Last week, TechCrunch reported on the latest in a series of occasions where global media outlets caved into a government request for personal information that led to an individual being prosecuted for what amounts to a thought crime. In this case, Google handed over to Indian authorities the email address of a poster on its Orkut social network who allegedly disparaged politician Sonia Gandhi using what the police claimed was vulgar language—a crime punishable by up to five years in prison in that country.
The episode seems to have merged back into the cloud, so to speak, but it shouldn’t—for reasons that should concern executives at any online media enterprise with global ambitions. Nobody may care about the tiff between Sonia Gandhi and 22-year-old Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid, but someone, somewhere will care when the wrong social activist, journalist, or ordinary citizen is turned over to the wrong country for a manifestly wrong punishment—and at that point, the CEO of the company that collaborated in that miscarriage of justice will wish they had thought through this problem ahead of time.
Stanford professor BJ Fogg has done some thinking about this. Social networks—Facebook first among them, in his opinion—are pioneering a new mode of group dynamics that he calls “mass interpersonal persuasion.” It’s word-of-mouth on steroids, and it can happen with startling speed and impact thanks to the way online social networks can spread ideas across multiple degrees of separation, among people who share nothing in common except the network—and a set of social values that are activated or challenged in the face of current events. Fogg first noticed this dynamic a few months ago when the Myanmar government cracked down on its Buddhist monks. Word of this violation of human rights and common decency was all over Facebook well before it started grabbing mass media attention.
Even medical sociologists are noticing how social networks can facilitate the spread of an idea or behavior among people who don’t know each other but are loosely connected via the network. When a member at the center of the network adopts a behavior—quits smoking, or goes on a diet—the effect of that behavior ripples through the entire network.
So what would happen if someone central to the network decided that Google—or Facebook—was evil after all? For example, last November Congressman Tom Lantos publicly derided Yahoo as “spineless and irresponsible” and its executives—in particular, CEO Jerry Yang—as moral “pygmies” for their role in the arrest and imprisonment of Chinese dissident journalist Shi Tao. Who is Shi Tao? I don’t know, and probably you don’t either. But it’s not a stretch to believe there is someone out there whose unjust treatment at the hands of a global social network will ignite the ire—not just of a few congressmen—but of its entire customer base.
This point is critical because the most progressive business strategies in social networking involve a form of globalization that media companies previously haven’t practiced. Most media globalization involves some form of localization—Google and Orkut, for example. But Facebook, ahead of all others, is ambitiously globalizing by providing translation tools that will make it possible for every Facebook member, in every supported language, to enjoy every feature of the global site and theoretically connect with every other member, globally. Somewhere in that vast global network, someone at its center is going to get mad about something. And what will happen then?
Neither Facebook, nor any other social network, wants that person at the center of the network to be mad at them for a social injustice they committed in the name of preserving their business interests in an authoritarian state. We might get a taste of this in the coming months. The Tibet issue would be a perfect one to demonstrate to global media enterprises the urgent need they have to develop workable strategies for exercising corporate social responsibility on a global scale.
