Facebook at Work is a recipe for utter calamity that only benefits Facebook

It is a manifestly terrible idea which, if adopted in your workplace, will undoubtedly transform it into a dystopian hell-hole of paranoia and confusion

PLENTY of terrible ideas didn’t seem terrible to begin with. Trans fats were developed to help feed people cheaply and well; the publishers who turned down Harry Potter presumably thought they were making a savvy commercial decision. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, like John McCain picking Sarah Palin as his running-mate, must have seemed a splendid plan at the time.

But Facebook at Work, a new corporate version of the social network, designed to let companies conduct internal business on their own mini-Facebooks, is not one of those ideas. It is a manifestly terrible idea which, if adopted in your workplace, will undoubtedly transform it into a dystopian hell-hole of paranoia and confusion, before ultimately destroying it altogether, leaving you on the streets.

I’m exaggerating for comic effect, of course. You might not be left on the streets. A kindly relative might take you in.

Admittedly, at a very brief first glance – the kind of glance you might give before the first coffee of the morning kicks in – the concept might seem appealing. If you’re an employee, the logic might go like this: Facebook is the thing you do for fun, as a break from work; so if you worked inside Facebook, too, it might make your job more fun. If you’re an employer or manager, you might conclude that, since your employees spend so much time goofing off on Facebook anyway, Facebook at Work might channel some of that attention more productively.

Then the caffeine would hit, and you’d realize the truth – which is that Facebook at Work, currently only available in pilot form to a restricted group of US companies, is a recipe for utter calamity, which stands to benefit no one except Facebook itself.

Consider, as a mere appetizer, the implications for workplace etiquette of a social network where the other members are your co-workers. Must you friend everyone? Like or share every post from your boss, for fear of looking disloyal, or decline to do so, for fear of looking sycophantic? Tell everyone in the company about the birthday cake in the second-floor kitchen, or restrict who can see that announcement?

But those aren’t the main issues, of course. For businesses, by far the weightiest problem will concern the implications of handing over the stewardship of company data to a mega-corporation founded wholly on exploiting user data for commercial gain. Facebook promises it will“gather no data on corporate users”. (It will initially make money from the service by charging fees, it seems.) But it has a deservedly terrible reputation to overcome in this regard – and if all you’re looking for is a way of collaborating at work that’s better than email, there are a widerange of non-Facebook options. Why take the risk?

Which brings us to individual users. Facebook has promised that your Facebook at Work account will be separate from your personal one, and that “things you share using your work account will only be visible to other people at your company.” A cynic might argue it’s worrying enough when a new product must be accompanied by a raft of promises about how it won’t cause havoc. But then there’s this: “When you set up your work account, you’ll be able to connect it to your personal account. This lets you switch between the two accounts while using the same username and password for both.”

What could possibly go wrong?

Facebook, as you know, is already almost surreally confusing to use, unless you’ve given up trying not to be confused. Its plethora of privacy controls are impossible to keep track of, even in their newly simplified form, so you can’t ever be certain about who can see what. Meanwhile, since posts on the Newsfeed are selected by an algorithm, there’s no way to be sure your friends will see a post even if you do want them to, nor that you’re seeing theirs. You see what Facebook wants you to see.

Adding a Facebook at Work account more than doubles the potential for confusion; it squares it. How long before someone gets themselves fired – or, worse, outed – as a result of not knowing which network they were using? Or maybe we’re too cautious for that these days, and we’ll simply get even better at never expressing a thought or posing for a photograph that might undermine our workplace brand. Which isn’t, really, all that much less dispiriting.

The developers of Facebook at Work may sincerely wish to avoid such confusion. (They’re giving in a different color scheme than regular Facebook, for a start.) But in the end that may not matter: keeping users confused is simply too beneficial to the network. Facebook needs you to share more about yourself than you realize; it needs any walls you try to erect between different parts of your life to be porous. You are Facebook’s product: it needs the data you provide about your interests and preferences and purchases to be as interconnected as possible. If Facebook at Work proves a success, yet users’ accounts really do remain completely separate from their personal ones, that will be something remarkable: a policy maintained in defiance of the basic commercial logic of Facebook’s existence.

It would be silly and hyperbolic and fearmongering – I suppose – to suggest that, should Facebook achieve a beachhead inside many of the world’s biggest corporations, it might then find ways to gut them from the inside, channelling revenues away from them and to itself. Then again, as John Herrman at The Awl and Will Oremus at Slate have both recently argued, that’s not a terrible way of looking at what’s happening to Facebook’s relationship with the news media. What started as a relationship of mutual benefit is rapidly becoming one-sided, as Facebook seeks to keep users on the network (where Facebook can make money from advertising to them) instead of letting them escape elsewhere.

You could argue that the media didn’t have much choice: only an exceptionally brave or stupid news organization would choose not to seek visitors via Facebook, where well over a billion people people share what interests them most. If you’re a law firm or a chain of florists or a human rights charity, though, no such logic applies. You probably can’t avoid advertising on Facebook, or connecting with customers there, but there’s no need to invite Facebook to become the platform on which your whole business is run. If you do, and it ends in disaster, you’ll have nobody to blame but Time magazine’s Person of the Year 2006: yourself. 

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