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Banned Union Organizer Back on Facebook |
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Union organizers don’t sit around when injustice occurs. So when Facebook banned Canadian union organizer Derek Blackadder from the site earlier this week, the global union movement took action—and Blackadder is back on Facebook.
Although candidates running for president, including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, each boast tens of thousands of friends on the social networking site, Facebook threw Blackadder off for making too many friends on the site.
Within nano-minutes of Blackadder’s ban, a “Free the Blackadder One” group was created on Facebook, and quickly became so popular, it reached the 1,000 friends mark. According to Facebook rules, once a group exceeds 1,000 members, Facebook turns off the e-mail feature and members can no longer be contacted.
John Wood, a dedicated unionist from the United Kingdom who organized the Free the Blackadder One site, urged people to e-mail Facebook customer services about Blackadder’s treatment. Yesterday, Blackadder was allowed back on the site and is discussing the situation on his Facebook page. The global website LabourStart, for which Blackadder is a correspondent, also played a big role in outreach.
As Lindsey Beyerstein writes on Alternet:
So far, nobody is alleging that the ban was politically motivated. The Facebook Terms of Use stipulate that Facebook is for personal non-commercial use only-that line is blurry for people like Blackadder who effectively make friends for a living.
In fact, Facebook is full of professional activists and organizers plying their trade openly. These organizers come from across the political spectrum. Facebook hosts thousands of politically-oriented groups. It seems odd that Blackadder would be singled out for the content of his profile.
Apparently, it’s not uncommon for users to get banned for adding too many friends. The tech blog Scobelizer reported last year that Facebook engineers imposed a 5,000-friend limit on all users because the system isn’t designed to handle such large sets of contacts.
But as Beyerstein wonders:
[T]he question remains: Why did Facebook kick Blackadder out, instead of just regulating his friending? By disabling the account, Facebook has deprived Blackadder of a potentially valuable contact lists and whatever else he may have uploaded.
(We’ve got an AFL-CIO Facebook page—sign on!)
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It is outrageous that the stimulus package looks like a retail stimulus package. It will do nothing to repair and rebuild our infrastructure, increase manufacturing here at home, extend unemployment benefits for the unemployed, provide health care, or provide affordable housing and shelter. In other words, it will do little to actually change and improve the economy.
The tax breaks for business, ie, for the wealthy who already do not pay sufficient taxes, will not change the direction of the economy; and change directions it must to change the situation.
The Administration does wars of conquest and transfers of public wealth into their own private hands, and we get military service for the corporate wars, unemployment, lack of health care, unaffordable housing, foreclosures, and those still working get a few hundred dollars to go shopping. What? To stimulate the import of more Chinese made goods?
Have the Democrats completely forgotten the New Deal? Put money into publicly run not-for-profit reconstruction of the country. Put people to work not for war but for the communities of the entire nation.
Fraternally,
Denis Mosgofian