The new Community Pages feature announced 19 April 2010 by Facebook is troubling government agencies. Most of the content for these community pages is currently being scraped from Wikipedia, automatically creating a page that is not the agency's carefully constructed official Facebook presence. Nancy Scola explains the problem in her 26 May blog post Facebook's Manifest Destiny Runs Into Open Government:
Community pages are auto-generated by Facebook wherever a user might mention in their profile that they're a fan of something, or worked at some place, or had an interest in some field. The trouble was that in some case, people had already set up their own huts in those spots -- including government agencies and politicians.
Scola describes Facebook's losing attempt to assuage government concerns.
New media strategist Adriel Hampton also comments on the topic in his 17 May 2010 blog post Facebook Hijacks U.S. Government Pages.
Comments