Who is afraid of Facebook?

Today's defence of Facebook by Tim O'Reilly (he wot coined Web 2.0) reinforced for me a very interesting thing - to wit, those rushing most to Facebook's defence are the A List Silicon Valley bloggers.

I had a quick look via Techmeme search at the whole Facebook / Privacy furore over the last few weeks, and who was pro and anti - the resulting impression is the 2 x 2 above - and it is a very curious thing indeed.

By and large the tech-informed Bloggerati have led the criticism of Facebook's privacy policy. By Bloggerati I mean technology bloggers, some of whom were in this space before "Web 2.0" was even coined, and who know it well. People like dana boyd, Stowe Boyd, Nick Carr and many others have all weighed in here.

Most of the serious Mainstream media have also weighed in - initially reporting on it, but increasingly coming out against the Facebook policies. I count the New York and London Times, Economist, Guardian, BBC et al as examples in this camp. (In fact its getting to the point that the "mass" mainstream media is starting to weigh in now)

Defending Facebook - well you'd expect the magazines such as Fortune to do so, their schtick is CEO and wealth worship and they tend to believe the ends justify the means. The FT and WSJ seemed to have started off in this camp - but seem in more recent days to have moved towards the other MSM as it becomes clearer what Facebook are up to.

Which leaves us with the curious spectacle of the Silicon Valley A List Blogs - TechCruch, Read Write Web, GigaOm and now O'Reilly - all have taken their turn defending Facebook, telling us that (in effect) privacy is dead, get used to it. It's curious in that - like the Bloggerati - they know what is going on (or not, in RWW's case ) and once upon a time supported all the good things Web 2.0 and its associated memeplex was about.

Now, however, they twist and turn on pinhead details, telling us that Facebook is doing the right thing for us all - when just about every other technologist, ethicist, moralist, liberalist, conservative, legislator, libertarian and librarian is getting increasingly concerned.

Why are they taking this stance? To what end?, is the question that we would ask. We are not certain, but analysis of past similar events leads to a number of potential reasons:

(i) Contrarianism as an intellectual model - and it also no doubt helps drive traffic (and comments - most of their articles are full of people furiously disagreeing with them). But its interesting that they have all chosen contrarianism right now.

(ii) Same Ideology/GroupThink - this is what they genuinely believe - except in many cases their new beliefs are somewhat Pauline - the Conversion seems quite recent in many cases (in a few cases junior staff were slagging Facebook off just before the Big Guns weighed in)!

(iii) Fear of the Subject's Wrath - this can be for overt reasons (criticising Adolf Hitler in 1930's Germany was a life-shortening event), more subtle (You'll never work in this town - or Valley - again) and even diabolical (You don't get invited to the best parties anymore)

(iv) Love of the Subject's Wealth - It has not been unkown in the past for people to radically alter their views on receipt of largesse from a rich sponsor.

Quite which of these factors (If any - there may be others) are driving our A List friends is unclear, but we would note that dependence on (or maybe proximity to) the Silicon Valley teat does seem to be a fairly good predictor of editorial viewpoint so far.....

Jus' Sayin......