As a member of the Facebook community, a person can write a comment on any of his or her Facebook friends’ walls unless limited profile access has been applied. While people usually tend to be “Facebook friends” with a great number of people, often times many of those so-called friends are either unknown or barely known in real life. Wall posting on Facebook is generally reserved for communication between people who are actually friends outside of the Facebook community. In addition to only commenting on the walls of your true friends, there are other standards associated with wall posting on Facebook. People normally tend to make more positive comments than negative comments because the wall post forum is public. The negative comments that appear on walls are usually just written in a sarcastic manner between close friends. However, most sarcastic negative comments are still censored to some degree because it is know through word of mouth that inappropriate content is monitored and can be reported to the Facebook supervisors and developers.
People come to know these Facebook wall posting norms through observation after initially joining the online Facebook community. I have noticed that new Facebook members usually wait some time before wall posting or commenting on pictures or using any of the other Facebook applications. During this waiting period, the person is able to scroll through other people’s profiles in order to examine what the wall posts on these other profiles are like. Through such observation as well as initially only responding to wall posts as opposed to making the first move, new members learn both what seems to be acceptable content and to whom they can wall post.
Wallace’s theories in “The Psychology of the Internet” help clarify the specific online standards associated with wall posting that allow Facebook to be successful. According to Wallace, there is a power source called the “Leviathan” that enforces people’s adherence to society’s norms and standards. In being part of society, certain individual freedoms are given up when the Leviathan is in place, but it is important to have a source that informs us which behaviors are okay and which will be punished. Wallace theorizes that the Leviathan appears in certain instances to moderate groups. In unmoderated instances, Wallace explains that “the Leviathan would emerge with more difficulty were it not for human willingness to conform and our eagerness to preserve a productive online group environment (70).” I think that Facebook is only an example of a semi-moderated environment because Facebook members know that there are Facebook supervisors who have the authority to take action if there is inappropriate content. However, such supervisors are in the background. In the forefront, wall posting standards generally seem to be adhered to through the observation of a conformity norm in the Facebook community.
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