In and of itself, self-censorship is not a bad strategy either. Social norms often dictate that we regulate what we say and how we act in particular spaces and with particular audiences. As with the previous discussion of identity, we intentionally and unintentionally articulate different identities within different contexts. Such norms serve a purpose and can be beneficial in creating and maintaining environments of respect, professionalism, and so forth. However, social norms also speak to normative values, expectations, and assumptions that ought to be continually called into question. Not all norms are beneficial, for example, gender norms can serve to limit how comfortable individuals feel expressing particular interests (e.g., a little boy is not “supposed” to play with princess dolls). For young people, social network sites are often considered peer-driven spaces for socializing. Yet when adults and authority figures surveil their practices, it opens up opportunities for their behaviors to be misinterpreted. Gabriela (16 years old, Mexican-American) expressed anxiety about how her online profiles might be interpreted by adults, specifically future employers or college admissions offices:
I just don’t know what they’re actually looking for. So, is something wrong with what I post? [Are they going to think] “Oh, this person likes this type of music, or they look like this,” and then judge me? So, it worries me. It concerns me that something I posted isn’t what they want or something.
Undoubtedly we should encourage young people to think critically about the kinds of information they share online, and even with whom they visibly connect online, but we should also be wary of rhetoric that penalizes young people for expressing themselves in ways that challenge or disrupt adult expectations of appropriate identity expression and peer connections.
None of the participants I got to know used “ghetto” names on Facebook, yet the practice was not uncommon, particularly for black and Hispanic peers. How might such names be interpreted by employers? What assumptions might adults make about teens that choose to express their identities in such a way? What about teens who do not articulate such identities but are connected with peers who do? The practices are situated within a context of peer relationships, as well as a particular racial and ethnic identity. Miguel and Marcus expressed anxiety and ambiguity about the ways they interacted with “ghetto” friends and were trying to navigate their own identities and friendships. Practices of deliberate disassociation can be an effective strategy for negotiating identities, however when social norms enact power and put pressure on youth to disconnect or self-censor, we need to make sure we are critically questioning the normative values of such assumptions and practices.
Unintentional Visibility
Facebook has changed the social media landscape in a lot of ways. As the most popular social network site, with 1.39 billion monthly active users as of December 31, 2014 (Facebook Newsroom, 2015), it has the power to shape social media norms. The architecture has undergone a lot of changes in its first eleven years; these changes directly influence conceptions of privacy and identity by shaping our understanding of “sharing.” In the early days of Facebook, sharing was understood as something that was done between and among friends. However, the increasingly commercialized and public aspects of Facebook have broadened the concept of sharing beyond just interpersonal relationships and has been expanded to indicate a more public and commercial sense of sharing. On page 54 of her 2013 book The Culture of Connectivity, José van Dijck explains that “Facebook wants its preferred meaning of sharing, implying complete openness and maximum exchange of data with third parties, to become the ‘shared norm.’” It is in the financial interest of Facebook to encapsulate the meaning of sharing within an economic framework that allows the platform to capitalize on users’ sociality.
Facebook’s archival nature, combined with the increasing publicness of interactions, works to create a visible and seemingly static understanding of identity. The social network site has become a portal to many other websites and apps—from shopping, to news, to games, and more—which works to create a persistent and semi-cohesive online identity. The architecture and the norms work together to attempt to create “one identity” across the web (van Dijck 2013b). Ivan Montiel (2012) argues that Google has also encouraged users to construct one consistent identity, which he refers to as “persistent identity.” As Google has created and acquired different apps and services (among them Google+, YouTube, Vidmaker, Softcard, and Android), it has also created one portal that allows users access to all their expanded services using only one log-in, one profile, and one password. Beyond merely streamlining users’ experiences and aiding in convenience, it also shapes social norms and expectations of identity, visibility, and privacy. The commercial impetus that underpins corporate acquisitions and pushes for a unified identity across platforms is often incompatible with users’ social practices and preferences on the sites.
The push toward a persistent and cohesive identity is contradictory to the way young people have historically constructed communities and identities—both online and offline. For example, since the 1990s blogs have been popular spaces for youth to play with different modes of identity, to participate in disconnected online communities, to engage and communicate with strangers, and to experiment with different interests and networks. Until recently, norms dictated that interactions could be pseudonymous and disconnected from offline embodied identities (as was the case for Regina, mentioned earlier in this chapter). It was not too difficult to create different and disconnected profiles that articulated different identities and then to pop in and out of different networks. These practices and platforms were reflective of and embedded in the evolving and experimental states of identity construction, particularly for adolescents. However, Facebook has increasingly rendered identities and interactions public and visible in a way that not all young people appreciate or are even able to understand. As I reveal, participants in this book tend to find the archival and public nature of Facebook to be oppositional to the more fluid and strategic nature of their communication practices and expressions of their identities. These differences in expectations are clearly articulated by exploring young people’s reactions to a change in Facebook’s architecture.
Public Liking
In 2010, Facebook changed its interface with the introduction of the Like button. As described by Facebook, the Like button is designed to “give positive feedback and connect with things you care about.” Initially users could Like pages run by commercial entities such as brands, celebrities, musicians, TV shows, and corporate restaurants. They served as a way for users to express interest in something and articulate particular aspects of their identities via their profile pages. The Like button is also one feature that Facebook uses to determine what users see in their news feeds. Although Likes were never private, they initially functioned in a more private manner. For example, you could Like a band or a celebrity, but this information was not published in your news feed. In order to know that your friend had Liked a band or a television show, you would have to click on your friend’s profile page and then view her Likes section to see all the things she had liked. Later the Like feature was added to users’ individual posts and photos; it became a way to acknowledge your friends’ updates without having to leave an actual comment. Initially these interactions were visible on the individual updates, but they were still not publicized or made visible in the news feed.
However, in 2011 Facebook began publishing Likes in users’ news feeds, so you could easily and unintentionally see what your friends had been doing on the site and beyond.4 Rather than going to your friend’s page to see that Sarah had Liked Mark’s post about his vacation, your news feed would publish a story alerting you that “Sarah Likes Mark’s photo album Vacation at the Beach.” This interface also pushed popular content (i.e., a post that has received a lot of likes or comments) to the top of your news feed. This meant that if a lot of your connections were engaging with Mark’s vacation album it was more likely to show up at the top
of your feed (even if it was not recent or new). This architectural design and interface functioned to heighten the visibility of particular posts and interactions among your Facebook network. If that post was someone announcing a new job, then that might be a positive feature for the user (i.e., the network was made aware of the big announcement and the individual received a lot of validation and praise). However, if the post receiving a lot of attention within the network was derogatory, gossipy, or controversial (as determined by the peer groups included), this could have a negative effect on the user and their network because it continued to draw attention to something that might be causing strife within different social circles.
Cassandra (18 years old, biracial) explained how the publishing of Likes (the new feature that had just been introduced during the week of the following conversation) created problems in her group of friends.
Cassandra:
Before you could see who Liked so and so’s picture, but it never told you on the news feed who Likes so and so’s picture. If you went to someone’s picture and looked at all the Likes you could see who Liked it, but now in the news feed it’s, like, yesterday I saw this girl Liked this boy’s picture and she has a boyfriend and she Liked this boy’s picture and it said “Kara Liked Devonte’s picture.” Ten minutes later it said “Devonte Likes Kara’s picture.” I guess they haven’t seen the new Facebook but, this girl has a boyfriend and they started Liking each other’s pictures back and forth every 10 minutes and the boyfriend was, like, “What the hell?” Usually you wouldn’t—for instance—that girl’s boyfriend wouldn’t go to Devonte’s profile and check all his pictures to see if his girlfriend Liked it, but now it says it on the news feed so he can just automatically see that.
Q:
So he did say “What the hell?” Where did he say that? On Facebook?
Cassandra:
Yeah. He wrote on her wall and he was, like, “Why are you liking all these guy’s pictures?” She was, like, “What?” They figured out finally and they were talking about it but that’s just crazy.
Q:
You just noticed it?
Cassandra:
It was the first thing I saw when I logged on, it was at the top. I just ignored it after that. It was just crazy because you couldn’t have saw that before, but the whole news feed said “Kara Liked Devonte’s photo” and then “Devonte Liked Kara’s photo”—it was, like, for 15 photos.
Q:
Wow. That is definitely something. Do you feel like you don’t want to get involved in that?
Cassandra:
No. I don’t care. I wasn’t going to say anything or anything—everyone could already see it because he posted it on her wall—he didn’t message her “What the hell?” — he wrote “What the hell?” on her wall.
Q:
Why would Kara’s boyfriend write about that on her wall instead of calling her?
Cassandra :
I think that’s just the kid coming out in him. I don’t know. I would think someone more mature and older would just message their girlfriend and be, like, “I just saw you Liked — you had a picture Like war with this random guy.” He just wanted to put her—I guess just, like, put her out there and let everyone know that he saw it and he’s doing something about it—you know?
Q:
Does that happen a lot?
Cassandra :
Oh, yeah.
Cassandra went on to discuss other examples about how people used Facebook to deliberately cause problems or air grievances in a public space: “People do that a lot on Facebook—put business out there that nobody cares about. I don’t even know—just dumb things. … That’s the only reason I don’t like Facebook.”
As the interaction between Devonte and Kara demonstrated, publicizing Likes added an additional dimension to the ways Facebook broadcasted information to users’ news feeds. Devonte and Kara probably were aware that their Likes weren’t private, but, as Cassandra explained, Kara’s boyfriend was unlikely to have noticed the Likes before the change in Facebook’s interface. Even if Kara’s boyfriend had noticed that she had Liked Devonte’s photos, it may not have been interpreted in the same way were it not for the timing, which Facebook rendered visible. In other words, seeing that Kara has Liked a lot of photos is one thing, but seeing that Kara had Liked a lot of photos in a short time span was interpreted differently. The changes in Facebook’s interface and algorithms changed the context in which users could Like information by rendering their pseudo-private interactions highly visible. One student explained: “We all creep on each other’s Facebooks, but you’re not supposed to let people know that. But Liking something really old is kinda embarrassing. … Other people now see it too, it makes it obvious you were creeping.” The public nature of Liking something and the intentional ways it gets publicized to mutual friends disrupted participants’ expectations of how to appropriately interact on Facebook and challenged their taken for granted understandings of social norms.
Invisible Algorithms and Misunderstood Intentions
Facebook’s algorithms fail to account for the overall sentiment of the popular and trending posts. Just because a post receives a lot of interaction from people in one’s network, does not necessarily mean users want to see the post. Furthermore, publicizing Likes on the news feed can have other privacy implications that disrupt expectations of visibility and context. For example, you might be cautious about sharing and commenting on an overtly political post. However, if you Like a news story that has been posted to another friend’s wall, or you leave a comment on an organization’s post, those comments and Likes are made visible to the broader community. These seemingly private interactions—Liking a story about marriage equality, for example—can inadvertently reveal information about you that you did not intend to share on Facebook. In this way, connecting with a friend or Liking something posted by an organization can feel semi-private, it is an interaction between you and an individual post; however, the information is often made visible on the site and in a context that is not visible to you or easily understood. This is because Facebook’s terms state that once you Like something, you have “consented” to Liking all future posts from that organization, what Sandvig (2014) refers to as “Like recycling.” Like recycling is also how ads are generated in your feed; they appear to be endorsed by your friends, but the process is a bit more invisible and deceptive. The visibility of your interactions is determined by invisible algorithms, not your intentions. For example, let’s say Sarah’s friend posts a rant about a local senator and provides a link to a news story from Fox. If Sarah Likes her friend’s rant, both of their other friends might see future ads in their news feed saying “Sarah Likes Fox News.” In context, what Sarah was Liking was her friend’s rant about the senator, but her Like is re-appropriated and shared in a completely different context stripped of her original intent.
This is also problematic because of the multiple levels of publicness and privacy levels that are operating on Facebook at any given time. For example, Jada (16 years old, black) kept her Facebook mostly private, meaning the only ones who could see what she posted were people she had added to her network (i.e., people she has friended). However, others in her network could choose to make their posts or profiles public.5 This means that what she chose to post on her profile should only be visible to select friends, but her actions on Facebook were public and were shared with everyone to whom she was connected, including friends of friends and family members she kept on a restricted list. When Jada Liked a photo posted by a friend with a public profile, her Like and comment became visible to everyone in her network, despite her own privacy settings. This was also true of all Pages that she interacted with—for example Comedy Central—because Pages have more open privacy settings than she did. In other words, the more public settings override her restrictive private settings. Van Dijck (2013a, pp. 49–50) explains: “All features added to Facebook have resulted in mostly invisible algorithms and protocols that, to a great
degree, control the ‘visibility of friends, news, items, or ideas. … Facebook’s interface foregrounds the need for users to be connected, but partly hides the site’s mechanisms for sharing users’ data with others.” The differences between privacy settings—Jada’s in comparison with Comedy Central’s—can have detrimental effects in terms of disclosure, identity, and privacy. Most the teens I got to know were cautious of what kind of information they deliberately shared on Facebook (and other social media platforms) such as what photos they posted, where they checked-in, the language they used (for example, many chose not to cuss), etc. However, they did not give as much critical and deliberate thought to everything they actually did on the site. Clicking Like feels more like a private action than re-sharing the story. Although the Like is intended to be somewhat public—a way to acknowledge a joke for example—participants did not intend for the interaction to be broadcast to their entire network (as demonstrated by Kara and Devonte’s “Like war”). According to boyd (2014, p. 57), “There’s a big difference between being in public and being public. Teens want to gather in public environments to socialize, but they don’t necessarily want every vocalized expression to be publicized. Yet, because being in a networked public—unlike gathering with friends in a public park—often makes interactions more visible to adults, mere participation in social media can blur these two dynamics.”
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