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Facebook Community Pages – a plague on all your houses

Posted on Ozloop – A plague on all your houses

I am advocating that Facebook be compelled to indicate that all these sites are not official. The major reason being that citizens need to be confident about engaging with sites active in the Gov 2.0 space. This latest twist from Facebook has the potential to undermine the good work we are all doing around Gov 2.0.

What are your views?

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9 Comments

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Adriel Hampton

Steve, I’ve been writing a lot about this at Wired to Share. Some here at GovLoop as well, listed under the tag. I agree. Actually, I think they should take them down because they are spam.

Gary Berg-Cross

Steve

Thanks for hightlighting the problem and an opportunity for discussion. There’s obviously been a bit of concern on Facebook’s privacy issues and this is another sign that the business model and “community” interest is no aligned.
It will interesting to see if social media inspired discussion and opinion can sbootstrap and solve its own problem here.

steve davies

Hi Harlan

I think some of this comes back to a worry I had many moons ago. To wit, being careful to ensure not to look at the use of Web 2.0 technologies through a Facebooks lens. This has been a problem and now that trust and confidence is an issue we probably start to be thinking that quality and ethics are more important than size.

To remain part of the Gov 2.0 universe Facebook really need to take a hard look at themselves. For my money if a hard stance is not taken Facebook will drag us all down.

Jeremy Bertrand

I agree with you, how can we move this forward. I have found at least 6 “pages” that have some variation of our agency name in them. They do offer a nice feature of keyword search within Facebook right now but aren’t labeled in any way as unofficial.

steve davies

In the Sydney Morning Herald today a piece on Senator Conroy’s concerns about Facebook http://bit.ly/bThaQA

I have already emailed the Senators office letting him know of the additional concerns about Facebook in relation to Gov 2.0. If you wish to add your voice to this the email address is [email protected]

Jaime Vogt

I agree that this is a problem if want to make sure people are confident in their interactions, so long as we preserve people’s rights to talk freely about our agencies online. I can see the BP Twitter page that was much talked about today is the worst-case scenario…

Chris Stinson

I am sure the official facebook answer will be, “it’s just beta” or “we will figure something out”. That might be acceptable to the “friends and family” crowd, but should not be acceptable to government.