Paul Krassner : I Was a Facebook Junkie

Prison break? Paul Krassner's Facebook profile pic.
Cold turkey:
I was a Facebook junkie

By Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog / February 10, 2011

I posted this farewell message on Facebook last night, and then I went cold turkey. Look, Ma, no rehab...

I had no friends in high school and college, and now I have 5,000+ Facebook friends. Maybe 25 of them are actual friends, so I assume that the rest of you liked my work. And the irony is that I’m quitting Facebook because it’s become a distraction from my work -- what Ken Kesey would’ve called my “current obsession” -- writing my first novel, about a contemporary Lenny Bruce-type performer.

I’ve truly appreciated your feedback, wit, imagination, insight, information, argument, and compassion. Incidentally, my decision was made before my Facebook identity was hacked (through my own clueless moment) and you all were spammed as a result. I apologize for that. Although I’m a professional prankster, this wasn’t my prank, or it would’ve had a purpose beyond electronic vandalism.

Recently, when I self-published an expanded edition of my autobiography, which is not available in bookstores, I felt that sharing and spreading an announcement of a link to its existence on my website was simultaneously self-serving and other-serving; ideally, two sides of the same coin. I repeated it at different times of the day for a week because I wanted to reach as many people as possible.

Facebook has enabled communication to span the spectrum from the trivial (what someone vomited for breakfast) to the profound (an organizing tool for the revolution in Egypt), and I have conflicting emotions about leaving. I realize that this isn’t exactly like Dave Chappelle leaving behind his successful Chappelle’s Show and a $50-million development deal, but I do hope that you understand my priorities.

[For years, Paul Krassner edited The Realist, America's premier satirical rag. He was also a founder of the Yippies. Find Paul's autobiography, Confessions of a Raving Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture at paulkrassner.com.]

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Mike Giglio : Egypt's Facebook Rebel

Photo by Peter Macdiarmid / AP.
Egypt's Facebook rebel:
Organizing the historic protests

By Mike Giglio / The Daily Beast / January 31, 2011

In Egypt, a Facebook page administrator known only by the handle El Shaheeed, or Martyr, is one of the driving forces behind the historic protests. Mike Giglio tracks down the mysterious figure, who talks about his crucial role in organizing the demonstrations.

Iran’s Green Revolution had a martyr named Neda, a 26-year-old woman gunned down in the streets of Tehran. Tunisia’s was Mohamed Bouazizi, an unemployed university graduate who set himself ablaze outside a government building. Egypt’s is Khaled Said -- because someone has been agitating under the dead man’s name.

Said, a young businessman from Alexandria, was reportedly beaten to death by local police this summer -- well before rumblings of the country’s current unrest. But a Facebook page that bears his name has been one of the driving forces behind the upheaval that started last week .

The anonymous Facebook page administrator who goes by the handle El Shaheeed, meaning martyr, has played a crucial role in organizing the demonstrations, the largest Egypt has seen since the 1970s, that now threaten the country’s authoritarian regime.

Yet even Egypt’s most active activists have no idea who the anonymous organizer is.

Esraa Abdel Fatah, who earned the nickname “Facebook Girl” when she organized a nationwide strike through her page in 2008, said she and her activist colleagues were in constant communication with El Shaheeed as they worked to coordinate the protest push, but still didn’t know his or her identity. “No one knows” who it is, she said.

“This is very important,” said veteran activist Basem Fathy, of the anonymity. “People find this credible.”

“El Shaheeed is a dead man who everyone is rallying around,” said a U.S.-based activist in close contact with Egypt’s protesters. “But who’s doing this? There is no gender. There is no name. There is no leader. It is purely about the thought.”

In a series of interviews with Newsweek/Daily Beast that spanned from the initial Tuesday protest’s early planning stages to the hours before Cairo’s Internet was blocked in the chaos that ensued, El Shaheeed refused to reveal even the smallest personal detail. But the conversations, which were conducted over Gmail Chat, offered a window on the thoughts and fears of one of the most intriguing actors behind Egypt’s swelling democracy push.

“El Shaheeed is a dead man who everyone is rallying around.”

“I'm taking as much measures as I can to remain anonymous,” said El Shaheeed. “But of course I'm scared.”

At home in Cairo, Wael Khalil, a democracy activist since 2004, saw the post and scoffed. “Come on,” he remembers thinking. “We can’t have a Facebook revolution. Revolution has no time and hour.”

In a conversation days before that first protest, El Shaheeed said T­­unisia had given people a sense of hope -- something the activist wanted to corral, using social-media tools. “A lot of Egyptians lost that hope years ago,” El Shaheeed said. “Now people start to pay more attention to the activists, and there is a hope that we can make it.”

At the time, the page had over 375,000 followers. “The power of Facebook is that our updates reach to everyone's wall,” El Shaheeed said. “Some of the videos we publish get shared on people’s walls more than 30,000 times. That’s how powerful a virus can be... Once it’s out, it goes everywhere. It’s unstoppable.”

However, El Shaheeed also cautioned against investing too much power in social-media tools -- online calls to protests had fallen flat in the past, and, at the end of the day, people would have to leave the screens for the streets.

With that in mind, El Shaheeed stressed interaction with fans of the Facebook page -- constantly polling, corresponding, and asking for advice, and posting downloadable fliers that could be passed out in person. “My role is to motivate people, inform them, encourage them to be part of the event and not just report it,” said El Shaheeed, hoping that if enough people got into the streets, the movement would become unstoppable.

To that end, El Shaheeed also coordinated with activists on the ground, such as Khalil, who quickly signed on. For years, groups like the April 6 Student Movement and its pro-democracy brethren had laid the groundwork -- organizing logistics and having lawyers on hand to track down those arrested, who might otherwise disappear into police custody. Those groups, too, had followings on Facebook and Twitter, and in the days leading up to the protests, managed to get thousands of fliers onto the street.

On the Facebook page, El Shaheeed took pains to avoid political and religious language in the posts, wanting to bring together groups that had otherwise often competed. Stripped of ideological overtones, the page became a draw for longtime activists as well as regular people. The language was emotional but conversational and filled with slang. “It’s not someone talking to the people,” said Khalil. “It’s someone talking with the people.”

“On Tuesday, I saw you who love Egypt -- conscientious, respectful, educated youth,” said a message on the Facebook page, after the first mass protests Tuesday. “You who walked and moved to clean up streets -- because these are the streets of Egypt. Not a single act of sexual harassment. Not a single fight. Youth are dreaming, and they want the chance. And we will have our dream. I swear to God it’s very close. If only we would unite.”

Protesters hadn’t brought political banners to the demonstrations but instead carried the Egyptian flag; men and women, rich and poor, Christians and Muslims, were suddenly marching together. “I can’t believe it,” El Shaheeed said in a message a day after the protests. “No one can think what will happen next -- including Mubarak.”

With the next protest scheduled for that Friday, activists including El Shaheeed were busy coordinating their response to what they believed would be a brutal government crackdown. A Google document with a list of demands as well as instructions for the demonstrations was, at one point, viewed at the same time by more than 200 people, altered in real-time by dozens of editors.

In a harried conversation on the eve of Friday’s protests, El Shaheeed vowed to stay anonymous even if the revolution succeeded. “This is not about me,” El Shaheeed said. “This is about the people of Egypt. I want to go back to my real life. I don’t want any glory. I wasn’t seeking it to start with.”

Shortly afterward, the Egyptian government cut Internet access.

Two days later, Wael Khalil stood among thousands of other people in Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the demonstrations. The protests called for Friday had continued into the next evening, seemingly tipping the balance of power.

Police stations across the country had been overrun; the National Party Headquarters had been burned to the ground; faced with tens of thousands of demonstrators, police had disappeared. On the tanks that had taken their place, protesters scribbled pro-democracy slogans without interference from the soldiers.

In a telephone call, Khalil said that he hadn’t heard from El Shaheeed since Thursday night; with the Internet still down, the Facebook page had been inactive ever since. But perhaps there was no more use for it -- it had played its role.

Fires still burned on the streets of the capital; in their flickering light, people huddled together to talk openly about revolution for the first time in many years.

Perhaps somewhere in the crowds was El Shaheeed.

[Mike Giglio is a reporter at Newsweek. This article was posted at The Daily Beast.]

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Paul Krassner : Censorship at Facebook

Unfriending the control freaks:
Censorship at Facebook

By Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog / August 31, 2010

Those control freaks who run Facebook are doing it again. This time, as you probably know, they're not allowing the image of a marijuana leaf -- because it's "illegal content" -- to appear in ads from the "Just Say Now" campaign for the legalization of pot, which is sponsored by Students for a Sensible Drug Policy. It's not the first time Facebook has indulged in chickenshit censorship. Below is my piece about it that was published in the May issue of High Times.

Mikal Gilmore, one of the best journalists covering the counterculture, is the author of Stories Done: Writings On the 1960s and Its Discontents. “For more than half of the subjects here,” he states, “including Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary and the Haight-Ashbury, psychedelics were a major factor in their lives…” But recently Gilmore himself had a bad trip, resulting from an overdose of the modern drug, Facebook.

Like so many others, his account was shut down, and they wouldn’t tell him why he was kicked off the island, so that he had no way of knowing what he did wrong or how to avoid doing it again. A Facebook friend who attempted to contact him with no success informed me that, “after numerous tries, I got this horrible warning that covered the screen screaming ‘DANGEROUS.’ Holy shit! To say it was disconcerting is an understatement.”

Gilmore explained the situation to me:

I was booted, I’m told, because of an image I posted. I was listening one night a few months ago to an early 1970s pop album by Joey Heatherton, and I was struck by her voice, how good it could be when she worked at it. I posted something to that effect, and I also posted the album cover, which I always try to do when I mention some music or music artist (or a book or movie).

This particular album has a photo of Heatherton baring her breasts. Last week, I couldn’t access my account and was told I’d been dropped for violating Facebook policy, but they couldn’t tell me what the specific offense was because, "for security reasons," they just can’t do that.

Since I'd acquired several friends at Facebook, and because my wife loves to take matters in hand, several people there raised a ruckus. I didn't ask anybody to. In fact, I thought my deactivation was just some fluke mistake, but Facebook refused to answer any of my inquiries, and also refused to answer anybody else's protests.

I was going to give up any idea of rejoining. Then, the same day I came to that conclusion, Facebook restored me, and told me they had deleted the offensive image. They never told me what the image was, but a Facebook member who has a relative at the place finally learned that it was the Heatherton album cover, and that Facebook had taken the action because another Facebook member had complained about the image.

Meanwhile, attorney Brian Cuban was fighting his own battle with Facebook, trying to get them to remove pages for Holocaust denial groups. He agreed with me that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private companies, but he added, “I think you have to look at the way free speech is evolving in historical context. We have come into an age where, with the advent of the Internet and unchecked values out there in the blogosphere, mere words have in fact driven people to commit violent acts.”

I asked, “When you spoke to Facebook about why they don’t tell people why they were dropped, how did they justify that?”

It was a justification of cost/benefit. I think they would love to give everyone a detailed explanation of why they’ve been dropped to prove there is no conspiracy there, as many people believe. In my battle with Facebook over Holocaust denial groups, I have been hit with countless e-mails asking me to ask them why there’s a Jewish conspiracy at Facebook -- to get rid of Jewish activists and to get rid of Jews in general -- because we’re raising all this fuss about Holocaust denial. In reality, I think it’s just cost/benefit. They don’t have the intrastructure to give everyone an explanation.

Perhaps Mikal Gilmore should have covered Joey Heatherton’s nipples with swastikas.

[Paul Krassner, for decades one of the country's foremost social critics, edited The Realist, America's premier journal of cutting edge social and political satire. He was also a founder of the Yippies. And speaking of censorship, Krassner defies it by publishing the Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster. See it at paulkrassner.com.]

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Backlash : Whole Foods Rep Takes Serious Dip

Whole Foods Buzz

As the Whole Foods Boycott grows on Facebook, brand perception is dropping

By Jennifer Van Grove / August 25, 2009

As the Whole Foods Boycott on Facebook continues to swell -- the group now has over 27,000 members -- we’re finding out that CEO John Mackey’s statements in The Wall Street Journal are affecting more than just angry Facebookers, but consumers in general.

According to YouGov’s BrandIndex, which tracks the daily consumer perception of brands, consumer opinion towards Whole Foods has been falling fast on the Web since the editorial appeared.

YouGov scores brands from 100 to -100, with zero being neutral, based on daily interviews from respondents, and they track the change in the score to show a rise or decline in overall brand perception.

Their buzz chart is a reflection of how buzz perception changes over time. They ask consumers, “If you’ve heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, was it positive or negative?” Their results indicate that Whole Foods had a buzz score of 22.8 on August 12th, and that score fell to 13.6 by August 20th. That’s almost a 10 point drop in just over a week.

Whole Foods Rep

The reputation chart is scored in the same manner, but asks respondents, “Would you be proud or embarrassed to work for this brand?” According to their research, the reputation score is suffering even more. On August 12th Whole Foods had a 33.3 score, but by the 20th they were down to 20.3.

Can the results be trusted? Well, according to the firm, “YouGov’s BrandIndex interviews 5,000 people each weekday from a representative US population sample, more than 1.2 million interviews per year. Respondents are drawn from an online panel of more than 1MM individuals. Margin of error is a very accurate +/- 2%.”

While we take no sides on the issue, it’s hard not to attribute at least some of the drop in consumer perception to the vocal Facebook group that has emerged in the aftermath of the CEO’s Wall Street Journal op-ed. Should YouGov’s research be as accurate as it claims to be, then Whole Foods definitely needs to be concerned about this social media backlash that’s negatively impacting consumer opinion.

Source / Mashable

For previous Rag Blog articles on Whole Foods and founder John Mackey, go here.

Thanks to David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog

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