Facebook, a place for friends.
Can you remember when Facebook was described as a place to ‘connect friends and family’? It  took me well over a year to get bitten by the Facebook bug after MySpace died a dirty death. It was full of celebrity gossip (yawn) and featured supposed ‘internet celebrities’ for people to add…. So Facebook began and it was plain, simple and just a great way to follow businesses and idols, along with talking to friends and family – some of them grandparents! There was none of this ‘Hiya, add me because I have 22356532 friends and I’m famous on MySpace’. It was refreshing to see something that was more, normal. The website didn’t indulge itself in celebrity endorsement, having crazy profiles that when you clicked on it a song would start playing really loudly, only for you to find the person had used HTML to hide the player so you were scrambling for your own volume. No, it was boring looking but stubbed out the annoying bits of other social networking sites so there were no popularity contests or big adverts for stuff you didn’t care about.
It is now three years on and things have changed, and not really for the better either. I looked down my news feed this morning to check up on what friends were getting up to. Well, let’s see: so and so liked a page what promised to be by the bio line ‘the sexiest girls with the hottest bodies’. The page’s default image was of a girl holding her fake boobs, and the name of the page suggested masturbation. Okay, what else? So and so liked hot tattooed girls. Another page claiming to be for the tattoos, but all we see is a big fat excuse to upload pictures of naked tattooed women.
Facebook, what’s going on?
I am seeing more and more of these kind of pages popping up, each time the images getting more explicit. Do Facebook delete and ban uses for a limited amount of time still for uploading indecent images to what is supposedly a family social networking website?
I am a photographer and once photographed a small chested lady covering her chest with suspenders. It wasn’t suggestive, and her hair covered pretty much most of her chest anyway, but it still got deleted and I got a warning. I was like, fair enough, I know a lot of latex design companies and photographers (not men with cams mind, eeww) who have had their professional work deleted even though it wasn’t that bad. But now there is pornography being spread around Facebook. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere with these pages and groups on a ‘family’ social networking site, right? From my own page stats, people as young as 13 are included in the statistics. This means Facebook must allow people as young as 13 to have an account. A lot of the stuff I see on Facebook is rated for people over the age of 18, so what are they going to do about it?
At the end of the day, it seems far too many people have far too much time on their hands (attached to their dick probably!) Porn should be left off Facebook and be viewed somewhere else. I don’t really want to see what explicit stuff gets you off on my news feed!
Is it time I moved on to Twitter I wonder? But then again, I miss the times before we all spoke via comments and Tweets!