Comment Central

James Kirkham

Twitter has the badge of distinction of the first mass protest from members at a change it has implemented - thousands of people objecting to a change it has made in replies. At the same time it has been subjected to an amusingly wrathful blog post from rapper Kanye West, who is incensed that the service allows people to impersonate him.

This highlights a strength and weakness of the service. Seven years ago, Friendster was the social network that everyone was talking about. It made a virtue of the fact that it discouraged members from pretending to be someone they weren't. That meant no "Fakesters" --people pretending to be Homer Simpson or God or Harvard University or a dog. It also meant no "Fraudsters" -- people pretending to be someone else,such as Britney Spears or their cousin Billy. "The whole point of Friendster is that you're connected to somebody through mutual friends, not by virtue of the fact that you both like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups," Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams told the San Francisco Weekly at the time.

However, the "No Fakester" approach violated one of the Internet's central tenets -- anonymity -- best embodied by a Peter Steiner cartoon in the New Yorker from 1993 showing a dog in front of a computer screen with the caption, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." To many, the power of anonymity is not a luxury but a necessity, the essence of freedom.

By gathering online anonymously, people are free to find others who share their political views or their sexual orientation without fear of repercussion. As a result, many of Friendster's users revolted. They decried the "Fakester Genocide" on Facebook and vowed to start a "Fakester Revolution." They wrote a revolutionary document, the "Fakester Manifesto." The first declaration: "Identity is provisional. Who we are is whom we choose to be at any given moment, depending on personality, whim, temperament, or subjective need.

No other person or organization can abridge that right, as shape-shifting is inherent to human consciousness, and allows us to thrive and survive under greatly differing circumstances by becoming different people as need or desire arises. By assuming the mantle of the Other, it allows us, paradoxically, to complete ourselves. Every day is Halloween."

MySpace and Facebook subsequently took all of Friendsters users. Twitter is in an interesting situation of being praised by certain celebrities -- Stephen Fry and Ashton Kutcher most famously – for letting them bypass pesky journalists who are liable to twist their words, and speak directly to those who are interested in what they have to say (and then have the media report it later).

However, there is little barrier to fakesters setting up Twitter accounts and gaining vast numbers of followers before anyone can confirm that it is actually a phony account. Is this a major problem for the micro-blogging site? Not really -- Kanye West's somewhat frightening rant aside. James Kirkham, Managing Director of Holler www.hollerdigital.co.uk