The Worst of Facebook
Late last week a campaign swept through Facebook. The idea was simple:
Change your Facebook profile picture to a cartoon character from your childhood and invite your friends to do the same. Until Monday (Dec. 6th), there should be no human faces on Facebook, but an invasion of memories! This is for a campaign against violence on children.
This is exactly as the ‘campaign’ appeared. Soon after, one by one, users started to change their profile pictures. Bananaman, Batfink and Tinkerbell. I didn’t take part, but if I had it would have probably been between Cedric Sneer or SuperTed.
The reason I didn’t join in the fun (aside from the fact that I’m a grumpy old man in the making) is that I spotted an immediate problem. One that, as a campaign, left it flawed from the start.
A friend of mine summed it up best:
If everyone who has changed their profile picture to a cartoon donated £1 to the NSPCC then that would make a real difference.
He was, of course, exactly right. Cartoons: good. Child abuse: bad. A memory can be a powerful thing, but changing your profile picture has done precisely nothing to out a stop to violence against children.
So who was the first person to start the viral status update? One tiny addition would have made a big difference. A link. Nothing more. All they needed to add was a link to a donations page to a charity such as the NSPCC.
Maybe they did. Maybe it got lost in translation, or someone forgot to copy and paste it in to their profile. Who knows?
To me, it exposed a deep flaw in the concept of Facebook, and heightened my positive view of rival social networking site Twitter. The concept of the almighty ‘retweet’ is simple yet brilliant. With the click of a button you can spread a message, link or idea (or all three) to all of your followers, in the hope that they will do the same. Wildfire.
With Facebook, it is not as easy. A thousand privacy settings keep your thoughts and feelings locked away. Great for those who like a quiet life, but rubbish when the time comes to actually get some work done.
To further compound the problem, an even more strange post started to filter through my feed:
The group asking everyone to change their profile picture to their favourite cartoon character is actually a group of paedophiles. They’re doing it because kid’s will accept their friend request faster if they see a cartoon picture. It has nothing to do with supporting child violence.
Lovely. Again, no link was given. All this did was remind me of the 2001 Brass Eye Special.
By this time, the NSPCC website was down, presumably from thousands of requests from people desperate to know whether the latest twist was true. Eventually, the charity issued a statement via Twitter saying that, whilst they had nothing to do with the campaign, they ‘welcomed the attention it had brought to the work they do’.
In reality, the debacle did nothing but cause confusion, and ended with a strange game of chinese whispers, when all that really needed to be shown was this: http://bit.ly/7sgXL
Update: This just in from Techland