The Purpose of Facebook

For all those out there who do not understand the purpose of Facebook, let me explain.

Facebook is a social network website that enables people to post comments about their lives. What they are doing, where they are going, books that they read, movies they saw, emotions they are feeling, etc. It also enables people to friend other people, whether they are friends or not, which allows those friends to post comments on your comments. If you don’t like what someone posts, you can disagree with them or, if you are really in a snit, you can unfriend them.

This is Facebook. It is open, free and, despite their privacy claims, not very private at all.

I mention this because of something that happened yesterday. A restaurant that I had friended because they are a local eating establishment and I wanted to support them posted the following:
tooting our own horn: just hosted former president George W Bush & his wife, Laura for dinner with their friends. Say what you want about him, he was kind of a funny smart ass & fun to have in.

I thought about this all morning because I thought that was very disrespectful. I didn’t like President Bush when he was president and, as I have stated before in this blog, I thought he did some terrible things to this country. But I respect the office of the presidency and it is rude to refer to a former or current president as a “smart ass”.

I discussed this with a friend and she agreed that I should comment on the posting stating that I thought it was disrespectful. So I did.

This is what I posted. It isn’t verbatim but the general gist is there (you will see below why I had to re-write this from memory):

I am not a fan of President George W. Bush but I deeply respect the office of the president and referring to a former or current president as a smart ass is disrespectful.

There were other comments under the posting but none that were critical of the restaurant. But I felt they should know how some people will see their posting.

Less than an hour later, I received an e-mail from the person who manages the restaurant’s Facebook page. This is what was sent (edited to remove any reference to the actual restaurant):

Please dont “school” us on our own FB page. Not your place. We could not be pouder of the fact that the former president chose to dine with us, cant see why you did not see that in our post. We attempted to show that he was also human & fun to have him join us. If you could not see that & read everything literally, I aplogize as there was no disrespect in the post by any means. You want to rant, use your own space to.
Respectfully yours,

As you can see, I did leave the misspellings in…felt it added a certain touch to what they wrote.

I then responded with this reply:

Not my place? What do you think FB is all about? Let me explain. FB is about posting comments about your life and then having people comment on them. If you can’t handle a little constructive criticism, then get off of FB. I still stand by what I wrote. It is disrespectful to refer to a former or current president of the United States as a “smart ass”.

I went to Facebook and noticed that they removed my comment from under their posting, which is why I had to re-write my comment from memory. Apparently they only allow comments that are positive and reflect well on their establishment. Which makes me wonder, if they edit comments like this, how can we trust that any comments under their posting are true and accurate?

I decided that I really had lost all respect for this establishment. I wasn’t planning on eating there again anyway since I found their food to be pretentious and highly overpriced. So I unfriended them.

Actually I feel that they handled it all wrong. Instead of thanking me for my constructive criticism and apologizing, they chose to lecture me and give me a condescending apology, which isn’t an apology at all.

So now my opinion of this restaurant is that they are overpriced, pretentious, arrogant, and have no understanding on how Facebook works. Not to mention, they don’t know how to spell very well.

I wish them well and I hope that someday they come back to earth and put their egos in check. That way they won’t offend people, either by accident or on purpose, and properly apologize if they do offend people.