Let's be real

[labellementeuse]

Look guys, I'm not at all thrilled about the facebook/twitter fuckery, but let's be real. I just saw a comment on the news post saying

now if someone could tell us why there isn't a total opt out on the fb/twitter crossposting (as in stopping others from posting things that would link to my lj without my consent), that would be great.

SERIOUSLY GUYS, people can already link to your livejournal without your consent. It's called 'linking'. They can do it on facebook and on twitter. They can do it to comment threads and to your friendslocked posts. They can copy your content and post it elsewhere (although that is obviously a Bad Thing which I don't defend). They can crosspost anything they like from facebook - and in fact there is already a feature you can set up on facebook to have your LJ updates go directly there! NOTHING HAS CHANGED except LJ has made this slightly easier and it might be too easy to do it by accident. That's a problem, but this is not THE DEVIL and it's not actually letting anyone do anything they couldn't already do themselves with only a tiny fraction more effort!

Also there's this thing that is weirding me out: a lot of people are saying "do not crosspost my posts or your comments at my posts to FB/Twitter". Now, I do not really like or use facebook that much. But it seems to me that if you have made a public post in your journal about, say ... Yuletide. And I thought that post was interesting and I commented on it and then I linked to that post on Twitter with the hash tag #yuletide ... I'm not allowed to do that? Like, it would never even have OCCURRED to me that I couldn't do that. And if it was a post on social justice, I could well have linked to it from my FB with a comment like "this discussion is interesting." But my flist is FULL of people saying "don't link my stuff on FB!!!!!" Am I wrong, or is it sort of *your* responsibility if you want to be anonymous to make your livejournal, you know, anonymous? I am not FB friends with most of my LJ friends and I really do not understand what would be so damaging for, say, sixth_light if I linked that from my FB and said "this post about Heroes made me laugh!" OBVIOUSLY I would not say "this post about Heroes by [her real name + FB link] made me laugh" because her LJ is clearly anonymous.

I GUESS MY POINT IS: explain your position to me because it seems needlessly and confusingly draconian. linking is normal, isn't it?

I STILL MISS YOU LJ/DW. WHEN I GET BACK WE'LL TALK ABOUT PORN AND SHIT.

Comments

[hazel]

rivkat points out here that code influences what you think you should do with it; maybe having the FB option everywhere will create an expectation that people link? FB appears as far as I can tell to largely ignore any distinction between RL identity and online identity; LJ (or at least the part of it I frequent) is built on it.

As for anonymity: it's contextual. I don't think a stranger could work out my RL identity from my livejournal. But if a close friend commented on, say, a post of mine about work and university, and then it was linked in that friend's RL facebook, it might be possible to work out my identity from there. And most of my RL friends are on lj, and most of those people also belong to facebook. It's the RL lj posts that concern me more than fandomish ones.

I do flock a lot of my posts these days, and I trust my flist by and large to respect that. But a lot of the etiquette of respecting flock is built upon LJ's anonymity and separation of various social groups. This links back into what people's expectations of their own use of the new tool is, and what people's reasonable expectations of other people's use of the tool can be.

[And, yeah, your point about this already being possible and the new tool just making it easier is a totally valid one.

I also don't think there's a distinction between linking to a post on twitter and linking to it on delicious, which of course we do all the time.]

[labellementeuse]

This is all true, and I think these are really profound issues about the way people use LJ/DW vs the way they/we use FB. I personally do link to my LJ from FB, but as I move for the first time into the serious working world I am thinking about shifting some content to a separate appropriate-for-work-and-mothers blog and getting rid of that FB link, so I totally understand this desire for separation. (Although saying that, people's relationship with FB as a public site is pretty vexed already.)

However, I think my problem is that a lot of people seem to be saying: this is how I manage my identity, and that gives me a right to control how you manage your identity. I don't want my livejournal linked with my facebook, so I don't want you mentioning my livejournal at all on your facebook, even if we have nothing in common, don't know each other, and if you use your facebook as a way of connecting with primarily fannish friends. I kind of ... obviously people have a right to ask others not to link to their LJ in certain locations and I do think people should respect that (and, to be clear, I always will). But I also think that, well, if your LJ is public and you invite a certain kind of discussion, people should be allowed to respond to that in their own space - even if that space happens to be FB. If your anonymity is really, really important to you, your right to control how people talk about you, to me, only goes so far. Like, clearly, it's NOT okay to say, oh, sixth_light, that's [her real name]. But we also have a lot of FB friends in common. If I linked to a public post in her journal discussing a social justice issue, it probably would be possible for people we both know to figure out who she is - she has a fairly characteristic manner of speaking and IMO is fairly identifiable, so if someone skimmed the rest of her LJ they might well figure it out. But is that my problem? Or is it hers, to manage her content in such a way that she's less identifiable by her intimates, if it's really important to her?

[hazel]

Hmm. I think your freedom-of-expression argument is very strong -- and I'd say therefore that the responsibility of protecting one's own anonymity lies largely with the owner of the LJ, but that some responsibility to protect other people's anonymity lies with people making links, so far as they are aware of the original person's desire for anonymity. [And that this is general practice anyway in LJ-land, so far as I am aware.]

Some responsibility on the part of the person making links exists in a way that I think is broadly comparable with journalists protecting their sources -- people say things under the cover of anonymity (no matter how fragile it is in reality) that they would not say under their own name. We want people to have the freedom to say these things because a) it might be really important to them, and b) it might be really important to their audience, whoever that is. I don't think there's necessarily any responsibility to anticipate a desire for anonymity, though some topics might carry a presumption of it. But it's complicated.

[labellementeuse]

IAWTC entirely.

[ilyena_sylph]

If anyone, including my girlfriend that has facebook, did something that made it easily possible to get from her real name to MY real name as attached to my journal, I would lose my shit at her so hard you would hear it wherever you are.

This applies about triple to anyone that I don't love with every breath in my body.

I don't use facebook. My twitter is under my fan-name. I don't have an online presence with my real name, and I intend to keep it that way. My journal very deliberately has as little meatspace-identifiable information on it as is humanly possible while I'm still communicating.

And also, cross-pollinating LJ/DW and/or FB & twitter is so very likely to be actively harmful to, oh, trans people in intolerant areas, or LGB people (like me) who are closeted to their family and journal services are the only place they can be who they really are, or people struggling with various oppressions.

ETA: You're not wrong that people can already do this, but nobody needs to make it easy. Especially a site that used to be decent about respecting separation of identity.

[labellementeuse]

I am pretty confident that we have no mutual IRL friends. If my FB and LJ identities were singular instead of separate, am I still not allowed to link to a public post in your journal? (To be clear: I have absolutely no intention of doing so at any point and I will always respect the wishes of my LJ/DW friends.)

To me this is really coming down to: people manage their IRL and fandom identities in a certain way, and they want everyone else to manage their own identities in that self-same way. If my RL and fandom identities were integrated, I might want to link to a fannish post in sixth_light's journal and talk about a discussion going on there. Should I not just because we have some mutual FB friends who might then figure out her RL identity? If that anonymity is really important to her, isn't it on her to flock and manage her identity carefully?

As hazel said above, I think both parties have a responsibility here. I have a responsibility not to be a dick, to not link to the posts of trans people to their local hate group, to not link the posts of people writing about social justice in SFF somewhere where W*ll Sh*tt*rly might see it and be inclined to harass them, etc. But equally I think people have a responsibility to be aware that their public posts are public, and that not everyone manages their identity in the same way that they do.

[ilyena_sylph]

Heh, I'm pretty sure we don't, either. I... have a totally irrational and vicious loathing of facebook and all its works upon the internet, but anything I post public can be linked as people feel like doing. Not sure why people would, because most of the people I run with do maintain separation of their identities, but... sure, why not. I did post it public. I'd be very likely to lock the post soon after I started getting strange traffic, but that's on my end.

If you have the ability to link your RL and fandom IDs in that way... more power to you. I absolutely don't, and I think most people don't. At least in the circles I'm usually around. And sure, there's nothing stopping you except your own manners and whatever your friends have asked. Which falls back into manners.

Most people that I know already do manage their IDs pretty freaking carefully, and that's why we're all flipping the hell out about people being so easily able (and freaking encouraged to) to willy-nilly fuck with our management of our IDs. So I might not be the person you really want to talk to about this.

We're aware. We just want people to not be dicks, and if that requires making blanket pronouncements of "don't do this shit, you could damage me"... well, that's what it requires. *shrugs*

[labellementeuse]

I do actually link to my LJ from my FB, as a matter of fact (but not the other way round, which I'm increasingly thinking is the direction I *actually* want these things to go, i.e. I'm cool with fannish friends finding me on LJ, I don't specially want my dad reading the post I'm planning next week about fisting and femslash) and I am thinking about moving towards a more careful separation. For various reasons my name is tough to google, I know that makes me lucky. So I do get where people's concerns are coming from.

and that's why we're all flipping the hell out about people being so easily able (and freaking encouraged to) to willy-nilly fuck with our management of our IDs.

I guess I'm just struggling with the idea that crossposting my own posts or comments to my FB - with the clear exception of flocked posts, etc - is willy-nilly fucking with your identity.

Here's an example: A is a trans teenager in The Sticks, Nowheresville, who uses FB to connect to other trans teenagers. Zie links to a public post in the LJ of B, a trans teenager who prefers to remain anonymous, sharing a post which moved hir with hir friends. It turns out that B is also from The Sticks and some of A's friends manage to identify zir, which upsets B. Something went wrong in this interaction, but where?