When Not to Share

In the UK over the last week there has been a lot of controversy that has rocked an already unsteady BBC. In the wake of the allegations against former BBC presenter Jimmy Savile of sexual abuse of minors, plus other very serious allegations, there was a BBC programme that allrged that a Nineteen Eighties politician engaged in child abuse at a north Wales children's home.

The programme didn't name names, so the specific allegation hasn't been made publicly by the BBC, but the rumours started flying around the social media sites about a specific person who has since been paid a substantial sum from the BBC in compensation for the harm his reputation has suffered.  I'm not mentioning his name - there's been enough attention on the claims which the BBC has clearly acknowledged to be untrue - and it has caused the Director General to resign in the midst of all of this.

As far as I can tell, the speculation about the name of the person appears to have been fought outside the BBC, particularly on Twitter, with a specific name ending up trending as a result.  Hence the unwarranted reputational harm that the BBC has felt the need to compensate for and allow its titular head to resign over.

Now it seems that the lawyers who are acting for the person wronged by the allegations have settled out of court with the Corporation, and the person they represent has settled for a sum that probably doesn't even start to reflect the harm such allegations can do but has been tempered by the fact that it is public money that forms the compensation.  That is very noble.

However the lawyers haven't finished, not by a long chalk.  It appears they are trawling through the many Tweets that named their client, in order to determine who did what harm to him.

You see, when dealing with defamation you have two forms.  The first is slander, where a person says something about another that is untrue and tarnishes their reputation. The second is libel, where someone or some body - such as a newspaper or a corporation such as the BBC - publishes something that is untrue and tarnishes someone's reputation. Libel is generally seen as the more serious offence as slander tends to affect a localised group and the harm can be limited.  OK, sure enough if someone bad mouths a colleague in front of their boss and the statements are untrue then that can have serious consequences for them, so any subsequent slander case could result in major damages.

But libel tends to allow an untruth to permeate further, to reach deeper and cause more harm that is longer lasting.  So the interest in the Tweets should be making a few people a little nervous.  In fact, more than a few as to get a person's name to trend it takes an awfully large amount of Tweets and Retweets.  Which means that while only a few people may have made an incorrect link to the upcoming BBC documentary, or perhaps may have been leaked information that has not subsequently been substantiated - after all, the BBC clearly agrees it has done something wrong here, and as they didn't screen the documentary it must have been something that they allowed off air - they did so  to sufficient numbers who probably retweeted glibly to their own list of followers.

There could be some serious ramifications of this analysis by the lawyers, because I'm certain they're not doing this as a technical exercise.  If this ends up with people in court defending their Tweets and Retweets we could see a sea change in the usage of social media - don't forget that Facebook has just launched the Share function which allows FB users to redistribute posts to all of their Friends.  As a minimum, users of Twitter and Facebook should think carefully before posting or reposting allegations about a person - most of us are not going to be in receipt of the facts of these cases and it is all too easy to get carried away with the call for blood that we're witnessing over in the UK right now, and it could cost individuals a lot of money if they contribute to defaming a person's reputation by the simple act of pushing a virtual button.

Long term this could be seen as the point that social media grew up and started to understand its social responsibilities.  Take care when Tweeting, Retweeting or Sharing.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

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Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

Force Fed Facebook

Hot on the tails of the Share button, Facebook have been innovating again - and it isn't all popular.

Now I guess Social Networking isn't a democracy, by any definition, but it seems reasonable that in a market economy  the Facebook programmers should take some notice of the opinions of the cash cows, sorry, customers that use their services.  The evidence would suggest otherwise.

A few months ago I noticed that Facebook had launched a service called Timeline - the idea being that you created an on-line history of yourself, uploading photos and other memories, I guess with the idea that your Facebook life would seamlessly interface with this past you, creating an ongoing genealogical roadmap of your life.  Wouldn't that be a boon for your descendants when they decide to map their family tree?

I'm not sure and it seems that 86% of Facebook users felt the same way, according to one poll.  As one commentator puts it, that's technically 668 million people.  Or as I put it, assuming the poll is anywhere near correct, 100% of real Facebook users.  How do I work that out?  Well, when they floated Facebook an eternity or so ago, the price plummeted when the investors suddenly realised that there was a percentage of Facebook 'users', I'm guessing 14%, that 'belonged' to animals, inanimate objects, protest groups or were duplicate pages by people who felt an irrational urge to have more than one Facebook page, like authors using FB to plug their books.  Who'd of thought it? (mine can be found by searching for raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com, BTW)

I resisted the urge to participate in Timeline, partly because I don't really use social media socially but also because it looked time consuming and, well, a little geeky.  It's the full geek or nothing with me.  Anyway, despite me and virtually everyone else ignoring Timeline, Facebook are still plugging it.  I can understand them not taking any notice of everyone else but....

But now it seems Facebook has gone one step too far.  When you filled in your profile you probably added lots of other details - unless you read my blog from the depths of time and took notice of it.  Don't worry, most of the others didn't either.  If you or your significant other (wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever - you get the picture) identified someone as their significant other (and I'm really hoping that everyone had played by the rules here, otherwise this is really going to end in tears for some) then Facebook has generated a 'Couples' page for you.  It kind of links your Facebook pages together, so what you see, you partner sees.

Normal, ordinary couples hate it.  We spend our lives working how to interact with our partners.  Some live separate lives, others live in each other's pockets.  Most sit somewhere in the middle, which means they share some friends, actively dislike others but tolerate them anyway.  This initiative by Facebook which may generate more lucrative contracts with sales managers desperate to sell their products, is doing so at the expense of their customers.

It's also creating a whole raft of phoney FB existences. I'm sure the Facebook investors will be real pleased to find out that FB are addressing the issue with false and duplicate pages in this way. Not!

I think that there is a place for initiatives like Timeline, Couples and even Share - but I think a bit of consultation with their customers wouldn't go amiss, let alone giving users an opt in they can choose.  If the initiatives are as good and useful as Facebook clearly thinks then surely users will beat a path to the door to opt-in.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

Share This On Facebook

Despite every tech company suing the backside off every other tech company, there doesn't appear to be any slowing down of me-too approaches.    We shouldn't be too surprised by this - the leading geneticist and  generally controversial guy Richard Dawkins postulated quite a long time ago that ideas reproduce like genetic material.  He suggests that they are analogous to Genes and calls them 'Memes'.  So when one tech company finds that rectangular shaped, rounded corner devices are popular, other companies pick up on the idea too.

So it shouldn't be too surprising that there is cross pollination in the Social Networks.  Actually, what is surprising is that in general the networks are quite distinct.  I know there are technically loads of these networks out there, most specialising in sharing knowledge in vertical markets, but there's two big ones (Facebook and Twitter, for those who haven't noticed) and one pretender (Google+ which may or may not usurp one or both).

It's clear what Facebook's purpose is - it harvests data about individuals and pushes advertisements at the users while they sit there providing the data for resale.  As a way of thanking them, it gives a lot of people an opportunity to share thoughts, links, photos and meaningless facts with each other.

Twitter's purpose is not as clear - sure it also allows people to share thoughts, links, photos and meaningless facts with each other - as long as you keep the message ridiculously short (given today's technical economy).  It doesn't cost to get on it, to use it and hard as I stare at it, I can't see any obvious advertisements.  OK, in my ever expanding list of tweets I notice a small number of sponsored links that don't seem to make a huge amount of sense to me - clearly not too tightly targeted I would suggest, although as I tend to read tweets from a small number of the many I receive perhaps I'm just missing the point.

But one aspect of Twitter that has been very useful is the retweet - the button that let's you share a tweet that has made you laugh, cry or drop your mobile phone in shock.  In fact, for those of us using Twitter to promote our books, music or whatever business we're in, the retweet is like music to our ears.  To get your link retweeted by just one person automatically puts your pitch in front of a new set of potential customers. When a Tweet is retweeted again and again - goes viral - then that is the Holy Grail of Social Networking.

Well, you may or may not have noticed it, but you can do much the same thing on Facebook now.  They've slipped it in quietly, so you may have over-looked it, but there's an option to Share a posting.  This could be very powerful, given the more graphic nature of Facebook compared to Twitter.  Tweets are, essentially, a few words and maybe a link and you have to decide from your evaluation of those few words if you want to risk wasting your time opening the link, which is almost invariably compressed so you can't fathom a clue about it's content.  With FB you can see what the posting is about and when you share it, so can the guys and gals on your network.

And this is the power of the share.  Because even those of us who don't spend out lives sharing every last detail about what we've seen or done with the world have quite unique FB contact lists.  I have a lot of the same names on my FB account as my wife has, but she has many more that I don't and as I use my FB account as a drop in for strangers curious about my writing and blogging, I have a lot of different names as well.

This isn't as tightly targeted as the Google+ circles I mentioned in my last blog posting - that seems to be the absolutely right idea however it doesn't have the penetration that Facebook has, at least, not yet.  So the downside is that we may find FB postings about people we don't know, would never know, don't want to know, creeping in our FB feeds.  But let's face it, there's a lot of clutter there already and if you don't want to look at the stranger's posting, why not look at the adverts instead?

However, Facebook already allows users to compartment their contacts into lists - I'm not sure how many people use them as I haven't seen an advantage to using them apart from perhaps providing FB with  more usable data to sell up until now, but now with the Share button it  does appear to allow us to choose who we inflict the item on.

So, why not give the Facebook Share button a try out?  Go on, share this on Facebook.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!