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Beware of the perils of a Facebook alias
by Stephen Hagan 6 January 2014
I
’m not sure when Mark Zuckerberg made his first blog entry, “I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 3 pm and it’s a Tuesday afternoon?” on the social-networking site Facebook he’d created back on 28 October 2003, that he knew the phenomenon he’d generated would become as big, influential and controversial as it is today. Zuckerberg’s only restriction back then for his website’s membership was that users had to be a minimum age of 13 years. The website, initially available for students at Harvard University where he studied, soon spread to other colleges in the Boston area and gradually to universities throughout the United States and
Canada. Facebook was a happening, trendy and extremely convenient means of social networking for the young back then, that today, has simply taken the world by storm for users of all demographics. With over 1.3bn active monthly users spending on average 18 minutes per visit, sending 3 million messages every 20 minutes and generating over $6.1bn last year, Facebook is a 21st Century marvel. Despite the merits of this modern day expedience of offering up desirable attributes of enhancing the user’s social skills, educational development and digital competence, not to mention the trump card appeal of shameless self-expression, there are, however, inherent dangers for inquisitive minds who seek more of the unknown.
Issues of lateral violence – of users being mean in the extreme to others – unlimited access to the Internet, including explicit adult programs that would make parent’s hair stand on end if they only knew what their little angels were viewing. Whilst liking friends is a relatively safe way of increasing one’s public profile, it is the liking of friends of friends who are totally anonymous and may well turn out to be the nightmare predatory friend that you wouldn’t wish upon your worst enemy. A relative newcomer to Facebook, Joyce Capewell - from Geraldton in WA - shared her story with First Nations Telegraph of another disadvantage of Facebook that she wanted to highlight and in which she intends to take further action. On Saturday First Nations Telegraph published Joyce’s
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Opinion piece, A racist police woman with a convenient Facebook alias http://goo.gl/6HaJuv, about a Facebook user with the name Anne T Sharia who referred to Aboriginal people as oxygen thieves who have welfare careers. Additional commentary from Anne T Sharia attributed in Joyce’s article of Aboriginal people abusing and starving their kids and dogs whilst wasting taxpayer’s millions on nothing of value speaks volumes of the lengths Facebook users are prepared to go to vent their spleen. Unfortunately for the Facebook user with a racist vitriolic tongue who, on this occasion, happened to vent her spleen on the Facebook page of a very proactive social justice advocate in Joyce Capewell. Joyce, through meticulous investigative research, found a willing Facebook ally who knew the woman, who assumed the alias Anne T Sharia, from a time they both spent time in an
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Aboriginal community in Cape York Peninsula together. Back then this Sharia woman was known to be a redneck – but sadly she worked in a profession where you’d expect those in that vocation were impartial on all communal issues, irrespective of their racial, social, professional or religious beliefs. She was a police officer. Today, Joyce will forward the real name of the Facebook user, with the alias Anne T Sharia, to the Queensland Commissioner of Police, Ian Stewart, and the Queensland Minister for Police, Hon Jack Dempsey MP, requesting they investigate her complaint. Joyce hopes this police officer with a penchant for racial vilification of others (she even has a anti-muslim video on her Facebook site) is sacked from the Queensland Police Department. Maybe it’s wishful thinking on the part of Joyce as police don’t generally have a good reputation when
investigating one of their own. It’s hard to imagine Mark Zuckerberg tightening the rules of his social-networking invention to prevent an alias accessing Facebook sites so easily – especially now that it’s valued at over $104bn and this problem would appear to him a minor irritant. But Joyce’s shared experience – if it achieves nothing else - may serve to remind others of the inherent dangers that lurks behind the anonymity of a Facebook user with a sick mind and a huge appetite to causing angst with their tapped keyboard social commentary. My advice to those who experience an unwelcomed and unsafe social communication from anyone on their Facebook page is to hit the delete button. If they reappear as another alias, do them the disservice of hitting the delete button again.