A critique of Facebook’s gender diversity

Facebook announced today they will now “offer an extensive list of gender identities” for users to declare in their profiles, as well as allow users to choose between masculine, feminine and neutral pronouns for the site to use when referring to them.

Below is a summary of the changes as well as a brief critique that’s (spoiler alert!) not entirely positive.

How it works

(NB: For this to work you MUST set your language to ‘English US’. I have no idea why this is a limitation or if it will eventually be available for other language settings.)

When you go to edit your ‘Basic Information’ you now have a ‘Custom’ option in the Gender drop down menu. If you choose this, typing in the text area brings up some of the options available to choose. One of the actually pretty cool parts of this is that you can choose multiple options!

You can then select a chosen set of pronouns and decide who can see your declared gender on the site.

List of options

I haven’t found an official list anywhere. Reports keep stating there are 50 but below is list of 56 I have seen myself today. It may be incomplete and may change without notice.

Agender	Androgyne	Androgynous
Bigender	Cis	Cis Female
Cis Male	Cis Man	Cis Woman
Cisgender	Cisgender Female	Cisgender Male
Cisgender Man	Cisgender Woman	Female to Male
FTM	Gender Fluid	Gender nonconforming
Gender Questioning	Gender Variant	Genderqueer
Intersex	Male to Female	MTF
Neither	Neutrois	Non-binary
Other	Pangender	Trans
Trans Female	Trans Male	Trans Man
Trans Person	Trans Woman	Trans*
Trans* Female	Trans* Male	Trans* Man
Trans* Person	Trans* Woman	Transfeminine
Transgender	Transgender Female	Transgender Male
Transgender Man	Transgender Person	Transgender Woman
Transmasculine	Transsexual	Transsexual Female
Transsexual Male	Transsexual Man	Transsexual Person
Transsexual Woman	Two-spirit

One interesting observation is that, though you can choose multiple options, ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ are not on this custom list so it is impossible to be, say, simultaneously ‘Female’ and ‘Gender Questioning’.

Misleading privacy settings

The announcement post states

We also have added the ability for people to control the audience with whom they want to share their custom gender. We recognize that some people face challenges sharing their true gender identity with others, and this setting gives people the ability to express themselves in an authentic way.

Ideally, and in order to comply with this statement, Facebook should use gender neutral terminology to refer to other users when you don’t have access to their stated gender information. However, this has been messily implemented.

Early on Google+ had an issue where you could hide your gender status from your profile but it would still publicly use the corresponding gendered pronouns to refer to you. They changed this fairly quickly following a non-negligible user response. (I wrote about it here.)

Facebook appears to have implemented something similar to Google+’s initial problematic system of access. To explain, I chose Female pronouns and locked the privacy for this field to ‘Only Me’.

The first issue is that Facebook has conflated chosen gendered pronouns with the default masculine/feminine silhouette user image so if, like I have done above, you hide your specified gender from others they can still see a (heavily stereotypical) visual representation of your choice, providing you haven’t uploaded another user image that they have access to.

To reiterate: Facebook still conflates gender with gendered pronouns through visual stereotype representation. (And ‘Neutral’ pronouns still default to the masculine silhouette.) But let’s move on.

Additionally, the system still uses these chosen gendered pronouns to refer to you publicly within the system. It appears such instances are far fewer than they once were (the system language appears to actively avoid pronouns where possible), but in cases where, say, I reply to a friend’s status and, despite not having access to my stated gender/sex, the title of the email notification they receive is something like “Anne Drogyne also commented on her status.”

Facebook actually mentions that your preferred pronoun is public (the fine print at the bottom of the above image) but is not clear as to what this means. The link doesn’t actually clarify anything.

To explain why this is an issue I’ll give a quick example.

Jack identifies as female but is not out to her family who believe she is male. Jack appreciates Facebook’s new flexibility and chooses custom gender and chooses a few options she is comfortable with but, fearing possible family drama, makes this selection only visible to friends. Jack chooses to be referred to using female pronouns and appreciates this new sense of freedom.

However, Jack’s mother soon sees a notification using female pronouns and, thinking it’s just a joke, mentions it to Jack who, horrified about the accidental reveal, changes her pronouns back to male in an attempt to avoid being ‘outed’.

Okay, so this example relies on the fact that these privacy settings are perhaps a little misleading. And I argue that Google+ has implemented this better by referring to everything using gender neutral pronouns if you don’t have access to that information. But if Jack was aware of this limitation the situation is not that much better; it now presents a space of gender/sex performativity where pronoun use must be universal for all viewing your interactions. Jack cannot choose to be referred to using female pronouns among friends without everyone being privvy to that choice. Jack may use male or neutral pronouns, though the latter option may prompt probing questions that are better avoided.

So Facebook remains yet another uncomfortable social space with jarring language. I don’t believe this choice is diversity friendly at all, and it clashes with Facebook Diversity’s assertion above that “We recognize that some people face challenges sharing their true gender identity with others, this setting gives people the ability to express themselves in an authentic way”. You have more options, yes, but you’re either out to everyone or forced to perform your identity inauthentically.

Is this progress?

Yes? But also very much no?

Concerns raised in the previous section aside, on the one hand this is clearly a positive change when compared to the previous (though it should be pointed out still current for all other languages) system that enforced a binary gender/sex status that corresponded with a similar binary pronoun system. Users now have more control over what their profile says and how the system refers to them. Facebook has finally made a move to recognise diversity within their system. This is great!

Having said that, it’s still a system with limited options. For anyone who doesn’t feel one or more of the 58+ (56 plus Female and Male) options accurately represents who they are, they have now become further marginalised by this common software developer desire to sort populations into neat categories for data analysis.

Gender options are not finite. Even the concept of gender itself varies between persons.

Why can’t this be a non-mandatory field? Why is it even asked for in the first place? Facebook justify this in various ways, to various levels of legitimacy, but other social network platforms get by without it (Twitter, tumblr) or allow much more freedom of expression through the use of a text field (diaspora*). And Facebook has gradually been removing or rewording system notifications that previously used pronouns (at least in the English language version of the site) so its mandatory status is becoming less and less justified.

I strongly believe everyone should be free to perform any and all aspects of their identity on social media in any way they wish. If these changes by Facebook work for you I think that’s great. The problem is that gender/sex identity is both a very important and very contentious aspect of identity and here we see Facebook allowing more flexibility (good) while stubbornly retaining control over the ‘approved’ method of gender performance within their system and continuing to reinforce various notions of gender/sex normativity (bad). Any gender performance conducted using these new features (or the old ones which the rest of the world is still stuck with) happens in relation to the strict, albeit now much looser, concept of gender and sex as defined by Facebook.

(I’ve written about this many times previously. More details in the tags. But one big glaring example is that ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ are not actually ‘genders’.)

I think it’s great that many have found these changes to be positive ones. I just have concerns that now many gender diverse users are now slightly better catered for, some of the broader issues around Silicon Valley’s tendency to limit expression through categorisation will now be more difficult to raise.

Gender expression is important, and the level to which it is important varies between persons. Many will embrace these new options and find them useful in performing their identity. But, if the idea of Facebook defining the rules and limitations of gender makes you uncomfortable, I still strongly recommend considering opting out of this field altogether and choosing your own method and level of identity performance through all other instances of interaction with Facebook and other social network platforms.

Opting out

Though Facebook don’t directly let you, it is still possible to set your gender/sex field to ‘unspecified’. (See my previous post for details and instructions.) This forces the system to use gender neutral pronouns when referring to you and removes mention of your gender/sex from your profile. (This is why the first image in this post leads with the ‘Select Gender’ option – I previously had nothing selected.)

It also appears you may be able to set your language to US English, set your gender to ‘Custom’ and pronouns to ‘Neutral’, and then set your language back to something else and have your gender set itself to ‘Unspecified’, but I haven’t tested this thoroughly.

Reinstating the third gender/sex option on Facebook

I received two copies of the Unlike Us reader in the post yesterday and I’ve started reading some of the other contributions. I highly recommend checking it out. (Reminder: it’s free to download!) But somehow, even seeing my name in print didn’t prepare me for the possibility that someone else might actually read let alone enjoy my essay. (Did I think it’d just sit there, unread, and that’d be cool? Maybe.)

Anyway, I woke up to Tweets from Marc Stumpel this morning, linking to some creative responses to Facebook’s limited gender/sex representation that I hadn’t come across before. Of particular interest is a ‘Facebook Gender Neutrality‘ script, written by Alec Wright, that apparently enables Facebook users to revert back to the ‘other/undisclosed’ gender/sex option that was made unavailable since around 2008.

I had previously seen scripts that change the display of user information in some way (use gender neutral phrasing on Facebook, for example, or even reverse gender/sex terms in all websites), but these only worked locally on the browsers where the script was installed. In this case, However, Alec states, “this is what everyone will see, and not just you”.

I decided I had to try it out. Immediately.

Using a new Firefox browser profile (so I could confirm it works without any scripts installed) I went to Alec’s ‘Facebook Gender Neutrality‘ page and installed Greasemonkey (a popular add-on many may have installed already) and after restarting the browser installed the .js script linked to from Alec’s page. As I understand it, all the script does is add an ’Other/Undisclosed’ radio button to the mobile page where you change your gender/sex status, and this actually alters your account. Incredibly simple, but absolutely brilliant!

Some quick background info and clarification: Facebook does have an ‘Undisclosed’ option for gender/sex; they just don’t make it selectable. This is from back when it wasn’t mandatory to declare whether you are either male or female. Not all users chose either ‘Male’ or ‘Female’ when they were asked to so you may occasionally see gender neutral terms ‘they’ or ‘their’ on Facebook – though this is becoming rare. So, Facebook’s gender/sex field is not stored as a binary value (either 0 or 1, corresponding to ‘Male’ or ‘Female’); rather, there are three possibilities:

• 0 is ‘Undisclosed’¹
• 1 is ‘Female’²
• 2 is ‘Male’

Put simply, Alec’s script makes it possible to select 0 again. And this is why the selection becomes visible to everyone.

After running the script on one of my testing accounts (Anne Drogyne) in a new Firefox profile, I created a new testing account (Funkmaster Jay) using my main Firefox profile and made them become friends. (It’s like playing The Sims!) Below is a screenshot taken from a Firefox profile that has not installed any of Alec’s scripts.

As you can see, the gender neutral term ‘their’ is used in the timeline. I haven’t looked much further but I have no reason to suspect this does not work universally for that account.

Finally, I should note that I don’t believe this fix is perfect. But it would be much, much harder to make more meaningful changes on Facebook such as making gender/sex a text field, removing gender/sex status altogether, or even altering system phrases to remove the ‘need’ for gendered terminology at all. However, all of that is close to impossible for non-Facebook developers. Reinstating the ‘Undisclosed’ option to users, especially as these choices become visible to all users, is perhaps the best we can do. Using only a few lines of JavaScript, I think Alec has done some amazing work.

So, to summarise, if you don’t like Facebook’s way of representing you in relation to a gender/sex binary, DO THIS! If you’re actually okay with being either male or female on Facebook but still think this is an option that should be available, TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS!

Lastly, if you appreciate this script and what is means socially, email Alec and say so – it’s always nice to get feedback =) Alec’s email address is described cryptically at the bottom of this page, but it’s also written at the top of the .js script file if you open it in a text editor.

I’m composing an email right now.

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1. I say that Facebook treats ‘not male or female’ as ‘undisclosed’ rather than ‘other’ because, well, the system design does not allow for ‘other’ as an option – options are interpreted as either ‘Male’, ‘Female’, or ‘I haven’t told you yet’. In short, Facebook as a system subscribes to and reinforces the binary theory of gender/sex. Of course, this doesn’t mean users can’t choose this third option as a way to present as ‘other’ – gender/sex performance can be interpreted in many ways the system didn’t intend, depending on the community/culture. I think Alec’s ‘Other/Undisclosed’ wording is correct here, but I just wanted to be clear about my own, more restricted terminology when referring to Facebook itself.

2. Interesting to note, this is one of the very few times I’ve encountered a system where a gender/sex field doesn’t list ‘Male’ before ‘Female’ (even though it’s alphabetically backwards) in coded representation.

I’m published! – Unlike Us Reader out now

I got notification this morning that the new Unlike Us reader is now available. My essay, ‘None of Your Business? Analyzing the Legitimacy and Effects of Gendering Social Spaces Through System Design’ appears on pages 200-219.

You can read the release announcement at the networkcultures.org site here. The short trailer for the reader is also available on vimeo.

There are multiple ways you can get a copy of the reader. If you go to this page you can read it online using issuu. (It should be noted, however, that if you try to download it on the issuu site it requires you to register, and registration requires you to choose your gender as being either ‘male’ or ‘female’, displaying a perfect example of what I argue is a terrible practice in my essay. Needless to say, I don’t recommend downloading it through issuu!) You can also read and download it through scribd without having to register, or download it directly from the networkcultures.org site.

Of course, as the reader is shared using the CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license, I can host it on my own server, too! (This is especially convenient because it appears the networkcultures.org site is currently down.) However, if you only want to download my essay, I’ve also uploaded an edited (remixed!) version that cuts out most of the other pages. Links to both versions are below.

Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives (3.9MB .pdf)

Andrew McNicol – None of Your Business?: Analyzing the Legitimacy and Effects of Gendering Social Spaces Through System Design (622kB .pdf)

Special thanks to Miriam Rasch and Geert Lovink who have done an amazing job with this release. I’m looking forward to checking out some of the other contributions once I get some free time.

Please share with anyone you think may be interested. And please feel free to comment or email with any constructive feedback you may have – I haven’t read through this in months, but I think there are a few sections I would change slightly.

Not everyone can sit on a chair

Facebook recently released a celebration/advertisement of their services to mark its reaching of one billion users*. It’s called The Things That Connect Us and I highly recommend watching it if you haven’t already been linked to it by your friends wanting to have a laugh. The text from the video is as follows

Chairs. Chairs are made so that people can sit down and take a break. Anyone can sit on a chair. And if the chair is large enough they can sit down together. And tell jokes. Or make up stories. Or just listen. Chairs are for people. And that is why chairs are like Facebook. Doorbells, airplanes, bridges. These are things people use to get together so they can open up and connect. About ideas. And music. And other things that people share. Dance floors. Basketball. A great nation. A great nation is something people build so that they can have a place where they belong. The universe. It is vast. And dark. And makes us wonder if we are alone. So maybe the reason we make all of these things is to remind ourselves that we are not.

Various spoofs have already appeared, as is the internet’s wont, as well as Facebook communities, tumblr accounts and articles discussing the confusing meaning behind the ad. While hilarious in some respects, I actually find the message a little disturbing.

First of all, for a company that talks about opening things up for us to make our own connections, and regularly championing the concept of openness, I believe it’s telling that they’ve removed the commenting and voting features on the YouTube video**.

The main concern is that it purports Facebook as being for everybody – ‘Anyone can sit on a chair’, using wide demographics as subjects, etc. – while behind the scenes doing absolutely nothing to address real concerns about its policies that marginalise. I offer a revision:

Chairs are for people. As long as they feel comfortable using a name Facebook determines is valid for all of their interactions with others. And that is why chairs are like Facebook. Oh, wait . . .

And there’s this one great moment in the video (0:18) where a young person is putting a doll on a small chair. Presumably, now that Facebook has seen this they will move in and remove the doll for violating the chair’s policy of not using pseudonyms.

Actually, I believe one metaphor introduced in the short video is fairly accurate, though not for the reason intended: ‘airplanes’. They’re an exclusionary technology. They help you better connect with others, but there’s a significant cost involved – privacy, security, safety – making it realistically unavailable to many. Panics about security fears lead to the removal of civil liberties and then the service becomes worse for everybody.

Facebook is getting bigger every day. According to their numbers, about one in every seven people use the service worldwide, and this fraction is considerably higher in some locations. But at least with air travel there is the sense that an elected government*** has some level of regulatory control. Facebook is a company who have complete authoritarian control over dictating the terms of discourse on a social platform that (apparently) one seventh of the global population use.

Are we comfortable with this? I know I’m not.

——————–

* I don’t believe they’ve actually reached this number yet. See my recent discussion on Facebook numbers for some of the reasons why. Despite whatever the real number is, it’s still considerably large, and it’s not that useful to focus on the details. But because I’m talking about it now anyway, I might estimate that, conservatively, at least one in every nine people globally, rather than one in every seven, relate to a legitimate, personal Facebook account.

** I can’t be sure if it was like this originally, but both commenting and voting were disabled on October 9 when I first saw the video.

*** Obviously, this varies country to country.

ETA: Facebook say they have reached ’1 billion monthly active users on September 14 at 12.45 PM Pacific time’. Mentions of the ’1 billion’ number I saw elsewhere just said ‘users’, not ‘active users’. the latter suggests the number of legitimate users is closer to the stated 1 billion than I thought in my notes above.

Percentages of Facebook users in Australia

In the comments of my previous post I mentioned the benefits of working out the percentage of people who are on Facebook by location, as this would help support an argument about the ethics of excluding people from such spaces. (If more people are on there, the social cost of opting out becomes greater.) I felt inspired to do a quick calculation of the numbers. Prepare yourself for an onslaught of numbers and tables!

Calculating Australia’s current population

We last held a census on August 9 2011 and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) website is a great resource for demographic information. This page helpfully displays census data for the Greater Sydney area, New South Wales and Australia overall, which I will be referring to here.

However, it has been a little over a year since the census and the population will have increased. To address this I will be increasing the values found on that page by 1.4%, the estimated rate of national population increase in 2011 from the previous year as stated on this page. This won’t make my results exact (states and cities increase at different rates, and the past year’s increase may be different to 2011′s), but I think this is close enough for my purposes.

Estimates of the current Australian population by location:

Location	Population
Sydney	4,453,157
New South Wales	7,014,505
Australia	21,808,825

Factoring in age restrictions

Facebook doesn’t (officially) allow users under the age of 13. Many ignore this, and some are even assisted by their parents in  setting up an account. For this brief study I’m going to pretend this (possibly significant?) number of underage users does not exist.

The problem, then, is removing people under 13 from my population results table above so I can compare it with Facebook data. The census statistics page helpfully breaks down the population by age, but includes ranges ’10-14′ and ’15-19′ rather than having a convenient break between ages 12 and 13. To address this I have used the 2011 totals by location and removed the entire population of under 10s and 3/5 of the 10-14 demographic, and then increased these values by 1.4% as above to estimate the current population.

Revised estimates of current populations to include only those over 13:

Location	Population (13+)
Sydney	3,762,165
New South Wales	5,930,528
Australia	18,440,93

Getting data from Facebook

One thing I love about Facebook is that its advertising page allows you to find interesting demographic data about its users. You need to be logged in first (I used my testing account), but all you need to do is go to the ‘Advertise on Facebook’ page, put in a URL (anything – it doesn’t matter), and then play around with the ‘Choose your audience’ section that appears. For example, if you wanted to work out how many Australian accounts have no declared ‘gender’ (yet another example of interchangeability of terms), you select ‘Australia’ as the location and ‘All’ under ‘Gender’ and it displays the audience size to the right (11,624,680 – this and following values retrieved 24 September 2012). Subtract from this the number of ‘Men’ (5,336,740) and ‘Women’ (6,091,320) users and you find that 196,620 (1.69%) Australian accounts have not succumbed to Facebook’s insistence, since 2008, that they choose a sex/gender. (It’s impossible for new accounts to opt out now, of course.)

However, there are issues with trusting this data. First of all, it isn’t clear how accurate the values displayed are, and – discounting a highly unlikely set of chance results – all values are rounded to 10. But more than that the results rely entirely on the accuracy of user entered data.

The 11.6 million ‘Australia’ Facebook accounts counted here include, among those from legitimate users,

• Accounts of deceased persons
• Abandoned accounts
• Accounts from those who have moved away and not updated the location on their profile
• Additional accounts from those who have multiple accounts
• Accounts from those who are under 13 (which presents a problem for my calculation)
• Fake accounts (like mine)
• Accounts made by others for non-humans such as groups, brands, non-human animals, children (who are human but not operating their own account), etc.
• Closed accounts that are still archived (I have no way of determining whether these are part of the number)
• Anything else … ?

I’ll call those ‘non-legitimate accounts’ for the purposes of this discussion.

In addition to this, the total number does not include Australian users who

• Do not declare their location (for example, I calculated that 5.11% ‘Australia’ Facebook users have not declared a state – it’s unclear how many users choose not to declare a country*)
• Declare another (fictional or real) location

To an extent, items on these two lists cancel each other out, but it’s difficult to argue whether, say, the active number of Australians on Facebook is higher or lower than the 11.6M stated by the advertising page. (Any thoughts?)

For my purposes here I’m simply going to use the data given to me by Facebook, though I freely admit the issues raised here make any conclusions or results problematic.

Population of Australians on Facebook

By refining my Facebook advertising results by choosing the city ‘Sydney’, the state ‘NSW’, and the country ‘Australia’, and comparing them with the results of my earlier tables, I get the following results:

Location	Estimated population (13+)	Declared Facebook population	Percentage on Facebook
Sydney	3,762,165	2,669,540	60%
New South Wales	5,930,528	3.792.440	54.1%
Australia	18,440,933	11,624,680	53.3%

It makes sense that Sydney has a higher percentage of Facebook users than the rest of the state and country, but I’m actually surprised it’s quite that high as I assumed fewer users would go the extra trouble of declaring a city, let alone their state, on their profile. I also don’t know what the earlier Facebook profile interface was like, but I assume it wouldn’t have categorised locations as well as it currently does so many older accounts may say ‘Sydney’ (text field), or one of many locations that are encapsulated within it, rather than ‘Sydney’ as a tagged, searchable category option. Therefore I suspect many may be missing from this 60% total, though that number may be countered by the number of non-legitimate accounts.

Conclusions

In short, what we’ve seen here is how one may use available data from Facebook and the ABS to determine a non-reliable percentage of Facebook users by location.

This and similar studies could be used in arguments regarding the coerciveness of Facebook and how, because of the high prevalence of use within a population, Facebook and similar systems, despite their status as private enterprises who ‘should be able to do whatever they want because it’s their system’, may actually have a responsibility in making their systems accessible to all by removing barriers such as ‘real identity’ requirements. Because such a high percentage of our social engagement now occurs online, and much of it on Facebook, those who are barred from entry lose the ability to meaningfully engage with their communities, both geographic and virtual, to a fair extent. When systems impose marginalisation and society silences diverse voices because they adopt such systems for everyday interaction, ideas stagnate and we lose as a civilisation.

… And other things I won’t go into now.

Of course, if anyone is actually tempted to use my results or method in making these or other arguments, be prepared for others to dispute the numbers. There’s a wide range of uncertainty within the Facebook data that I’ve only just begun to address.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As someone who advocates for profile systems making all fields optional, it makes me happy to recognise the major limitations of this data =)

——————–

* If I could be bothered, I could work out the populations of every country, add them together and subtract that from the number of total Facebook users, and then attribute a percentage of this number (relating to the ratio of declared Australian users) to the Australian population … but that could take a while.

Real name coercion: a survey that helps ‘make Facebook better’

I just read the recent news that Facebook, apparently through various iterations over the past few months, has been asking users to confirm whether or not their friends are using real names.

This news appears to have gotten big following a Tweet on September 20 that helpfully included a screenshot. An article on talkingpointsmemo.com (TPM) outlines the story well, along with some of the concerns, and includes a few official responses from Facebook. I share the concern that it’s unclear as to what Facebook is using these survey results for, but I think there’s more to this move than direct policing by the service themselves.

First of all I wanted to address a claim that appeared in the TPM article and happens to have been adopted by others breaking the story. It ends with a paragraph stating

In general, Web users may prefer anonymity for reasons of personal safety. But Facebook is not alone in enforcing a real names policy: Google Plus provoked a backlash for employing a similar policy shortly after in launched in late June 2011, a response dubbed “Nym Wars” as in “pseudonym,” for the desire of some users to use pseudonyms. Google Plus has since backed away from this policy as well.

The final sentence suggests Google no longer enforces a real names policy. Interestingly, the first embedded link doesn’t suggest this at all. The second link discusses the eventual move by Google to finally allow pseudonyms in addition to real names within its service. Allowing the inclusion of pseudonyms does not mean it is no longer enforcing a real names policy. (I wrote about this back in January.) I think it’s dangerous to paint Google as leading the way in social media privacy; that’s not what they have achieved here.

The second issue that isn’t really being raised is that of how this may affect engagement with these systems. TPM quotes a Facebook representative as stating “This isn’t so we can go and get that person in trouble […] None of our surveys are used for any enforcement action.” The story as discussed by this and other posts appears to centre around whether or not Facebook is sincere when making such statements, but I feel this is largely irrelevant. The simple suggestion of potential enforcement can change user practices much more than any actual enforcement system – which Google and Facebook both know is extremely difficult and all too easily results in a PR nightmare.

Say you use a pseudonym on Facebook and you get one of these notices asking you to confirm whether one of your friends are using a ‘real name’ (whatever that is). Regardless of what you do next, you’re going to be a little less comfortable risking pseudonymous engagement yourself now you are aware of the possibility friends of yours could just as easily receive a similar message about your account. And if you’re not yet on Facebook and regularly read these sorts of alarmist articles, you’re going to feel even less confident signing up with a ‘fake name’.

Facebook enforces their ‘real names policy’ in a rather intelligent way. They don’t do heavy-handed bans like Google did last year; rather, they regularly publicise their stance on real names (in their official documentation, by allowing interviews with Zuckerberg, etc) to suggest an environment where there is a risk of account deactivation. All they need to do is occasionally ban accounts when they receive a complaint from an enemy (an individual, a company, a government) of that account (this is believed to be what happened to blogger Michael Anti last year), and let the low-level news coverage do the work for them.

No one wants their account to be deactivated. Even if Facebook keeps to their word and does not act on data gathered by these name surveys, which I suspect might be the case, actions and stories like these serve to scare users into compliance.

Version control: In which Facebook makes improvements and my work suffers

In a paper I presented last year I discussed how hiding your sex/gender from your public Facebook profile didn’t actually remove the gendered language the system uses to refer to you. So, when leaving the box unselected, like so

your public profile would still use sentences such as, “If you know Anne, add her as a friend or send her a message” (emphasis mine).

I see this as a concern for various reasons I’ve discussed elsewhere and I won’t go into them now. (Google+ also had a similar practice during its testing phase, which it changed fairly quickly after receiving a lot of user feedback. Frances Haugen from Google talks about the situation here, for anyone wanting a refresher.)

I mention this again this week because I’m in the process of finalising a paper which reviews gender and sex usage in social media systems and discusses potential social effects leading from these system design choices. It was going well and I had a great structure that appeared to work, but yesterday I went to check out Facebook’s system to confirm my statements and noticed that they appear to have addressed the above issue. Now, when looking at a person’s public profile, regardless of whether they’ve chosen to hide their declared gender/sex status, you see shorter sentences that avoid pronoun usage altogether.

I think this is a great move! Eventually I’ll make time to look into other instances of this and evaluate how easily other systems can introduce similar changes (it’s difficult because I’m not that familiar with other languages/cultures). But for now I have to finish writing my paper. And this improvement throws a spanner into the works. (Or, rather, removes one that I was hoping to talk about a bit.)

I can work around it. I just need to do some work on changing the way I’ve structured everything. But it does raise one major difficulty I’ve been having throughout my research; that of being unable to easily record how the systems I discuss change over time when they are ‘closed’ systems.

Last year when Google Profiles allowed users to hide their gender status I kicked myself because I didn’t think to take a screenshot (a documented first-hand account that may constitute a better academic reference than a random person’s blog post) before it was changed – honestly, I didn’t think they’d fix it! I could keep taking regular screenshots of various interfaces, but that’s time consuming when I don’t actually know what I may want to focus on later. It’s what changes that becomes interesting, and I don’t have forewarning. In this case with Facebook removing gendered pronouns I actually have screenshots; what I don’t have is an idea about when, exactly, within the twelve months between my two screenshots these changes were actually made.

Couple this with the fact that some users see different iterations of a system interface, depending on their location or the server they’re using, documenting something accurately for later use can be quite difficult.

And this is one important (though small) reason I love open source software: I can find out which version is running on a particular server and then look through the code personally to document it accurately. This allows one to take a historical look at these services.

With all their talk about ‘transparency’, I wish Facebook and Google+ would take this direction. Just for me.

It would make my work a little easier.

Is limited representation bad for advertisers?

I’m writing a chapter about the representation of individual persons this month so I’ve been thinking more than usual about the justifications for limiting profile options.

One common reason for, say, giving users of your system a limited set of predefined options to choose from (drop-down menus, toggle switch, ticky boxes, etc) is that such strict categorisation allows for easy collection of specific data. You can more easily compare users. And often – for example, if you’re using a free corporate social media service – this categorisation ties right into the advertising side of the business; they offer targeted advertising services to other businesses wanting web traffic in order to remain financially viable.

I was looking at Facebook’s ad targeting page this week, which outlines the process of targeting specific demographics and later seeing detailed metrics that help you review your approach. (Check it out, it’s interesting!)

Another concept I’ve been looking at a lot this week is that of ‘Big Data’. I had some trouble defining it so I evaluated other attempts . . . which weren’t as helpful as I had hoped. It appears Big Data is one of those new buzz words that everyone is using and defining differently in relation to their own work or theoretical context.

However, the MIKE2.0 site offers an interesting understanding that emphasises the complexity of data, rather than its size, as being the definitive property of Big Data. This appeals to me and my approach because it highlights the confusion and potential for new understandings that this phenomenon introduces. To complement this, I also like Mac Slocum’s description of social data as “an oracle waiting for a question” in this context. There is just so much data out there and the new problems we face are less to do with accessing data than trying to ask the right questions to find out something new and exciting.

And this is where we return to Facebook. I’ve always thought the best argument for limited representation (gender/sex is always a good example, but other categories are just as relevant here) is that it helps with their advertisers. However, we have technology that can produce rich datasets and give us more details about individuals, so wouldn’t allowing a greater range of representation actually improve targeted advertising? Companies can include or exclude demographics and then better review the effectiveness of their advertising in much more detail.

One example that Facebook gives is a success story where a wedding photography business targeted women aged 24-30 who were recently engaged. Of course this works*, but it would be even more successful if they could look at and target finer demographics within this quite broad dataset. Imagine if Facebook simply allowed for an ‘other’ gender/sex option – even this simple change would help many advertisers not pay to target ‘those crazy, politically correct hippies who probably wouldn’t want my products anyway’, and give many more advertisers the ability to more easily target this specialised group.

Big Data is complicated, but it enables us to uncover interesting and important details. And where corporations such as Facebook may benefit from expanding its user options, government funded projects like the census who still enforce a male/female binary and ignore non-standard religions – thus making us all miss out on exploring and better understanding our diverse population now and in the future, which is an important aspect of its purpose – really have no excuse.

Admittedly, this is the very early stage of an idea so it’s not completely thought out, but it’s the first time I’ve been able to see Facebook’s binary gender/sex field as being detrimental to their business and thought this was important enough to share.

* As much as any online advertising works, at least. I’m always surprised to hear that people click on advertising links, because it’s counters my own practices so strongly. But I’m happy these people are out there, keeping the Internet alive!

Gender and sex interchangeability on Facebook

I heard that Facebook’s ‘sex’ field once said ‘gender’, instead.  This somewhat disturbing interchangeability of two very different words, I feel, helpfully highlights the disconnect between Facebook and the complex individuals it attempts to categorise.  Understanding the difficulties involved in gathering historical information on closed software interfaces, I nevertheless looked for evidence to support the claim that the field name had changed from ‘gender’ to ‘sex’.

‘Sex’ influences gendered pronouns on Facebook.  This is clearly visible on profiles, and just about anywhere users are referred to in some way.  This imposed one-to-one relation is also apparent from the language used in ‘He/She/They: Grammar and Facebook‘, a June 2008 post from The Facebook Blog.  It is claimed that some languages have difficulty with non-gendered pronouns.  “For this reason”, they write,

we’ve decided to request that all Facebook users fill out this information on their profile. If you haven’t yet selected a sex, you will probably see a prompt to choose whether you want to be referred to as “him” or “her” in the coming weeks.

The post goes on to say,

We’ve received pushback in the past from groups that find the male/female distinction too limiting. We have a lot of respect for these communities, which is why it will still be possible to remove gender entirely from your account […].

(Of note is the fact that it is currently impossible to remove gender from your account, like it supposedly was in June 2008.  Hiding your sex status from everyone does not stop Facebook from referring to you using gendered terms (or using a gendered default picture, if you have no profile photos visible) that relate to your declared sex.)

According a a Facebook user (quoted in Emily Rutherford’s June 2009 article ‘Choose One‘) “this is the only peep ever heard from Facebook regarding this issue”.  Two years later, there are still no other mentions of these options in The Facebook Blog.  Google encountered similar issues with non-gendered language translation in Google+, but managed to get around it because they felt user privacy was more important than the discomfort felt by those few who are uncomfortable reading ‘their’ or ‘they’.  (Also of note, Google are not guilty of instituting a culture of sex/gender interchangeability.)

Looking further I found a few interesting conversations and projects people worked on in response to concerns over this limitation.  Sadly, it appears any and all petitions calling for a revision are ignored.  However, I did come across one highly intriguing comment in the Expand Gender Options on Facebook Petition page that claimed setting your language from ‘English (US)’ to ‘English (UK)’ changes references of ‘sex’ to ‘gender’.  That couldn’t be right, I thought, and had to test it out immediately.  But lo and behold, changing the language on your profile options page or the welcome screen, for example, changes the field title.

I have absolutely no idea why this is the case.  Is the gender/sex difference actually considered to be a ‘language difference’ by the Facebook team?  Are different people in charge of the UK translation who happen to have different views on the appropriateness of this field — and hold the power to implement different terminology?

I’m still yet to find any evidence of when — or if — Facebook changed the terminology for all users, but this discovery reveals a situation whereby Facebook is using different terminology to relate to the same field, depending on what settings are used.  I played around with it and confirmed that this difference extends further than self-expression within your own profile — open up the profile page of a user that displays their sex or gender to you and switch your language settings between UK and US English and see what I mean.

This language setting, then, represents a sort of cultural lens through which we understand other users.  What it also represents, however, is a systematic disregard of users’ sex and gender performance.  If I wish to declare my sex in a particular way but others read it as my gender identity (or vice versa), I am being misrepresented.  Some may feel comfortable declaring male or female using one language rather than the other, but the recognition of misrepresentation may destroy any sense of freedom experienced through this act of expression.

In my previous post on sex legitimisation on Facebook I wrote

In the case of Facebook, many of us have lost the power of accurately expressing our identity because we have complied with a system whose context disagrees with our own understanding of sex categorisation.

Now I know there are two systems operating simultaneously I realise it’s actually worse than this.  No one can express their sex or gender identity accurately on Facebook unless they believe, just as Facebook has asserted, gender and sex are exactly the same thing.

Sex and gender legitimisation in context

This year I’ve been looking at, among other things, the representation of sex and gender in digital spaces.  My thesis argues that restricting user options in profile fields – not just sex and gender, but these are great examples – alters the way individuals self-identify, through social feedback loops.  Digital representation introduces major issues of marginalisation and safety (which I won’t go into here), but I’m also looking at the limitations of digital technologies in representing real, complex individuals.

Wanting to get into the habit of posting regularly, I thought I’d share something I noticed recently about misrepresentation by context.

When asked for my sex I respond that I am ‘male’.  This is what I self-identify as biologically.  (I don’t identify as male gendered, but I’m going to avoid that discussion to keep this example simple.)  I have ‘guy parts’ and I personally understand sex as correlating to this aspect of my self.  Categorisation is often difficult and inexact but, while a little uncomfortable with the gathering, use and publication of such information, I am fairly happy to categorise myself in this way.

However, I also believe that sex is not a simple binary.  Not everyone falls neatly into a category of sex that allows only one of two responses.  If I casually identify as male, I am doing so without explicitly acknowledging that this comes with the following concession: I don’t believe in the binary notion of sex.  I am male, but this isn’t to be equated with ‘the opposite of female’.

When creating a Facebook account, you are asked (required) to declare your sex as either male or female.  What is interesting here is that, though I personally identify as male, if I chose that option the system would actually be misrepresenting my sexual identity; it represents me as male, but it represents me as male in the context of the limited and often insulting binary idea of sex.

The meaning of words change depending on their context.  If I told someone from the UK that I dislike football, I would have to address the ambiguity of this statement by including, ‘but by that I don’t mean I dislike soccer’.  ‘Football’ can mean different things depending on the national or cultural context, and not simply the sport being referred to; it could relate to the experience of seeing a game in person, playing first-hand, or represent the wider culture of football fans.  In conversation I could provide further details and state exactly what it is I dislike about football, and any qualities I actually find redeemable.  Digital systems, especially those with binary options, rarely allow for such elaboration and precision of response.

Words play an integral part in self-expression.  When the meanings of words we value become heavily simplified and determined by their context within digital systems, when our range of response becomes limited, we lose an important tool for performing our identity.

Some digital systems address the issue of misrepresentation, in regard to gender and sex.  For example, Diaspora* has an optional text field for gender, allowing users to write whatever they want, only if they want.  (I think this is a pretty good response, but I don’t think it is the optimal solution.  I’ll talk more about issues in designing gendered spaces another time.)  The point is that digital systems demonstrate a strong tendency toward allowing users to, often publicly, identify themselves only within a strict vocabulary defined by the system itself.

In the case of Facebook, many of us have lost the power of accurately expressing our identity because we have complied with a system whose context disagrees with our own understanding of sex categorisation.