I think it’s great that social networking isn’t split across many different platforms, even though I’m usually in favour of less centralized control.  Facebook, so long as it continues to provide more privacy features, allows what Piere Levy calls “totalization without control.”  That is, we can communicate with one another through and around any institutions, so long as they allow Facebook.  Now one might counter by saying that having only one major networking site makes it easier for governments to censor them, but I would argue that the easier access by so many others (others without much knowledge of how to use the internet), in so many free countries, outweighs its censorship in few countries, but only if their still remains other more spreadable and tougher to censor forms of social networking, and especially when Facebook can cross-platform with these other forms of social media.

What do you think?

First, I, along with the 1,066 members of the SSA’s Facebook group received the following message from Alison Bates, Field Director of the SSA, on September 4 at 11:24pm PST:

Subject: SSA sexually harasses employees and is corrupt

Message: The Secular Student Alliance executive director, August Brunsman watches porn at work and sexually harasses his employees. The organization is going to be shut down soon.

I seriously doubted Alison would send such a message since I know her to be a very nice person. The other factor that made me doubt it was her sending such a message was that she undoubtedly has access to all SSA e-mail contacts and would have also sent out this message over e-mail to everyone in SSA’s databases. My first conclusion: her account was hacked.

I started doing some sleuthing and found out from one source that Alison had recently quit the SSA this past week. This of course worried me because now it was more likely that the message actually had been sent by a disgruntled Alison. But again, the fact that this was not sent out as an e-mail to all people in SSA’s databases calmed me down somewhat.

I stayed up until 4:30am PST discussing this with some people and waiting for people on the East Coast to wake up so that I could ask them what the hell was going on. But alas, my body is weak, and I went to sleep. When I woke up I found another message from Alison, part of it went like so:

[...]Менеджеров по торговым маркам, менеджеров по продукту, директоров по маркетингу и рекламе, маркетологов и менеджеров по рекламе.

В результате обучения группа приобретет знания и навыки:
[...]

It was in Russian! Clearly it was a spam message. But to be sure, when I translated it with Google Translate, it said some things about marketing and whatnot. It was definitely spam. Plus, her Facebook profile has been defaced and is all in Russian now.

Conclusion: Alison’s account was hacked.

This conclusion was verified when August Brunsman, Executive Director of the SSA, sent out a Facebook message:

Hello SSA Facebook Group Members,

We apologize for the messages sent to the group members this morning. It does seem that the messages were sent from a hacked account. We have removed the account from the group.
[...]

However, there was still issue of Alison having quit her position at the SSA. It turns out this was true as well. When you look on the SSA Staff page, Alison is listed as being a former staff member. She resigned this past Wednesday, September 3, and did not give a reason for her departure. However, she says she did not send out those odd Facebook messages.

Now, of course this looks very odd. Alison resigns from her job, and then *boom* her account gets hacked and sends out a libelous message about the SSA’s Executive Director. However, let us just look at the facts:

• A strange message unbecoming of Alison is sent out to all SSA Facebook members, but NOT to all SSA contacts on their e-mail database.
• A message in Russian is sent from her Facebook account and her Facebook profile is now all in Russian.
• Alison says she did not send those messages with her Facebook account.

Our best conclusion at the moment is that her account was hacked. Until any other evidence comes to light, this is the best fit scenario and should be taken as what really happened.

So, to conclude:

• Alison resigned from her position at the SSA this week. And,
• Her account got hacked.

There’s no use in speculating beyond that. It is expected that she will make a statement sometime this week about the situation. If anything else comes to light, I’ll report it.