I've been hearing a lot of buzz about online activism lately, ever since my post about the "Blackadder 1" case. People are increasingly chafing under a variety of Facebook policies. Recently it seems as though a bunch of Obama supporters have been running up against Facebook's sort-of stupid spam filtering system. Add to that complaints about mysterious deletion policies on Wikipedia - the site seems to support entries about white men and de-emphasize entries about people of color and women. There is a growing need for an army of progressive "online activists", whose job is to push the policies and content of big online sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace and others further to the left. danah boyd has been a vocal critic of Facebook along a number of lines, including their sluggishness in allowing users to totally obliterate their accounts, and has recently tagged Google for the opposite behavior (zapping entire accounts without much warning.)
There are really a wide variety of ways to pursue this goal, and they range all the way from the entrepreneurial (creating our own sites to compete with the big boys) to the activist-oriented (petitioning and emailing site administrators) to the legalistic (suing, using creative techniques to signal disagreement with legal terms), and perhaps, eventually, leading to legislation that goes beyond child predator crackdowns.
I am beginning to think that we need to view these online sites as something more than private arenas which are the sites of purely commercial transactions. They are increasingly becoming a type of public commons, and I think there is, or should be, cause for the government to regulate them, or for users to introduce democratic controls. I don't have the legal brainpower necessary to think up how we'd implement such a system, in terms of litigational or legislative action, but I'm certainly open to thoughts, suggestions and comments, including those of the "what a stupid idea" variety.
More generally, I'd love to hear your thoughts about activism directed at large websites as a whole.
Update: A quick thought - perhaps online activist should start a wiki to track complaints against Facebook, Google, et. al.? That might be an interesting place to gather criticisms and begin to mount a more fundamental campaign than the quick-fix ad hoc campaignsonline activists tend to run these days.
