Criticism Of Facebook

Facebook's growth as an Internet social networking site has met criticism on a range of issues, including online privacy, child safety, and the inability to terminate accounts without first manually deleting the content. In 2008, many companies removed their advertising from the site because it was being displayed on the pages of controversial individuals and groups. The content of user pages, groups, and forums has been criticized for promoting controversial topics. There have been several issues with censorship, both on and off the site.

The changes made by Facebook have been criticized, in particular the new format launched in 2008 and the changes in Facebook's Terms of Use, which removed the clause detailing automatic expiry of deleted content. Facebook has also been sued several times.

Psychological effects

Envy

Facebook has been criticized for making people envious and unhappy due to the constant exposure to positive yet unrepresentative highlights of their peers.

Stress

Research performed by psychologists from Edinburgh Napier University indicated that Facebook adds stress to users' lives. Causes of stress included fear of missing important social information, fear of offending contacts, discomfort or guilt from rejecting user requests or deleting unwanted contacts, the pressure to be entertaining, and having to use appropriate etiquette for different types of friends.Many people who started using Facebook for positive purposes have found that the website has negatively impacted their actual lives.

Search function

Facebook's search function has been accused of preventing users from searching for certain terms. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has written about Facebook's possible censorship of "Ron Paul" as a search term. MoveOn.org's Facebook group for organizing protests against privacy violations could for a time not be found by searching. The very word privacy was also restricted. Facebook claimed that the problem was a bug.

Breastfeeding photos

Facebook has been criticized for removing photos uploaded by mothers of themselves breastfeeding their babies and also canceling their Facebook accounts. Although photos that show an exposed breast violate Facebook's decency code, even when the baby covered the nipple, Facebook took several days to respond to calls to deactivate a paid advertisement for a dating service that used a photo of a topless model.

The breastfeeding photos controversy continued following public protests and the growth in the online membership in the Facebook group titled "Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene! (Official petition to Facebook)."

Censorship of editorial content

On February 4, 2010, a number of Facebook groups against the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB) were removed without any reason given. The DAB is one of the largest pro-Beijing political parties in Hong Kong. The affected groups have since been restored.

On May 21, 2010, Facebook disabled the account of Sulphur Springs, Texas radio station KNOI after it posted editorial comments critical of Facebook's privacy policies and shared links to articles about Leo Laporte's decision to delete his own Facebook account.

Accusation of politically biased granting of group upgrades

In May 2011, Facebook announced that in the coming months it will be "archiving" all groups in the old format, part of the consequence of which is losing all the existing members of a group, which would effectively destroy many groups, forcing them to re-acquire members from scratch. A few groups have been given an option to "upgrade" to the new groups format, which keeps the members, but the criteria for determining whether a group is offered this "upgrade" are unknown. Some groups have had success in getting this upgrade by having activity in their group, while others have not. One article has claimed an empirical observation that disproportionately more "liberal" groups have been able to upgrade than "conservative" groups, leading to accusations of potential political bias, or of politically motivated censorship of conservative groups.

Reference : wikipedia.org