How Facebook – the Wal-Mart of the internet – dismantled online subcultures

Facebook wants you to spend more time on Facebook, so why should they promote links pointing to content that exists outside of Facebook? Facebook’s approach to content control means that communities that use Facebook have to play by Facebook’s rules.

Users have limited ability to communicate with Facebook’s administrators when there’s a problem, as we’ve seen when drag queens demanded changes to the “real name” policy, when nursing mothers rejected censorship of breastfeeding photos and when LGBT activists insisted that photos of same-gender couples kissing shouldn’t be blocked for being “obscene.” In all of these cases, Facebook attempted to enforce a blanket set of policies on groups that have a very different set of ethics and values. | I’ve found that the people who lose from this approach are those on the margins, whose identities and experiences are least likely to be anticipated by designers without significant experiences of marginalization. —The Conversation