Oh, Facebook, Can You See By the Dawn's Early Light

Extra, extra, read all about it! Facebook censoring search when it suits them! Extra, extra, read all about it! Facebook privacy issue around part of its new advertising platform! Extra!

Old school advertising, that is. Because when the young boys with the roll of newspapers in their hand yelled their lungs out the above ilk must have been the last time when what Facebook is trying to pull actually happened. I'm talking about the period between the two World Wars, the prohibition and the great financial failure of September 1929 with the shooting in the streets and censorship taken to the extreme.

It's about censoring as you might have guessed. Actually, I said it above so don't take credit for it like you guessed the perpetrator from the tenth page of an Agatha Christie novel. While earlier in the month reports came in about search censoring any inquiries about Presidential candidate Ron Paul and showing no results, yesterday scores of mainstream press organizations (the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, LA Times, CNET etc.) and bloggers reported a big problem around part of the new advertising platform of Facebook.

The leader of the charge was MoveOn.org as it created a petition that demanded Facebook to not disclose personal information about a user without their explicit consent. The result of the petition was that the group, a rather numerous one at that, with more than 12 thousand members, could not be located via search. A "search currently unavailable" message was returned when the query was the word "privacy" but at the same time any other word would have returned normal results. MoveOn's Adam Green: "Facebook has the potential to revolutionize how we communicate with each other and organize around issues together in a 21st century democracy. But to succeed, they need the trust of their users. That trust will be undercut if they continue to put the wish lists of corporate advertisers ahead of the privacy interests of their users. It would also be undercut if it turned out our group was intentionally hidden from Facebook users - as opposed to it being an accident."