Mike Strong
, Arts & Living Editor
Facebook has come under fire recently for its selling of users’ data to advertisers. But the controversy hasn’t just sparked headlines, only to fade away in a matter of weeks. This time, the controversy has spawned a whole new social network directed at those who oppose Facebooks ad-selling methods. The new social network, Ello, is being billed as the “anti-facebook” around the internet.
Upon requesting an invitation to join the site, users are greeted with a fairly passive aggressive message calling out the fact that “your social network is owned by advertisers.” Without ever directly calling out Facebook itself, Ello makes it clear that “your social network” is a deceiving, coercing and manipulative organization. On the other end of the spectrum, Ello claims to “believe in beauty, simplicity and transparency.”
Interestingly, it is actually quite hard to explore Ello’s beauty, simplicity and transparency for yourself. The site is currently invite only, so you have to request an email invitation from what appears to be the creators themselves. The site is not in its finished form yet, so they are picking and choosing who gets to use the site in its current state. But while you wait for your invitation, Ello greatly encourages you to share their manifesto with everyone on that other evil site.
So more than anything else, Ello simply comes across as an outlet for bitter Facebook users to share their anger with other Facebook users. Without a way to easily jump in and get a profile going on Ello, the platform is doomed to come and go like a tumbleweed shouting its problems to a bustling western town that couldn’t care less. The small team that created Ello is a very vocal minority that is not at all representative of most Facebook users’ feelings about the ad-selling policy behind the site. Facebook users generally understand that whatever they post on their page is no longer exclusively owned by them. In this day and age, nearly everyone knows that the internet is anything but private. No matter how many privacy setting you enable on your Facebook, your content is still out there, ready to be sold and shared at the will of Facebook.
So the solution is simple, if you don’t want Facebook to see you holding a Coke in your photo, only to turn around and sell that data to Coke, who then plasters ads all over your page, then simply do not post that picture. It really is not that much of a problem. A company knowing what type of soda you drink is not going to affect directly in any way.
This nature of the internet is utterly unavoidable. So the more that Ello preaches that it is a private social network, the more hypocritical it will become. Since I was not able to try the site out for myself due to a lack of invitation, I cannot speak for how different the site is from Facebook from a design standpoint. But if it does succeed, I have no doubt that one day it will have to sell ads in order to survive in the wilds of the web.