“John Doe invited you to his event BIG BIG PARTY.” Despite being the root of dozens of pesky notifications in our news feed, Facebook events is an extremely convenient event planning tool as I blogged about last week. In my limited experience, most of the invites I’ve received have been for celebrations and frivolity. However, Facebook events have been incredibly effective in gathering people for protests and demonstrations. Facebook events helped the Egyptian protests by mobilizing thousands of protesters, and recent suspicions of election fraud caused thousands of Russians to plan Facebook events for mass demonstrations at Moscow’s Revolution Square. Used for a variety of purposes ranging from small dinner parties to uprooting a regime, this Facebook tool is clearly quite versatile. On this note, let’s examine its strengths and weaknesses, particularly for social activism purposes.
The advantages of Facebook events center around the network nature of Facebook. On Facebook, people are friends with quite a bit of other people in various social circles (family, friends, acquaintances, etc), so finding the right people to invite to social occasions isn’t difficult. Inviting them is even easier as Facebook simplifies it to a mouse click and optional descriptions. For demonstrations, though, Facebook events is extremely useful. It allows people to invite everyone on their friends list, and with enough organizers, thousands of people may be easily invited. From there, invitees can choose to invite their own friends, creating an exponential rate of increase. The sheer number of people who are “going” reveals the popularity of the event, and more attendees will cause more people to want to go. Just the amount of people who support these events by clicking “attending” on the RSVP represents the scale of the protest and serves as a good indication of disapproval of current conditions, political or social.
On the other hand, many disadvantages exist when using Facebook events. First of all, invitations are less personal and clicking “attending” is extremely simple, so actual attendance cannot be ascertained. Also, because invitations are much more easily spread through Facebook than by word of mouth, the chance of outside attendees going are low, so the number of people who are “going” on Facebook will almost always overshoot the eventual attendance. If invitations were more personal (as they used to be), attendance rate would be higher but it would be more difficult to invite large numbers of people. Other concerns include government censors, such as the Egyptian shutdown of social networks in the wake of protests coordinated through Facebook and Twitter. In addition, it’s very easy to locate and identify organizers and attendees of these events, so persecution is a real possibility even before the demonstration takes place.
Despite these concerns, Facebook events is a great tool for organizing large events, as we have seen with recent examples. We’ll just have to wait to see the next creative use of Facebook tools.