For five years I had built my account, creating an international network of friends, coworkers, and professional contacts.  I incorporated it as an important communication tool for my job.  It had become the chief means of updating my church group friends of upcoming activities.  Facebook was more than just a fun way to update my friends on what I was having for lunch; it had become my hub for exchanging ideas and information, a hub which no other communication tool could rival.  With Facebook, I could quickly and efficiently gain access to the minds and ideas of hundreds of people around the globe–literally around the globe.  I had contacts in Germany, Ireland, France, and Australia as well as in most of the Continental United States.  Not to mention the thousands–yes, thousands–of photographs I had added to my account over the course of five years.

All vanished, in the blink of an eye.

I e-mailed Facebook again to express my shock and to ask what, specifically, they had considered to be hate speech on my account.  I picked my brain and the brains of my friends.  We could think of nothing I had done on Facebook in that five year span of time that could be construed even remotely as “hate speech,” especially given some of the horrible things we had seen other users post to the site with no repercussions.  I had never uttered a profane word from my account or singled out any individual or group for derision.  Those who know me best will tell you that that’s just not how I roll.  I do not have hatred in my heart for anyone or any group of people, and if I did, I would certainly have had more sense than to post it to Facebook for all of those professional contacts to see.

Without a response from the Facebook Team, I still have no clue as to why they deleted my account with no warning.  It was like coming home from work to find that my apartment had been burned to the ground, and then later finding out that my landlord lit the match because he kinda sorta thought I might be in the Klan.  But what bothers me even more than the aggravation I’ve gotten from this incident is what it tells me about the future of the freedom of speech in the United States.  It is my great fear that, as the medium for the exchange of ideas evolves from the printed page to the computer screen, this most basic of American rights is slowly becoming privatized.

Much to the disdain of many old-fashioned newspaper editors, the preferred medium of free speech is changing.  The Internet has become the method of choice of millions of Americans who wish to express their opinions and exchange their ideas unedited, and with no revision.  I believe that this is the very pinnacle of free speech; millions of individual human beings with the ability and freedom to express individual opinions in their own words, and in their own timing.  Ideas and opinions both great and small, important and mundane, simple and complex, gush from the blogs and personal web sites of America by the tens of thousands each minute.  It is chaotic, it is loud, it is often impassioned, and that flow of information from one mind to another is the cornerstone of democracy, magnified a thousandfold.

And social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have, believe it or not, enhanced that ability even further.  I believe it is obtuse to dismiss social networking sites simply as web sites where kids send each other funny videos.  Social networking sites do not just connect friends and acquaintances for the purpose of socializing, they link human minds in a very dynamic, organized, and fast-paced way.  Everyone with an empty status bar and a flashing cursor has the ability to become the news anchor of his or her own personal news network.  The more contacts that individual has, the more minds he or she can reach.  That kind of power is the very future of free speech in America.

But if the idea of an online social network represents the future of free speech, what does that mean for the companies who own and manage sites where people exchange information online?  Some will argue that since they are privately-held companies, they are free to monitor and censor speech on their sites as they see fit.  I believe that, in a 20th-century world, when print was still the chief repository of ideas, that argument may have held water.  But if the marketplace of ideas exists chiefly online for millions of Americans, that argument must not remain the standard of just censorship.  If evidence is needed, look no further than my unjustly-deleted Facebook account.  My new and revolutionary ability to share ideas and spread information without the filter of another person’s mind was put to an end with nothing but a very baseless, vague excuse, and since my online voice was, by necessity, privately-held, I have no recourse left to regain that voice.

I have a feeling that soon–hopefully very soon–corporations who own personal web site services like Facebook will have a very rude awakening to certain truths about free speech that have, for generations, been the domain of newspaper publishers, radio station owners, and television news networks, for whom a litany of Supreme Court decisions and Congressional actions exist to enforce the honest, equitable, and balanced exchange of ideas in those media.

As the nature of human interaction changes, so must the laws that safeguard our right to interact with each other; a right derived from a Constitution that justly values the fundamental interests of the individual over the financial interests of the corporation.  The safeguarding of free speech should never be entrusted to the private sector, and there should be no single judge presiding over the marketplace of ideas, wherever that marketplace exists.

Otherwise, we may one day find ourselves unfriending democracy.

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