When I teamed up with Forbes to produce a series on etiquette in the age of social networks (Social Sense and Sensibility) it was driven by a simple idea: unique cultures and social norms develop around online communities.  You ignore them at your peril.

The story of the social web is a story about how people, when given the ability to freely communicate – do so in great numbers.  And when they do they abide by social rules (be yourself, listen, build relationships through give and take etc.).  Hence, Social Tools Follow Social Rules (the current tagline of this blog).  When people are allowed to exercise their innate drive to be social they expect the companies they interact with, and work for, to get social as well.  Thus social rules become the new rules of doing business.  This is the sea change and breakthrough insight (in my opinion of course) that explains much of the discomfort and missteps that corporations are making when entering the fray.  Behaving like a corporation (impersonal press releases, constant self-aggrandizing and selling in every communication etc.) in a social medium makes you look like a psychopath.

Online etiquette isn’t just for business – it applies to everyone.

Precisely because it is a social medium, online exchanges are full of the same issues that exist offline; rude behavior, bullying, slander and so on.  In fact, online communications often stimulate bad behavior since the online environment lacks physical cues and distances the speaker from the consequences of their speech.  Just take a look at YouTube comments and you get a sense of how a social environment, lacking any controls or community norms can quickly spiral out of control.

So it was that I came to watch my colleague, Bill Evans, speaking on CNBC about the recent Facebook suicide incident.  In short, a teenage girl committed suicide, apparently after being bullied… much of it via Facebook.   I am a bit discomforted by  two elements of the story.  First, that it is a story in the first place (more on that later).  Second, some of the implied responsibility on Facebook as a platform to monitor and control conversations that take place there.

Bill does a great job, especially in pointing out that responsibility for maintaining decorum needs to be distributed across every person with a stake in it; parents, teachers, friends and Facebook.  His counterpart, Joel Reidenberg, from the Center on Law & Information Policy at Fordham University, makes solid points as well – specifically pointing at simple feedback mechanisms that would allow users themselves to flag abuse (however since Facebook relies on you actively choosing who your friends are the notion of a “report abuse” button seems a bit odd).  But he does slip in one idea that, while it sounds great on T.V.  is, to me, hopelessly unrealistic.   Essentially Reidenberg seems to charge Facebook with responsibility to police etiquette of its users by monitoring the substance of their conversation.   Sounds great and he implies that we have the technology to do this.   Well, theoretically yes.  We can apply data analysis to unstructured text but it is a very imperfect art since language (especially among youth) is in constant flux.  Consider for instance that saying “your are sick” can often be a compliment.  But when you digest a few statistics about Facebook the practical implications get mind boggling:

• There are 400 million (and growing) people on Facebook.  Only 30% of them are within the U.S.
• More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared each week

• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States (mostly using non English languages)
• There are more than 70 translations are available on the site

Facebook employees roughly 300 engineers.  That is a ratio of over 1 million users for every single engineer working at Facebook.  Obviously the first issue that gets raised is whether such monitoring and flagging is even a technically reasonable request.  Do you end that responsibility with U.S. citizens or is this a global effort?  The bigger issue gets to who is responsible for ensuring social etiquette online in the first place.

My answer is that ensuring etiquette never has been, nor ever will be the domain of automated surveillance, or platforms (online or off) that host literally billions of conversations.  Not because of the technical challenges but because of the nature of etiquette itself.  Etiquette is a social norm that is instilled through acculturation in your family, school, community and broader media diet.  You do not arrive at good etiquette through policy nor do you effectively enforce etiquette through surveillance and punishment. Policy and punishment are guardrails but it is community norms that constrain bad behavior.  Don’t take my word for it, let’s look to Confucius on this one: “If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishment, but have no sense of shame. If they be led by virtue, and uniformity sought to be given them by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of the shame, and moreover will become good.”

Which brings me to my first point:  While the whole story seems newsworthy I feel uncomfortable with the framing. essentially  “Teen commits Suicide after Facebook Bullying”… how many suicides occur because of bullying each year?  How many can we trace to social networks?  Are social networks playing a unique and pivotal role in raising the level of suicides?  Not of these questions are raised but the frame itself seems to condemn the new technology…

Bad behavior is bad behavior whether it is committed via email, telephone, in person or social network.  Every time a new technology comes along we commit two cardinal sins:

• We attribute new cause to old problems… case in point, bullying has always taken place – now that it is taking place on Facebook we seem to think Facebook has played some unique role.  I disagree with this but I am totally open to being swayed by data.
• We expect some parental figure to govern behavior through surveillance or punishment.  Case in point –  let’s charge Facebook with ensuring that no one bullies on their platform.   To do this let’s monitor every conversation for possible bullying, inspect every escalated issue and then get in touch with the offenders and make them stop.   That is a lost cause and it put the burden on the wrong party.

Bad behavior is bad behavior whether it is committed via email, telephone, in person or social network.  Etiquette is a critical skill in the age of social networks but education and enforcement of such skills must be equally distributed among us all.