Facebook has revised its terms again. How many times, Facebook? The social network is notorious for updating its terms, revising its methods around the updating of its terms, and its level of involvement with participating users that would like to comment on the revisions. The vicious cycle continues with Facebook’s latest revision, which aims to simplify the terms of use for being a member of the site.
There are a few things to point out here: Facebook had installed a system for increased transparency around its terms revisions in order to receive feedback and voting from its users. Facebook also has a long history of needing to revise its terms, namely because the existing jargon was too difficult to easily comprehend and implementing its various privacy features can be confusing for many users.
In terms of the voting issue, this latest revision from Facebook only received about 7,000 comments from users. That means that an extremely small percentage of users is partaking on terms revisions for Facebook. Comments from Facebook stating that such a small pool of participating users leads to an ability to disregard the user votes indicates that that open method of terms revisions may not have as much uptake as both Facebook and users expected.
The growing history of Facebook’s need for revisions, however, is a notable concern. Facebook seemingly updates its regulations and terms on a relatively frequent basis, constantly keeping users and developers on their toes. It’s most notable because of the amount of feedback users tend to give Facebook when they don’t agree with a terms revision. This level of involvement has actually forced Facebook to take a more transparent approach, and also continue to revise its terms accordingly.
From news feeds to the Beacon platform, alert notifications and tricky application promotions, there is a lot a user needs to be aware of when interacting on Facebook. The company has also established itself as a standardizing authority on several aspects of social networking, making it increasingly necessary to pay attention to their terms, revise them as needed, and find an effective way of presenting the updates to its entire user base.
This dissemination of information is at the core of Facebook’s catch twenty-two. Because Facebook has such an active and involved user base, Facebook must find ways in which to keep its user base at the forefront of all its business and regulatory decisions. Facebook also has an unending amount of privacy and personalized features that can be applied to a user’s account, giving even more reason to continuously update its terms and regulations. This also makes it even more necessary to have an effective information distribution method, as term changes affect all of its users. It’s a hard job, but Facebook has taken on the responsibility to do so. The social network is clearly not giving up on those initiatives.