Constitutional Facebook

A grassroot movement to establish a constitution to Facebook to guarantee a certain extent of community member rights.

If you have registered to Facebook, please go to the Constitutional Facebook group - that is where the action is.

Brief introduction

Our current legal contract with Facebook gives us almost no rights to control how our own data or our privacy is handled. Facebook user interface gives us an implied promise of such control but Facebook is actually not accountable and may neglect any of our implied rights. There have already been many apparent abuses by Facebook. As we are the suppliers of all the content here, we should stand up and demand our just rights as a community and defend our community members. Please distribute this declaration and invite your friends to join us in this rebel cause.

Constitutional Facebook Declaration

We are the Facebook community. The Facebook platform is necessary for our community to exist in this virtual state occupied by our virtual presence. We ourselves provide all the social contents – the very substance that attracts people to Facebook. We are thus highly valuable collaborators of the Facebook platform providers. We hereby stand up and demand our just rights.

The Facebook platform gives us many implied promises through its user interface. As we store our connections, conversations and other data in the Facebook databases, we are allowed to select who may see this content. We can also identify and block intrusive people from our vicinity. These implied but important promises must be properly reflected in the user agreement, which we are required to accept. We demand that the Facebook platform providers acknowledge and respect these implied promises and act accordingly.

We demand mutual respect in the user agreement. It is not proper that one collaborator is the judge, jury and the executioner. Both contributing parties must respect the just rights of the other party. Both parties must have equal responsibility to fulfill their part of the collaboration. Both must be accountable and breaches must be handled according to such transparent practices where disputes are handled through joint community measures or independent arbitration.

The following lists potential problem areas for misconduct or abuse of our implied rights, which we as community members have identified:

1. Our privacy concerns must be honored: our content and connections should not be seen by third parties if we have defined restricted visibility according to the practices provided by the Facebook platform.
2. We should not be expelled or banned from the Facebook community without a severe breach of our contract, which should always be clearly documented and immediately communicated to the affected community member.
3. Our contents and connections should not be destroyed or mishandled by the Facebook platform providers unless this is required by law enforcement.
4. We should have efficient tools for removing and exporting our contents from Facebook. Each community member should be provided complete visibility into what data is being stored about him or her and who is able to see and access that data.
5. We should be able to rely on our identities not being stolen and stolen identities not being used by people who approach us. Serious and publicly documented efforts should continuously be made by the Facebook platform providers to handle this concern with all practical measures.
6. There should be an independent or Facebook community -based appeals process with transparent rules and such contractual arrangements that the decisions of the appeals process are binding to both parties.

In any collaboration it is necessary that all investing parties contribute and commit. This is a description of some of the most basic commitments that the Facebook community requires of the Facebook platform providers. This is also the sum total of current Constitutional Facebook movements consensus. Varying viewpoints on more detailed issues and related movements have been linked to Constitutional Facebook –group – linked through www.constitutional-facebook.org.

You are free to pass this forward unchanged. You are also free to quote and refer to this in a fair manner, and naturally you are free to use any ideas you get from this in any way you see useful. Please post or send this to anyone you think could help in our cause. We want to make the Facebook a decent and just place for our community.