Facebook ‘community wall’ trolled at F8 conference

“What does community mean to you?”

So asks a large wooden wall painted Facebook blue in the Festival Hall of San Jose’s McEnery convention center. It’s the annual F8 developer conference, and adjacent a series of mock living rooms showing off Portal video conferencing devices sits an attempt by the Menlo Park-based company to highlight the positives of its scandal-plagued platform in attendees’ own words. And it’s getting trolled. 

The interactive booth asks people to write their personal definition of community on a piece of paper and tack it to a giant circular Facebook logo. Messages like “love,” and “support” dot the wall. Ironically, one such note reads “local news.”

But those are just the messages that get past Facebook staff’s watchful eyes. Yes, a Facebook employee stands guard monitoring the messages placed on the wall, and one such employee confirmed they have had to remove notes running counter to Facebook’s newfound dedication to privacy. 

And just what, exactly, did those messages say? The two examples the employee provided were “hacking,” and “stalking.” Which, yeah. 

I checked the surrounding recycling and waste bins in an attempt to find crumpled evidence of the described trolling, but unfortunately came up empty-handed. Facebook apparently knew better than to leave that stuff lying around for nosy reporters to discover (or the convention center cleaners had simply emptied the bins). Perhaps the rejected messages were stashed away in the Harry Potter-like cubby built into the wall?

This, of course, calls to mind the 2016 incident in which Mark Zuckerberg had to reprimand employees for crossing out “black lives matter” and writing “all lives matter” on its Menlo Park signature wall.    

This time around, we don’t need Facebook employees to reveal their true colors. The attendees at F8 already know exactly what those colors are all on their own.