Analysis of a Facebook Freakout: Rhetoric of Agency in the Places Privacy Debate

Abstract

New technologies often generate fear regarding privacy threats, and social networking sites like Face book have lately experienced the brunt of the criticism. Face book users, even as they post greater amounts of information online, express concern over privacy violations. This paradox suggests that the issue is more complex than the private/public dichotomy and that the rhetoric used during these protests could yield insights regarding the competing worldviews expressed in a privacy debate. My paper examines discourse by the ACLU and Face book at the time the controversial Facebook Places application came out. I use cluster criticism to show how the two rhetors position themselves, each other, Face book users, and users' friends in terms of the degree of control each ;:igent is portrayed as having. My findings suggest that appealing to users' agency will be a key persuasive strategy as concerns over social networking privacy violations increase, and I comment on how sentence structure in corporate discourse can be used to enhance or detract from users' sense of agency when using social networking sites.