Hugo Rifkind: What is Facebook? 

I’d never noticed that there aren’t any tits on Facebook. The place always seems brimming with right tits to me. But no. According to this week’s mumbling bien-pensant scandal, the world’s largest social network has decided to allow newsy videos of murder and beheading and all the rest, but still not tits, and this is an outrage. Strangely enough, it’s mainly regarded as an outrage by the sort of people who are normally to be found slamming publications such as men’s mags and the Sun because they minimise the proper news and have tits all over the place. Honestly. Anybody would think these people just like to be cross, or something.

In fact there’s very little to get properly cross about on Facebook. It only feels like there might be because nobody, especially those who use it, is quite sure what Facebook is. This is a phenomenon noticeable with pretty much all internet giants. They play a vital role in modern lives, and because of that we have a tendency to consider them mighty and responsible institutions, perhaps like government departments or the NHS. Or at the very least as facilities, like Thames Water or Scottish Power, still with an element of public service embedded within their mission. But they aren’t that at all. They have no mission. Theirs is not a quest for your trust or your love or your vote. Theirs is a quest for your money.

Sometimes, granted, they seem to forget this themselves. Google, particularly, at times behaves like a liberal arm of America itself; a sort of US version of the most John Birt-ish aspects of the BBC. This week it unveiled a host of services designed to allow people in oppressive regimes — Iran and Russia and suchlike — to dodge local internet restrictions.