A New World Error

Most of the time when somebody uses the phrase “Wake up, sheeple!” (that is, sheep + people = sheeple) they’re being a douchebag – which is to say, they’re asserting how cool, unique, and not sheep-like they are compared to everyone else. It’s rather like the stereotypical “hipster” who only listens to obscure music, just so they can say “It’s a really obscure band – you’ve probably never heard of it.” But there are times when a news story will come along and you find yourself wondering just how naïve – how foolish and unworldly – someone would have to be to allow such events to happen in the first place. You don’t give a loaded gun to a small child; you don’t turn your back on a mad dog, and you don’t post invitations to an upcoming party where everyone on the Internet can see them…

Unfortunately, we keep seeing cases where somebody does just that – usually because they’re a teenager and don’t understand that the whole world WILL take you up on such an invitation, or because they don’t understand how the privacy settings on Facebook work, or most often both. The most recent case comes to us from Harpenden, England by way of the MSNBC Website , but there have been similar cases elsewhere in the UK and Spain in the last couple of years. In this week’s case the teen’s parent was able to cancel the party and shut down the Facebook page well in advance, and local law enforcement is gearing up to deal with any mobs of drunken revelers (and vandals and thieves) like the ones from February’s incident in Spain . The real question is how could this happen in the first place…

The news account states that the teen in our story did not check the box on her Facebook invitation designating the party as a private affair, and that this lead to it being classified as a public event and made available to anyone who wanted to see it – which, by extension, meant that the whole world was invited. On learning of the mistake, her mother cancelled the party, suspended the account, and revoked the teen’s Internet access, but also said that Facebook itself should have realized that a teenager’s birthday party should not be made available to the public and blocked the public listing. The company, in turn, says that it can’t monitor every invitation sent out by every one of its customers, and that doing so would be a violation of free speech (and freedom of assembly, if you think about it) anyway. They suggest that parents keep a closer eye on what their children are posting online…

On the one hand, it’s hard not to side with the company on this – nobody really wants Facebook censoring what their users post, and there’s no question that parents shouldn’t expect a social networking site to mind their children for them. On the other hand, it’s a rather naïve and silly policy for the company to take, given the potential for abuse this situation exposes. A common harassment tactic (it goes back to the social unrest in the 1960s) is to surreptitiously post signs indicating that your adversary is having a garage sale at dawn on Sunday, and then watch the resulting chaos; imagine how much more damaging it would be to create a dummy Facebook account and indicate that a wild party will be held at your enemy’s address on Saturday, and invite the whole world to come – especially if they are actually having a party that night…

When we were children, or even young adults, the worst that could happen with a wild teenage party was that a few of the wrong kids might get wind of it and show up to make trouble; today, if you push the wrong button, every troublemaker in the world could get your name, address, telephone number, and the date and time of your party. The truth is that there has never been anything as mindlessly powerful or casually dangerous as the Internet in all of human history, and allowing your children to play with it without supervision is far more insane than leaving loaded weapons lying around. The world has changed around us once again, and it does not care what you or I or anyone else thinks about it. Anyone who does not pay attention to the dangers of this Brave New World might as well be stuffing raw meat down their pants and then going for a walk in wolf country…