Non-Profit Organisations’ Struggles against Facebook Logics

The next speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Rena Bivens, whose focus is on non-profit anti-violence activists online. The literature on such initiatives is still poorly developed; there is a great deal of advice on how these organisations should operate online, but how they actually operate remains poorly understood.

Rena approaches this by examining the Facebook and Twitter content posted by some 20 non-profit organisations in this space in Canada and the United States, which often also draw on the guidebooks for non-profits published by the platforms themselves. She is focussing here especially on Facebook, and enhances her analysis through interviews with the employees of these organisations themselves.

The use of these platforms by non-profit organisations is not necessarily anticipated or even desired by their initial designers; Facebook, for instance, started out as a space for ivy-league students, and gradually expanded by allowing companies and other organisations to create their own Facebook pages (notably nudging them to move away from organisational profiles, and incentivising this by offering better access logics).

This also promotes to them the metrification logics of consumer capitalism, of course, and enrols them in the quantification of reach and engagement and the competitive attention economy that results from it. Facebook itself also continues to tinker with its newsfeed algorithms, privileging certain types of content, and with the metrics that it reports to page owners. None of this is shaped specifically to suit the needs of non-profit organisations.

For instance, Facebook suggests associating pages with leading individuals as brand ambassadors; for anti-violence organisations – which through their work are exposed to a great deal of trolling, abuse, and hate speech – this is inherently counterproductive as it means that these lead representatives become even greater targets of hate. Facebook also suggests reaching out to others who already share the organisation’s interests – but anti-violence organisations are inherently interested in those users who have not yet heard the message, especially also including lurkers and other invisible users.

Without critically evaluating the assumptions built into these metrics and this advice, then, non-profits are likely to produce content that generates ‘good’ metrics but is likely to reach the wrong audiences and to fail to serve the organisation’s aims. There is a need to keep the organisation’s own agenda in the foreground, and to work against the grain of Facebook’s built-in structures in order to achieve the organisation’s aims. This may mean co-opting social media to their own ends, and eventually moving the work offline after the initial Facebook engagement. It means to take things offline and get to work, to get back to actual organising.