According to Nick O’Neill at All Facebook, there are (not surprisingly) quite a few Lindsay Lohans on Facebook.
So, what did Lindsay do as soon as she found out her account was shut down? The same thing Robert Scoble did, she blogged about her experience, only at her MySpace profile:
okay, so i love myspace, because it is secure, and the people at myspace don't disable your account because they think that you are a fake you.
[..]
when i typed my password and "log in" name in, a red sentence came up saying..
Account Disabled
Your account has been disabled by an administrator. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page here.
Lohan, in her own way, criticized the vaunted Facebook Connect, the account management system that the social network has opened up for other blogs and sites to use as a way of managing their site’s userbase.
To paraphrase Lohan, it’s infuriating that Facebook arbitrarily decides who is and isn’t the real account holder, and it’s equally infuriating that they don’t at least offer account holders the opportunity to respond to the company’s accusation before the account is shut down.
The sentiment is almost identical to the insight of Scoble’s reaction to his account being deactivated:
Facebook claims it is a “utility.” Well, I like how Kara Swisher put it. Hint: “utilities” have due process and don’t just shut down someone’s account without a warning. You should see the comments on my last post. Some people didn’t even knowingly break the rules and never got a good answer for why their accounts were shut down.
Turning away from the amusing similarities between Scoble and Lohan for a moment, it’s interesting to note the echo outside the bubble on this one.
As social networking tools go more and more mainstream, people who are real celebrities as well as those with real world influence (and not just the “Internet Famous”) will have the same scenarios have happen to them we’ve experienced a year prior. For more proof of this, see CNN’s epiphany over Twitter’s Mumbai coverage versus our epiphany over Twitter’s earthquake coverage a year earlier.