Get out of MySpace, bloggers rage at Murdoch
Angry members of MySpace, the personal file-sharing website for young adults, are accusing Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation of censoring their postings and blocking their access to rival sites. — The 38 million subscribers to MySpace …
Context & Ripple Effects
By early 2006 MySpace has become the dominant daily hangout for American teens and twentysomethings, and News Corporation's purchase put Rupert Murdoch in charge of that crowd's shared space. The flashpoint now is control: members accuse the company of censoring postings and of blocking their access to rival sites — charges reported as real grievances by the users making them, not company policy statements.
The dispute matters because the asset Murdoch bought is precisely its users' sense of ownership; a community of this scale revolting against its new landlord is an early test of whether corporate-owned social networks can govern their members without losing them.
First-order effects
- News Corporation faces an active legitimacy problem inside MySpace itself: bloggers publicly accusing the owner of censorship and of walling off rival sites, on the very network whose value depends on user participation.
Second-order effects
- Rival social networks gain an opening to court MySpace's teens and twentysomethings as the 'open' alternative, turning News Corporation's moderation choices into a competitor recruitment pitch.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, every large user-generated community acquired by a traditional media owner will have to choose between editorial control and the openness that built it — the first structural fault line of corporate-owned social networking.
The trend: As media conglomerates absorb the web's largest user communities, platform governance — who moderates what, and which rivals stay reachable — becomes the defining management challenge of social networking's first corporate era.