EIDOS Brisbane conference: Social media in times of crisis

(Kym Charlton of QPS speaks at Eidos. photo: Fiona Muirhead)

One of the predicted outcomes of climate change is more frequent and intense severe weather events (today’s report in The Australian predicting exactly the opposite should be treated with caution due to the paper’s well documented ideological biases.) Given the likelihood of such events increasing, a conference called “Social media in times of crisis” held yesterday in Brisbane was timely. Organised by the Eidos Institute, the conference brought together a number of speakers from academia, media, public relations and public affairs to discuss the use of tools such as Twitter and Facebook in crises, particularly in the 2010-2011 Queensland flood event.

First speaker Kym Charlton was ideally placed to talk to the topic. Head of Queensland Police Service media unit, she was responsible for the delivery of a service that set the gold standard in crisis response. Charlton told the audience she set up the QPS Facebook Page in May 2010 without asking the powers that be for permission.

She admits it was a risky move in a notoriously risk-averse organisation. Without telling anyone about it, the page grew slowly through word of mouth. Charlton eventually realised she needed high level signoff for the page and approached her boss Deputy Commissioner Ian Stewart (who would later play a critical leading role in the flood response). The tech savvy Stewart agreed to trial the page for six months and by December 2010 the page had 6,000 likes. Early experiments such as live-streaming the funeral of an officer who died on duty failed, but the experience gained was crucial.

Then on 15 December as Charlton laconically put it, “it began to rain”. Many people, myself included, signed up to the QPS Facebook feed in the days that followed as it sent out reams of useful and relevant information covering the flood events across a huge area of the state. Then on 11 January, a torrent of water rushed through Toowoomba and into the Lockyer Valley below. Journalist Amanda Gearing would later take the conference through a harrowing blow by blow of events in the region from her eye-witness perspective.

There was a desperate need for credible and quick information about missing family and friends. USQ’s Kelly McWilliam told the afternoon session how one person’s page Toowoomba and Darling Downs Flood Photos and Info was set up within an hour of the flood (well ahead of scanty official responses from the Toowoomba Regional Council) as a repository of photos and information about the missing. It remains the most popular site with 37,000 fans.

QUT’s Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess measured Twitter use of the #qldfloods hashtag. They noted a huge spike in tweets on the day marked “Lockyer” (there would be an even greater number marked “Brisbane” in the days that followed.) The ABC’s Monique Potts told the conference how the national broadcaster used tools such as Ushahidi to map crowdsourced incidents in the flood (and later cyclone) region.

On the day of the Toowoomba/Lockyer Valley flood, the QPS Facebook page was a crucial resource. Suddenly as Kim Charlton said, their facebook page feed was on the pointy end of social media. 16,000 fans of the page became 160,000 in just 24 hours as people across Queensland, Australia and the world desperately sought to get information about those in the disaster zone. There were 39 million views of the page in that day, over 450 views every second. “Thank heavens it wasn’t our website,” Charlton said. “January 11 blew us out of the water.” The pressure remained intense to get timely and accurate news out all week as the wall of water headed towards Brisbane. Just as valuable as the information sharing were the QPS “mythbuster” posts and tweets which punctured the many rumours that were rife at the time. Then “after a week off” as Charlton put it, tropical cyclones Antony and Yasi struck the north coast pushing the QPS team into overdrive again.

It was an astonishing effort for a team with just one acknowledged social media expert in an organisation with no official social media policy. Emergency 2.0 Wiki Project Leader Eileen Culleton (herself a survivor of Darwin’s Cyclone Tracy in 1974 when it took days to let the world know what happened) would later tell the conference that setting a social media policy was a must for all organisations with a public presence. Culleton noted how the Brisbane City Council galvanised the "mud army" to help with the clean-up with their use of social media.

But for Charlton the QPS social media updates were simpler still; it was something they had to do to save lives. The conference's final speaker UQ’s Mark Bahnisch put these usages in a social sciences context of “social resilience”. Disasters, said Bahnisch, expose our social structures more sharply than any other important event. They unsettle us by taking us out of our normal rituals. But panic is rare, Bahnisch argues and there is a social good of new communities created out of the common bond of crisis. Social media go a long way to help creating those communities, not to mention as the QPS found out, saving lives.

The Social Network and Facebook's foreign policy

A few weeks ago, Internet law writer Tim Wu playfully asked (or his headline writers did) whether “Facebook had a foreign policy?” It’s a reasonable enough question. If Facebook were a national state, it would be the third largest in the world after China and India. Facebook is not anywhere so powerful as a nation yet but its 500 million adherents mostly recognise there is no other tool yet that manages that social network side of life nearly as well.

Wu called Facebook “an integral part of the world's social architecture”. The author of the book Who Controls the Internet understands what makes Facebook interesting: “a mutual agreement to tell others who you are, what you like, and what you are doing.” Not only has this “agreement” attracted mass audiences, it attracted a massive intensity of international and domestic scrutiny which Wu said would give us a sense of the soul of this company more so than any “recent movie” ever could.

Wu was making a powerful point about Facebook but erred badly in his faint praise of the “recent movie”, the acclaimed David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin film “The Social Network”. It deserves better. Director Fincher reins in the violent storytelling ability he showed in Seven and Fight Club while Sorkin brings the intelligence of the West Wing to the script. The result is a brilliant but tight expose of how and why the biggest social network of our generation came into being.

How Facebook became “The Social Network” is indubitably the story of its chief founder Mark Zuckerberg. The 27 year-old New Yorker officially owns just under a quarter of Facebook but his mindshare in the company is a lot closer to one hundred percent. The story of the film is set in the recent past with Zuckerberg facing two law suits from those that feel they lost out while Zuckerberg made billions. “You’re not an asshole, you’re just trying really hard to be one,” one sympathetic female lawyer said in the film, yet whether he was or wasn’t became immaterial to the film's purpose.

Zuckerberg didn’t cooperate with the filmmakers yet right from the electric opening scene, we see a strange hagiography emerging. Zuckerberg harangues a soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend and paints himself as an intensely burning candle with little or no thought to what way his smoke went out. Jesse Eisenberg’s gift is to make audiences awed by his audacity and awareness of opportunity as much as they detest the way he treats people. Sorkin and Fincher are both 20 years older than their main character and it may they are trying to channel their own X-gen faults with women through the Zuckerberg they came up with. His jilting/jilted lover is “Erica Albright” who is made up for dramatic purposes (his real girlfriend is Priscilla Chan) but it isn’t difficult to believe he might be that chimeric with women.

Aided by a deft soundtrack by Trent Reznor, the plot surges along in a manner most would not associate with computer nerds. We see how Zuckerberg and his friends turned a new idea called “the Facebook” (complete with definite article, it is a pre-Internet Ivy League invention to describe a set of photographic data that defined a student) into a success story. As it gets closer to becoming a billion dollar industry, bottom feeders such as Sean Parker (played with Best Supporting Actor Oscar-winning conviction by Justin Timberlake) start to shape Zuckerberg’s vision.

Zuckerberg’s Brazilian friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) provides inspiration in the shape of intellectual honesty as well as a mathematical algorithm and funds to keep the server running. The film is based on the book "The Accidental Billionaires" a semi-fictional account that tells the story primarily from Saverin's point of view. But in the movie Saverin overplays his hand and is ousted by the Machiavellian Parker. The eventual feud forms one of the two dramatised court cases; the other being Zuckerberg’s fight with the Winkelvoss twins (both effortlessly played by Arnie Hammer) who claim they gave him the idea to use the Harvard .edu domain to promote the social network. Zuckerberg tells the “Winkelvi” if it was their idea then they would have done it. The filmmakers’ sympathy is with the nerdy Jew over his upper-class co-religionists.

How much he has won since that battle was shown in a new item this week on the BBC about a fight between Facebook and fellow Internet heavyweight Google. Facebook has offered users a workaround after Google Gmail blocked the export of contact material because Facebook “did not share its data reciprocally”. Mike Davis, a senior analyst with research firm Ovum, told the BBC the stand-off says a lot about the developing rivalry between the two firms. "Facebook is a significant challenge to Google's dominance of the web sphere and it has decided that it doesn't want to give Facebook any more advantage,” he said. "This is Google waking up to the fact that it was the next big thing and that now Facebook is," he said.

Because Facebook’s phenomenal reach shows little sign of slowing, there are those who worry greatly about its power. Criticism to date has focused on data mining, child safety, and the inability to terminate accounts without first manually deleting all the content. But there is a bigger hankering issue which Wu alluded to earlier. In the film Zuckerberg acknowledges Facebook’s phenomenal growth is based on its “cool” value Wu called the “mutual agreement to tell others who you are”. But when Zuckerberg himself is such a cipher, why should we treat the agreement as mutual? Without a foreign policy to guide us, Fincher and Sorkin have done us a favour by asking the question.

The People's Republic of Facebook

Sooner or later, we will all probably hate Facebook enough to leave it. It will become too commercialistic, too voyeuristic, too invasive of privacy or just too damn powerful. And we’ll all pack up our digital bags and go somewhere else. And that will be a shame because as social networks go, Facebook has a lot going for it.

Facebook is easily the most popular social network in the world and now has a massive user base capable of connecting a planet. There are more than 300 million members and growth is showing little sign of slowing. And to date, its effect is mostly benign and very often beneficial. It allows people from across the world to get a window in other people’s lives. It re-opens old and stalled friendships. And though it has more than five percent of the world’s population in it, it hasn’t caused any wars, terrorism, or large scale hatred. Yes sure there are hate groups out there on Facebook, but these can be easily named and shamed or better still simply shunned. And despite the media stink about linking every nastiness with Facebook, usually there is only a tangential link. There is no evidence to suggest Facebook is evil.

What is evident is Facebook is in danger of becoming a massive time sink. Facebook is changing the way we deal with the world because it is a one-stop shop for multiple communication needs. It has email, instant messaging, twitter-like status updates with added banter, there are a limitless number of games, there are links to be shared, and there are photos to be posted and enjoyed. Before you know fifteen minutes of the day is gone in a flash. No wonder some employers hate it. Yet it caters for a crucial part of human existence: the need to know more about the world. If Facebook didn’t exist, people would still be on the phone or reading letters or playing games.

Mark Zuckerberg has already made a lot of money from Facebook. Aged just 25 he is a “youthful multi-millionaire” however most of his wealth is virtual and tied into the possible worth of Facebook if it ever went for public stock options. And when that happens the gloves will be off. The corrupting influence of power and money will likely turn Facebook into a grubby advertising pit.

So here’s my suggestion to Mr Zuckerberg. Instead of making gazillions out of it, why not give it away. Release it into the wild of the public domain. Let the users take it over and turn it into open source or wikify it. Let Facebook privacy finds its own equilibrium. Sack your army of lawyers and offer passports to the People’s Republic of Facebook. If that idea sounds too radical, then consider the alternatives. The desire to make serious money out it will eventually kill it. You may be gone on to other things by then and may not care but the destruction of Facebook will still be forever associated with you.

It remains a good idea to put the world on one network. That doesn’t mean everyone has to talk to everyone, but it does open up infinite possibilities. It will require a whole new universe of trust; it will redefine what it means to publish. It will stretch and pulsate our neural network without the nagging fear that ultimately its all about exploiting users to turn a buck. Facebook could yet be that network but only if Zuckerberg lets it run free.

Australian media opens new front in Facebook wars

The issue of policing Facebook raised its ugly head again in Australia this week after the tribute sites to two murdered Queensland youths were defaced by pornography, bestiality and statements about one of the alleged killers that could be prejudicial to a fair trial. It didn’t help that the two crimes were extremely emotive. 12-year-old Brisbane student Elliott Fletcher was killed after being stabbed in a school playground brawl with a 13-year-old charged with his murder. And 350km north in Bundaberg, 8-year-old Trinity Bates was found murdered near her home after being abducted from her bedroom.

With an estimated eight million Australians (over a third of the population) now on Facebook, it was only natural the social networking site would be a central point of communal grief over the murders. Thousands of well-wishes and sympathisers flocked to the tribute sites of both children. However it wasn’t long before they descended into grubbiness. On the page dedicated to Fletcher, photos and messages started appearing of murder, child porn, race-hate and bestiality forcing the removal of the page. A similar thing happened to the Bates tribute page where posters also called for the death of the man accused of Trinity’s murder.

The incidents caused Queensland Premier Anna Bligh to write a letter to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg asking whether he could do anything to prevent a recurrence of these types of incidents. Bligh said the posting of pornography and illegal messages on tribute sites for Bates and Fletcher had compounded the grief over their deaths. "To have these things happen to Facebook pages set up for the sole purpose of helping these communities pay tribute to the young lives lost in the most horrible way adds to the grief already being experienced," Bligh wrote. "And it is something no parent should have to deal with when coming to terms with the loss of their child."

Facebook have yet to formally respond to Bligh. But Facebook’s Director of Communications and Public Policy Debbie Frost said the site had rules to check content and reviewers were quick to respond to any reports of hate or threats against an individual, pornography, or violent photos or videos, and would remove the content, and either warn or disable the accounts of those responsible. "Facebook is highly self-regulating, and users can and do report content that they find questionable or offensive," Frost said. In the Fletcher case, the most Facebook could do was remove the groups and disable the accounts of the people responsible. “It is simply not possible to prevent a person with a sinister agenda from undertaking offensive activity anywhere on the Internet where people can post content,” said Frost. “Nor is it really possible in real life.”

Meanwhile News Ltd’s The Punch pointed out inconsistencies in the calls for the death of the person charged for the murder. “If this happened in a newspaper or on a major news website,” The Punch’s editor Paul Colgan wrote, “the editor would be at risk of going to jail.” Colgan was alluding to the vexed issue whether social network entries can be considered as publications under the law. He also raised several questions related to “the ongoing safety of general Facebook users and what the company is doing to protect the public from being exposed to unsolicited pornographic or obscene material”.

But social networking maven Laurel Papworth launched a vigorous defence of Facebook today and said they cannot be held responsible for the actions of people using the site. Papworth told the ABC she was “actually quite scared of Facebook starting to act as censors of our discussions.” She said other people created the pages and with 400 million members worldwide it is similar to asking Australia Post to be responsible for letters that they deliver or telcos to be responsible for dodgy SMS messages. "It's not their responsibility to be the police of humanity,” she said. "We still get spam, but we have learnt now to put it into the spam folder and move on.”

Papworth is right. Attitudes and the law will adapt to the way people use new technologies. A moral panic against the technology will sell newspapers but it won’t solve the problem highlighted by the Fletcher and Bates cases. That’s not to say Facebook are blameless. Their tendency to treat privacy issues in cavalier fashion will come back to haunt them as the worldwide user base rapidly approaches saturation point. The final word should go to Daniel Solove who wrote about the issue in his seminal text The Future of Reputation

“Although the internet poses new and difficult issues, they are variations on some timeless problems: the tension between privacy and free speech, the nature of privacy, the virtues and vices of gossip and shaming, the effect of new technologies on the spread of information, and the ways in which law, technology and norms interact. New technologies do not just enhance freedom, but also alter the matrix of freedom and control in new and challenging ways”

Facebook and the media: Opening the gated community

One guaranteed way to make a newspaper headline writer’s day is to find an event that has some tenuous connection with Facebook. If there is a remote chance that technology can be blamed for something, it will be. So it is hardly surprising that in the last few days alone we have Facebook murders, Facebook crime, Facebook rescues, Facebook bandits, illegal Facebook parties and even “Facebook for the dead”. This is all very lazy journalism though understandable that the media should want to tap into the Internet’s biggest phenomenon. (photo by jurvetson)

Facebook’s growth shows little sign of slowing down. Its founder Mark Zuckerberg said he still had big plans for the five-year-old application when he announced last week Facebook now had 300 million users which would make it the fourth largest country in the world. It is not difficult to believe it will soon overtake the US with its 3.1 million to leave only China and India ahead of it. Zuckerberg is so confident, he thinks the company may even make money in 2010!

Zuckerberg says his company mission is "to make the world more open and transparent by giving people the power to share information.” But while many have praised Facebook as part of the democratising trend of new media, there is a social exclusion aspect to it also. Facebook is easily the largest gated community in the world. Author Robert Putnam told fan culture guru Henry Jenkins that while engagement with Facebook was primarily a social activity, there is a real "participation divide" that creates varying degrees of Internet engagement. Putnam found that Facebookers practice what cultural anthropologists call "gating", the tendency to build physical/virtual, social, and cultural walls that are exclusive.

But within their own communities, social network users are very generous. Zmags’ Joakim Ditlev found Facebook is easily the most popular sharing tool among digital readers with 38 percent using it to forward content with Twitter well back in second place on 9 percent. This also means readers are more likely to pick up content from Facebook. Ditley says Facebook’s casual way of communicating “seems to apply well” for sharing digital content.

Facebook’s wide range of communication tools are also eating away at time spent on email, instant messaging and discussion groups. Activities that used to take place in email, such as posting videos or holiday photos are now migrating to Facebook. As ReadWriteWeb says Gen Yers “don't even think of email as the place to connect with friends and family - that's what social networks are for.”

But people are leaving an enormous trail of data that could eventually come back to haunt them. While embarrassing photos are an obvious problem here, a friend list can also reveal a great deal about the person. An experiment at Boston’s MIT found that simply by looking at a friend list, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and made a prediction using statistical analysis. As the Boston Globe puts it: “if our friends reveal who we are, that challenges a conception of privacy built on the notion that there are things we tell, and things we don’t.”

In Australia, the notion of privacy has been challenged by a court case against prison officers who used a Facebook group to protest against changes in their industry to privatise prisons. In October last year, six NSW corrections officers created a private group called "Suggestions to help big RON save a few clams". But when Big RON - the NSW Corrective Services Commissioner Ron Woodham - found out about the suggestions he wasn’t happy and threatened to fire them for "bullying" and "harassment".

It did not take long for the media to label them The Facebook Six (though for some reason they preferred the more alliterative Facebook Five for a while). Last week Industrial Relations Commission decided their cases needed to be reheard after concerns of procedural unfairness so their fate is on hold for now. But the lesson to be learnt about Facebook, as academic David Perlmutter stated recently is that it is “a particularly dangerous weapon for self-injury because more than with many other social-networking sites, it is so easy to share an embarrassing admission or offensive quip.”

Despite the pitfalls, there are some who believe Facebook makes its users smarter. According to Dr Tracy Alloway from the University of Stirling in Scotland, the socmed site is doing “wonders for working memory [and] improving…IQ scores”. While it is doubtful that the thousands who sign on every day are doing it to become smarter, its versatility is one of its most attractive features. The downside is that it gives news editors even more things to place next to “Facebook” in their next headline.

Did the Russian FSB try to kill Facebook and Twitter?

(photo by Bird Eye).
The western world made three decisive strikes against militant Islam today but found itself surprisingly helpless against a new and dangerous opponent in cyberspace. The day began with Hilary Clinton vowing support for Somalia’s tenuous Transitional Government in its war against Al Shabaab who were implicated in the failed army barracks attacks in Melbourne earlier in the week and who are now threatening to take control of Mogadishu. Then came the news from the BBC that a missile from an unmanned US drone has probably killed Baitullah Mehsud, a Pakistani Taliban leader and that country's most wanted man. And Al Jazeera announced this evening that Indonesia has arrested Noordin Top, the Jemaah Islamiyah mastermind suspected to be behind the 2002 Bali bombings and the recent Jakarta hotel bombings.

But while the war on what was formerly known as terror remains the uppermost threat for Clinton and her State Department, they also need to seriously consider a new and dangerous cyber-enemy that emerged in the last 24 hours. For a couple of hours yesterday, and again intermittently today, a combined and concerted attack crippled the social network sites Facebook, Twitter and Live Journal.

While that may seem like a trivial offence to those who don't use social networks, the attacks are anything but trivial. Facebook’s quarter of a billion world population is the envy of most religions while Live Journal bloggers make 200,000 updates a day. And it was the Obama Administration that asked Twitter to suspend routine maintenance so the Iranian opposition could mobilise its forces in an attempt to topple the president.

So while no-one died and there were no pictures for the media, the overnight DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack was as much an important attack on the public sphere as 9/11 was. In a DDOS attack, hackers compromise unsecured computers with viruses or other malware. These infected hosts are then instructed by the attacker's computer visit a targeted site, simultaneously and repeatedly. A bomb of connection requests detonates at the receiving end taking out legitimate traffic in the process.

Often DDOS is spam related, but Facebook’s chief security officer Max Kelly said this latest one was politically motivated. Kelly said the outage was caused by a deliberate attack on sites used by a pro-Georgian activist. He said it was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting the activist to keep his voice from being heard coinciding with the first anniversary of the nation’s brief and bloody war with Russia. One cyber-aspect of that war was Russia’s attacks on Georgian websites using DDOS and defacement techniques.

Kelly declined to lay today’s blame on Russia or Russian nationalists, but said: “You have to ask who would benefit the most from doing this and think about what those people are doing and the disregard for the rest of the users and the Internet.” The intended victim of the attack was the Georgian with the account name "Cyxymu," (the name of a town in Georgia). He/she had accounts on all three different sites (Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal) that were attacked. The blogger had attracted attention because LiveJournal users received spam that appeared to come from Cyxymu’s account.

Bill Woodcock, research director of the Packet Clearing House, a non-profit technical organization that tracks Internet traffic told the New York Times yesterday the attack was an extension of the Russia-Georgia conflict. He said he found evidence that the attacks had originated from the Abkhazia, the disputed border territory that caused the war. Woodcock wouldn’t commit to who was at fault. “One side put up propaganda, [and] the other side figured this out and is attacking them,” he said.

Given Russia’s access to superior technology, the most likely culprit would have to be the FSB (formerly the KGB) who have form carrying out this tactic on internal political enemies. However if it was Russia’s fault, libertarian Midas Oracle thinks the attack may have backfired despite the temporary annoyance. All the Russians achieved, said Midas, was to hand Cyxymu a megaphone. The Internet remains a double-edged sword.

Fouad Mourtada: Jailed for fake Facebook entry

Moroccan man Fouad Mourtada has been jailed for three years for setting up a fake Facebook profile impersonating a member of the country's royal family. On Friday Mourtada was sentenced to three years jail and a fine of 10,000 dirhams ($US 1,350) after a court found him guilty of "usurping the identity of HRH Prince Moulay Rachid". The prosecutor and judge repeatedly reproached Mourtada for having “undermined the sacred integrity of the realm as represented by the prince".

According to the website set up by his family Help Free Fouad, Mourtada is a 26 year old IT engineer and a native of the town of Goulmima in the South Eastern region of Morocco. They say he is “a reserved and timid type” who created Internet friendships and was accustomed to participating in forums and exchange sites. They say he is “a Facebook user just like many young people around the world”.

Mourtada created the Facebook profile of the Prince as a joke. On 5 February, he was arrested in Casablanca on the charge of “villainous practices linked to the alleged theft of identity”. He was blindfolded and taken to a local police station where he was harassed and beaten unconscious. His family were allowed to visit him after a week where Mourtada told them he was "persecuted, beaten up, slapped, spat on and insulted." He continued: "I was also slammed for hours with a tool on the head and the legs."

His arrest and subsequent treatment brought a wave of protest by media and bloggers. Agoravox called Mourtada “a Martyr of the Net” and Le Monde Libere described the case as a “media lynching” pushed by the Moroccan royal family. Last week some Moroccan bloggers suspended their regular blog entries for 24 hours in protest at Mourtada's detention.

There is no precedent anywhere in the world for a person receiving a jail sentence for posting a fake Facebook profile. Fouad's fake profile was not malicious, and it did not in any way attempt to slander Moulay Rachid. The prince is the younger brother of Morocco's Head of State, King Mohamed VI. Mourtada admitted placing the profile of the Prince on Facebook but said he had done this out of admiration for him, not out of any wish to undermine the monarchy.

Two Amnesty International (AI) delegates attended the trial and AI released a statement yesterday issuing its concern. They say the hearing failed to satisfy international fair trial standards. AI said the main reason for the prosecution was the authorities' determination to clamp down on anyone deemed to be undermining the monarchy and what the prosecutor termed the "social and sacred values of Morocco." The court failed to investigate the alleged breaches of Mourtada’s rights during arrest and detention, and his allegations that he was ill-treated in custody and forced to "confess." AI called for a re-trial and for allegations of mistreatment to be “fully and impartially investigated.”

Moroccan-born author Laila Lalami writing in The Nation wondered how Moroccan police found out Mourtada's identity. Lalami said Mourtada did what millions of other people his age do every day: “create profiles, real or fake, on social networking websites”. Lalami said such spoofing was common. "There are fake profiles on Facebook for everyone from Brad Pitt to Mother Teresa, from King Abdullah to Osama bin Laden”, she said “There are 500 profiles for George W. Bush."

But criticism of the Moroccan royal family remains taboo. The French-based Reporters Without Borders annual report for 2007 said that investigating the role of the king and the royal family in running the country is the main reason journalists are prosecuted. Press law has many offences carrying prison sentences and journalists often have to pay very heavy fines and damages for offending the king, the monarchy, the nation, territorial integrity, God or Islam. According to Culture Maroc, it all boils down to the same problem: “Modern Morocco vs. the Morocco of the Middle Ages”.

The Rise of Facebook

The fast rising social networking website Facebook will break into Britain’s top 20 most popular online destinations for the first time this week. It joins fellow networking sites Myspace and Bebo in statistics to be released by Internet information provider Comscore. However advertisers are taking longer to follow suit. Average rates for online banners on social networking websites in the UK are almost 50 per cent lower than on internet portals such as Yahoo or MSN.

Nevertheless, Facebook's growth is impressive. The site was 28th in Comscore’s June figures and was one of the top three gainers in the overall figures with a 25 per cent rise from 4.8 million visitors in May to 6.0 million in June. Facebook allows users to join networks based around schools, companies and regions. Facebook offers an interactive network of photos, user profiles, email and chatrooms.

Facebook’s growth is matched worldwide and is now the sixth most visited site in the US with over 22 million registered users 60 percent of whom log in every day. Facebook’s astonishing popularity is based partly on its privacy measures. Only designated friends or people in users’ networks can see their full profile pages, in contrast to the chaotic freedom on MySpace.

Facebook’s CEO is whizzkid Mark Zuckerberg who turned 23 on 14 May. Zuckerberg was a Harvard student in 2004 when he founded “The Facebook” as a networking site with the help of three fellow students Andrew McCallum, Dustin Moscovitz and Chris Hughes. The site rapidly grew among the college elite and within a month half of Harvard’s students had signed up. By two months it had expanded to the other Ivy League colleges.

The big break came in 2005 when Zuckerberg signed a deal which secured $12.7 million in venture capital from Jim Breyer’s Accel Partners. Facebook was overhauled, dropped the “the” from their name and moved to a new domain name when they finally got the rights to facebook.com. The network was expanded to include high schools and spread to colleges in Canada and the UK.

In 2006 Facebook was linked with Viacom and turned down a $750 million offer which sparked rumours the company could be worth up to $2 billion. In the same year the company dropped its entry restrictions and made itself available to all internet users with an email address. While this move sparked criticism from its existing user base, it created an explosion of new users.

The company added free classified listing for the first time in May this year. Facebook’s rationale was that the new feature would offer another reason for users to return to its site regularly, instead of going elsewhere to conduct their Internet business. It allows users to create classified listings in four categories: housing; jobs; for sale, where users can list things like concert tickets and used bikes; and “other,” a catch-all for miscellaneous requests. Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research said the advantage of having classifieds linked to a social network is that you know something about the seller

Zuckerberg and Facebook are now undergoing increased scrutiny with sometimes embarrassing results. The company was left with egg on its facebook on the weekend when its source code that powers the user interface was inadvertently exposed. The leaked code was promptly posted on a new blog called Facebook Secrets for the entire internet to see.

A Facebook spokeswoman said in a statement e-mailed to Computerworld that "a small fraction of the code that displays Facebook Web pages was exposed to a small number of users" because of a misconfigured Web server that was fixed "immediately." Pete Lindstrom, a senior security analyst at Burton Group was less sanguine. "[Facebook will] need to take some very quick short-term measures to mitigate the risk to users,” he said. “You can bet that right this minute there are hundreds of potential attackers pouring through the leaked code and probing their systems."