So Facebook has 1 billion users now. That means out of 7 people on earth, one has a Facebook account. And if you take into account that there is only 32.7% of world population with Internet access, the rate will be even higher.

Facebook has really grown into the “country of all countries”. If we treat Facebook as a sovereign state, it then becomes the third most populous country in the world (after China and India); its “GDP” of around $42,000 million (Facebook’s current market capitalization) makes it richer than countries like Iceland and Costa Rica (which is quite a tremendous achievement considering Facebook does not really “produce” and material goods); it does not have military or political influence over other countries, yet it is one of the major players behind civil uprisings in Egypt, Libya and many other Arab countries last year and indirectly caused the resignation of a few rulers; and it is undeniably the most culturally and ethnically diverse country in the world.

Given the astonishing power of Facebook, one question comes to my mind: who should be monitoring/governing this “state”? My initial answer was “Mark Zuckerberg” without much consideration. True, he controls more than half the wealth of Facebook and has executive power. But after some thought, I found an error in this naive answer: he is only “running” the site instead of “monitoring” it. It is like the difference between the Prime Minister and the Supreme Court: the Prime Minister is the one implementing economic and social policies to ensure smooth operation of the country, but the Supreme Court plays the ultimate role in deciding what is right and wrong according to the law. We have the Prime Minister of Facebook, but where is the Supreme Court?

So I changed my answer to “the United States government and the laws of the United States”. They, in some extent, provide guidelines and regulations to control the types of activities that can take place on Facebook. However, I soon realized that the laws can never evolve as fast as the Internet community. What is codified into the law as illegal behavior might have already taken place for months or years on Facebook and could have harmed millions of people. And when one trick is banned, ten “upgraded versions” might just come out simply because someone is profiting from them. Moreover, Facebook is a global community operating in different nations and has users with different backgrounds, and a set of rules from only one country is definitely insufficient to monitor its behavior. International cooperation to govern Facebook? Seems much too serious for a virtual community whose main purpose is to help people socialize, plus governors around the world have more urgent business to do (at least they think so).

What other choices am I left with? One seemingly highly unlikely answer appears: “users”. Few people think users have much say over what is right and wrong over the service they are using – they can provide opinions on how to improve the service, but when it comes to the basic rules guiding the functioning of the system, they seem to be the ones affected by the changes rather than making any changes. Does that mean I should give up on this answer as well? No. Facebook does not fit our conventional definition of “service provider”. Socialization involves people, and people constantly change the courses of socialization as a result of changes in communal beliefs, standards, etc. So users are not passive recipients of the Facebook service; they are part of the service. And as a constituent of the system, they therefore should be making decisions for Facebook. The voices of millions of users should be heard, and majority view respected. Compared to government officials and regulators who are usually distant from such social-networking services, we users are more updated with the current situation online and can provide nearly immediate counter-actions to malicious behaviors. Of course, that calls for responsible exercise of user judgment power.

So it turns out that we users are the ones who should and could monitor Facebook. And the first step we need to take is probably to convince Facebook that this “country” should listen to more feedback from its “citizens”.