Facebook is creating its own “Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.” Sort of like the proposed airline passengers’ bill of rights, I guess, but they’re not trying to get it enacted by Congress—it would be part of the direct relationship between Facebook and its users. Or should they be called members?
In my view, the really interesting thing here is that bills of rights have traditionally been established to protect people from their governments. Of course, people have long used private contracts to establish their rights and duties between each other, but to my knowledge they don’t usually use the term “bill of rights.” Does the use of that term by Facebook signal another step down the road to a post-national world? Do Facebook users think of themselves as members in a social network, as citizens of a community that is governed by a corporation? Or is Facebook just cashing in on our special emotional attachment to the phrase “bill of rights” in determining its terms of service?
Another interesting aspect of what Facebook is doing is its call for input from Facebook users. Facebook, Inc., is a privately owned corporation, so users can’t obtain a share in the company by purchasing stock. Does Facebook have any obligation to take seriously the input provided by its users? In a democratically-constituted nation, a Bill of Rights enforceable against the government, at least theoretically, derives its power from the sovereignty of “the people,” or the citizens who, directly or indirectly, voted for its enactment.
But do Facebook users have any kind of “sovereignty” to be asserted against Facebook, Inc.? From what I can tell, the only real authority that Facebook users can assert against Facebook, Inc., is a single, binary decision: use the service or not. Is that enough? It reminds me of union organizing. What if Facebook users decided to “go on strike” against Facebook, to put on the pressure for terms of the bill of rights? With fewer people looking at ads, and advertisers threatening to bail, could Facebook, Inc., find itself compelled to capitulate? Would that give greater legal heft to the proposed bill of rights?
And what about Facebook’s ability to change the terms of service at will? Would that apply to the proposed bill of rights? Or would some form of entrenchment be enacted? How would that affect Facebook’s ability to do business?
These are the kinds of questions that occurred to me in law schoool, when I was taking classes on constitutional law and business associations at the same time. In some ways, constituting a nation and constituting a corporation are similar endeavors. In other ways, they are very different. But in a world where corporations rival nations in their scope and ability to affect our lives, I wonder how we can deal fairly and consistently with ideas like “rights.”
Going along with your last thought, and dovetailing this post with your initial post on vigilantism, it’s also interesting that in these corporate times, private policing has grown in influence, almost without limit. People don’t often realize that when visiting Disneyland, for instance, their ticket in is also an agreement to be arrested and searched by Disney cops.
I’ve read some estimates that private police outnumber their public counterparts by nearly 2-1.