This essay is from MacKinnon’s book Consent of the Networked (2012).

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As protests mounted in reaction to Iran’s presidential elections on June 12, 2009, Facebook actively encouraged members of the pro-opposition Green Movement to use the social networking platform. By mid-June, more than four hundred members of Facebook’s fast-growing Farsi-speaking community volunteered their time to create a Farsi version of Facebook. Thanks to efforts by Facebook enthusiasts all around the world, the platform has been made accessible in seventy languages—including many languages spoken in countries where regimes are known not to tolerate dissent.

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Then in December 2009, Facebook made a sudden and unexpected alteration of its privacy settings. On December 9, to be precise, people who logged in got an automatic pop-up message announcing major changes. Until that day, it was possible to keep one’s list of Facebook “friends” hidden not only from the general Internet-surfing public but also from one another. That changed overnight without warning. An array of information that Facebook previously had treated as private, suddenly and without warning became publicly available information by default. This included a user’s profile picture, name, gender, current city, what professional and regional “networks” one belonged to within Facebook, the “causes” one had signed on to support, and one’s entire list of Facebook friends.

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The changes were driven by Facebook’s need to monetize the service but were also consistent with founder Mark Zuckerberg’s strong personal conviction that people everywhere should be open about their lives and actions. In Iran, where authorities were known to be using information and contacts obtained from people’s Facebook accounts while interrogating Green Movement activists detained from the summer of 2009 onward, the implications of the new privacy settings were truly frightening. Soon after the changes were made, an anonymous commenter on the technology news site ZDNet confirmed that Iranian users were deleting their accounts in horror:

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A number of my friends in Iran are active student protesters of the government. They use Facebook extensively to organize protests and meetings, but they had no choice but to delete their Facebook accounts today. They are terrified that their once private lists of friends are now available to “everyone” that wants to know. When that “everyone” happens to include the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and members of the Basij militia, willing to kidnap, arrest, or murder to stifle dissent, the consequences seem just a bit more serious than those faced from silly pictures and status updates. I realize this may not be an issue for the vast majority of American Facebook users, but it’s just plain irresponsible to do this without first asking consent. It’s even more egregious because Facebook threw out the original preference (the one that requested Facebook keep the list of friends private) and replaced it with a mandate, publicizing what was once private information—with no explicit consent. If given the choice to remain a Facebook user with those settings, or quit, my friends would have quit rather than risk that information being seen by the wrong people. Instead, Facebook published it anyways. It’s a betrayal of trust for the sake of better targeted advertising.

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The global outcry over the exposure of people’s friend lists in December 2009 was so strong that within roughly a day after the dramatic change, Facebook made an adjustment so that users could once again hide their friend lists from public view. People’s friends could still see one another, however, and there was no way to hide them. Everybody’s “causes” and “pages” were still publicly exposed by default, another serious vulnerability for activists. People kept complaining—many by creating protest groups within Facebook itself, where hundreds of thousands of people from all around the world posted angry messages. The groups had names like “Facebook! Fix the Privacy Settings!” and “Hide Friend List and Fan Pages! We Need Better Privacy Controls!” and “We Want Our Old Privacy Settings Back!” Scrolling through these pages, you see people posting from all over the world, with large numbers of Arab, Persian, Turkish, Eastern European, and Chinese names.

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Eventually Facebook fixed this problem as well, adjusting the privacy options so that information about what pages users follow, or groups they have joined, can be made private. Meanwhile, however, lives of people around the world had been endangered unnecessarily—not because any government pressured Facebook to make changes, but because Facebook had its own reasons and did not fully consider the implications for the service’s most vulnerable users, in democratic and authoritarian countries alike.

Write a one- or two-paragraph evaluation of each of the three sources you read for Exercise 8.1. Be sure to support your evaluation with specific references to the sources.

A website’s URL (uniform resource locator) can give you information that can help you assess the site’s objectivity.

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Confirmation bias is a tendency that people have to accept information that supports their beliefs and to ignore information that does not. For example, people see false or inaccurate information on websites, and because it reinforces their political or social beliefs, they forward it to others. Eventually, this information becomes so widely distributed that people assume that it is true. Numerous studies have demonstrated how prevalent confirmation bias is. Consider the following examples:

When you write an argumentative essay, do not accept information just because it supports your thesis. Realize that you have an obligation to consider all sides of an issue, not just the side that reinforces your beliefs.

Consider the following two home pages—one from the website for the Chronicle of Higher Education, a publication aimed at college instructors and administrators, and the other from the website for Glamour, a publication aimed at general readers. Assume that on both websites, you have found articles about privacy and social-networking sites. Locate and label the information on each home page that would enable you to determine the suitability of using information from the site in your paper.

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Here are the mission statements—statements of the organizations’ purposes—from the websites for the Chronicle of Higher Education and Glamour, whose home pages you considered in Exercise 8.3. What additional information can you get from these mission statements? How do they help you to evaluate the sites as well as the information that might appear on the sites?

Each of the following sources was found on a website: Jonathan Mahler, “Who Spewed That Abuse? Anonymous Yik Yak App Isn’t Telling”; Jennifer Golbeck, “All Eyes on You”; Craig Desson, “My Creepy Instagram Map Knows Where I Live”; and Sharon Jayson, “Is Online Dating Safe?”.

Assume that you are preparing to write an essay on the topic of whether information posted on social-networking sites threatens privacy. First, visit the websites on which the articles appear, and evaluate each site for accuracy, credibility, objectivity, currency, comprehensiveness, and authority. Then, using the same criteria, evaluate each source.