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Facebook has become so powerful that, for some people, having a Facebook account is more important than a driver's license. But when you lose that account, there's no recourse. Lily Padula for NPR hide caption. This story contains references to child pornography that some readers may find disturbing.
It's tempting to think of Facebook as pure entertainment — the dumb game you play when your boss looks away, or your date goes to the bathroom. But that's underestimating how powerful the Facebook empire has become.
For some, the app is more important than a driver's license. People need it to contact colleagues, or even start and build businesses.
It's hard to know how many people rely on Facebook for work, but NPR interviewed dozens who do. Their stories reveal an unsettling fact: This Silicon Valley giant — one that has woven its way into the lives of more than a billion people — can be a black box, silent about how it makes decisions.
While some have been frustrated about censorship , for a number of users, there is another concern — livelihood.
Users started setting up offices in the park, using the roads to travel, treating it like a public utility. But legally, it's private. So when Facebook shuts off the road that goes to your shop, or puts in a new toll, he says, "That's it, you're done.
Two very different people — one is a meme-maker in Florida, the other an investigative journalist from Zimbabwe — got stopped in their tracks as they were doing their work on Facebook, because of the company's decisions and refusal to talk, human-to-human. That caused them tangible harm. Their stories illustrate how much Facebook controls people's access to the online world, and how opaque the company is about this power. Tim Lawler considers himself a regular American. He doesn't have a computer science degree from Stanford, yet he managed to make a six-figure salary on Facebook.
His job is something you've likely never heard of before: He makes and shares memes — those dumb, funny pictures you see all over the Internet — for money. Lawler previously worked as a manager for Harley-Davidson, but he lost his job when his store got bought out. He was 40, a tough age to make a career change. He first got on Facebook just for fun. He had a regular account. Then one day he decided to try out a special feature — to make something called, simply, a " page.
It takes just a few seconds. Lawler made one in honor of a personal passion: Turns out, it was a stroke of brilliance. Lawler built a base of , fans — fellow skull-lovers.
And then he started making more pages for more passions, amassing about 4 million "likes" total. By comparison, NPR's Facebook page has 5.
So Lawler is a serious one-man shop. Names of individuals have been obscured to protect their privacy. Courtesy of Tim Lawler hide caption. His most popular page was called "Unlawful Humor" — an edgy title, but with PG content. One day, a Facebook friend told him she was making money off one of her pages, and he should get in on the business. Here's how the money part works: Just like Google and Facebook get paid to post advertisements in your search and your news feed , Lawler gets paid to posts ads too — in his Facebook page — by a third party, an entity known as an "affiliate link" company.
In the complex world of online advertising, these companies are middlemen between big brands like Home Depot and publishers. It's a standard practice for businesses on Facebook to post these advertising links. He'll share a link — it could be for a juice company or a news site — and every time a fan clicks on that link, he gets less than a penny. But the money adds up. He showed NPR proof of his earnings. Before it became lucrative, Lawler felt he had a knack for this work because he saw celebrities sharing his memes.
In , according to a former senior employee, Facebook had only , of these pages. Now, according to two employees, there are roughly 60 million. And they're a vital part of the corporate strategy. To keep growing, Facebook needs people to do more than set up personal accounts. It needs small businesses to set up digital shop.
That brings in more traffic and opens the doors to Facebook mediating and getting a fee for financial transactions. If Facebook is the publisher, the most dedicated page owners are the army of reliable writers. They post multiple times an hour. NPR interviewed dozens of people who operate pages. It's an intriguing world of niche interests. Maureen Camfield, a nurse, started a page for the brokenhearted.
Camfield says there are so many lonely people online who just want a friend, you can build a real business by being kind. She'd sometimes refer a fan on her page to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, and get a message in return like: You made a difference.
I wanted to kill myself that night and I didn't. The technology sector gets criticized for killing jobs, for having robots and algorithms replace human labor. These page owners sound like success stories — exactly the people Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would want to brag about. While algorithms take over boring, repetitive work, Facebook is making new work that is creative. This is the very promise of technology. But that is not where this story goes. Lawler and the other page owners listed above got shut down.
Lawler remembers he was sitting on his couch, posting to his Facebook pages. And all of a sudden, he saw a stream of notifications: This page has been unpublished.
And I was like, 'Oh my God. He remembers the date: Around the same time, others tell NPR, they received similar, generic messages. They'd violated Facebook's Terms of Service and their pages are not allowed to operate. The notices did not state what the person did wrong exactly, what the offending posts were, or whether there was a way to rectify the situation to get the page back.
They read like form letters. When Lawler opens his Facebook account, he can still see his old pages the rest of the world can't. It makes him sad "because there's nothing happening over there.
All that's happening is I'm [losing] likes that I built," he says. You could say tough luck. Facebook is a free app. People don't pay, and they're not entitled to use it.
But Lawler and others did pay. Facebook makes money in different ways. The company sticks its own ads on pages — meaning the ads other businesses pay Facebook to place.
Facebook pays NPR and other leading news organizations to produce live video streams. Lawler paid thousands of dollars in ad money. He thought it was a kind of a safety valve. When you advertise, you get a point person, a human at Facebook. Lawler tried reaching that person, and even got a call back — which he missed.
His emails to Facebook went unanswered. In April , Facebook posted a new rule online stating that users have to get special approval from corporate headquarters to post advertisements independently. Furthermore, Lawler got dozens of notices that his account was sending out spam. Facebook declined to discuss the specifics of any case, citing privacy concerns.
Lawler says he didn't know about this new rule Facebook didn't tell him , and the spam notices he got are just little pop-ups that disappear in seconds. If he were in bad standing, he figured, someone in the advertising department would have warned him — and not let him keep paying to promote his page. The difficulty in reaching the company to have access restored doesn't just affect people who created pages.
In Zimbabwe, about 8, miles away from the Florida meme-maker, there is a user named Sandra Nyaira, an investigative journalist. On June 17, , she received three photographs.