Commentary

What Facebook Has To Do With Standing Rock

Here’s something interesting and possibly significant, that didn’t happen: Standing Rock didn’t start trending on Facebook until suddenly, it did. TechCrunch put it this way:

“A massive social media protest is exploding on Facebook, not Twitter for a change, yet Facebook’s dehumanized Trending system wasn’t picking it up. People around the country are checking in on Facebook at the Standing Rock Native American Reservation in an effort to supposedly hinder local Morton County police from targeting protesters attending in person to fight an oil pipeline through historic tribal lands.”

This story got a little awkward because apparently right before it was published, or not long after, Standing Rock did make it as a trending topic, represented on the list as #NoDAPL, which stands for Dakota Access Pipeline.

What was trending instead of that protest?

Well, among other hot topics, TechCrunch’s Jess Constine noted that Facebook thought a worthy trending topic was “Breaking Bad”-famed Bryan Cranston’s declaration he’ll move to Canada if Donald Trump is elected president next Tuesday.

This flap is more than criticism of Facebook’s news judgment, though that’s a good topic because Facebook insists it’s not in the news biz.
As Constine and others point out,  there’s a rumor police authorities are monitoring to see who checks in online to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, presumably to hassle them or worse.

Word got around that a good way to thwart the snooping is to have everybody check in. And Facebook, by not having Standing Rock as a trending topic, was, thwarting the thwarters who wanted lots of phony check-ins. So the theory went.

The Washington Post explained: “By now, depending on your Facebook filter bubble, you’ve probably seen it: a Facebook friend ‘checking in’  to Standing Rock, N.D., and then a separate post explaining the clever ploy that reads something like this:

‘The Morton County Sheriff’s Department has been using Facebook check-ins to find out who is at Randing Stock in order to target them in attempts to disrupt the prayer camps. SO Water Protecters are calling on EVERYONE to check-in at Randing Stock, ND to overwhelm and confuse them. This is concrete action that can protect people putting their bodies and well-beings on the line that we can do without leaving our homes.

If you’re sharing your location at Randing Stock (which you should be doing)

1) make it public

2) make the clarification post separate, and so that only your friends can see it

3) don’t clarify on your check in, message friends who say “stay safe!” to let them know what’s up — the stay safe posts are more convincing / confusing for p*lice

4) copy paste to share clarification messages (like this one) because making it public blows our cover

5) say “Randing Stock” in clarification posts so that when they filter out / search those terms, your post is visible to the right people.’ ”

A friend of mine enacted the ruse, adding a photo to his post. When another friend asked, “Dude, you’re there?” he responded, “In spirit.”

In reality, I’m pretty sure he’s in Berkeley.

For their part, the Morton County Sheriff’s Department denies they’re doing that monitoring.

What a pretty mess. First, the idea that Facebook’s trending topics could or should be a kind of social media front page sort of reverses the news process. News is what is happening, not what news people are reacting to. Certainly, “giving ‘em what they want” is purely expressed by counting the heads interested in a topic, but if you’re going to Facebook to get the news--and lots of people are--that’s just crazy .

But if Facebook was, for awhile, hurting protesters’ efforts to mislead authorities, what is that all about?

The Washington Post also reminds its readers that earlier this month, it reported that “Facebook was one of three major social networks (the other two were Instagram and Twitter) to grant access to Geofeedia, a company that provides real-time surveillance information to law enforcement on protesters, according to an ACLU report.

Some 500 law enforcement agencies reportedly use the service, which tracks publicly posted information, including location, from social-media accounts. Facebook was providing Geofeedia with a topic-based feed of public posts, the ACLU said, but cut off the company’s access to it in September."

pj@mediapost.com
2 comments about "What Facebook Has To Do With Standing Rock".
Check to receive email when comments are posted.
  1. Douglas Ferguson from College of Charleston, November 1, 2016 at 1:19 p.m.

    What's sad is that Facebook users expect the trending window to accurately reflect what the users think is news. The window belongs to Facebook, much like the front page of the NYT belongs to the New York Times. The window needs not be fair to all.  

    I use fbpurity dot com to filter out the things on Facebook that offend or irritate me (including certain topics). Not only do I no longer see the news trending wall at all but I filter out certain political words used by my friends. I use Facebook to keep up with their lives, not their polemics.

  2. Paula Lynn from Who Else Unlimited, November 1, 2016 at 5:46 p.m.

    Please read Bob Garfield's column on the United States of Facebook that was posted right here on MediaPost.

Next story loading loading..
About the Author

P.J. Bednarski has written for MediaPost since 2012 on media and marketing topics. He can be reached at pj@mediapost.com