Facebook users campaigned to replace third-person status with first-person format

Evidence

The networks of the 2010s have rerouted the internet’s original anonymity into self-expression; cultivating our personal brands, social media makes memoirists of us all, on the daily. The original format for the Facebook update, starting in 2005, positioned users to describe themselves in the third person (it used the formula “Member Name is________”), but that was discarded in 2007, partly due to a member campaign of more than 500 separate groups against it. First-person is instead the rule of the platform, with everyone immanently adding to their personal story. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 161

Categorization

• CANDY: The 2007 Facebook user rebellion over third-person updates is a genuinely fun, tweetable micro-history of platform design.