Tactic: MoveOn Organizes on Facebook

Written by Mary on December 23, 2007 – 12:05 am -

Organizer: MoveOn
Purpose of Campaign: To make the Beacon advertising system an opt-in system. Facebook should not tell users’ friends what they buy on other sites–or let companies use a person’s name to endorse their products–without explicit permission.
Organizing Techniques: Facebook group, e-petition
Outcome: Success, Facebook changes Beacon social advertising program to opt-in (your purchasing information remains private unless you explicitly agree that it can be shared)
Ease of Replication: Pretty easy - setting up a Facebook group and an online petition are both simple and free.

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The anti-Beacon group which MoveOn created on Facebook

Background: In November, Facebook announced the creation of Beacon, a system that would display Facebook user purchases in their mini-feed. It was a form of “social advertising.” You would learn through your mini-feed that one of your Facebook friend Mike rented the film Mean Girls at Blockbuster. Problem is, Mike is the captain of the football team he doesn’t want you to know he likes chick flicks like Mean Girls. And that was the problem with Beacon: the system automatically posted your purchases on the mini-feed unless you specifically opted out. Some people worried that it was an invasion of privacy since it made personal transactions public.

The Campaign: On November 20, MoveOn started a group on Facebook called Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy. Over the next nine days the membership of the group grew at a steady rate of 5,000 to 10,000 a day.

The group proposed two actions to their members. The first action was to sign a simple petition on the MoveOn site affirming that “sites like Facebook must respect my privacy. They should not tell my friends what I buy on other sites–or let companies use my name to endorse their products–without my explicit permission.” The second action was to ask group members to ask their friends to join the group. In addition to being a site for action, the group also offered information about the status of the anti-Beacon campaign

On November 29th, when the group had 50,000 members, Facebook capitulated. It agreed to turn Beacon from an opt-out system to an opt-in system, which makes it easier to control which information is shared on their mini-feed and which information remains private.

In the words of Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerburg: “The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends…. Facebook has succeeded so far in part because it gives people control over what and how they share information. This is what makes Facebook a good utility, and in order to be a good feature, Beacon also needs to do the same. People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don’t want to use it.”

Lessons Learned: While this campaign did not draw as many protesters as an earlier (failed) campaign against the mini-feed, this anti-Beacon campaign demonstrated that Facebook is an effective tool for organizing around Facebook issues. It is a rather unusual organizing example, because the medium of the organizing (Facebook) was also the target of the organizing (a Facebook application). It will be far more interesting to learn how Facebook can be used to influence offline situations.

Another important take-away is that Facebook can be used with other online applications. In this case, MoveOn used Facebook as a way to drive people to an e-petition on their own site. The Facebook group was not the action itself, but rather a means of bringing people an encouraging them to take an action (the e-petition) on a different web site.

Learn More: article “About Facebook” in the Jan. 7 issue of The Nation.

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