November 6, 2019

WHY IS FACEBOOK YELLING AT ME?

Excuse us, but did you just become an acronym?

FACEBOOK

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The world’s biggest social media company just couldn’t help itself: Facebook is now FACEBOOK. Officially. THE ALL-CAPS RESET was announced this week in a widely mocked blog post by its chief marketing officer. The rationale: Apparently the company felt the need to distinguish its subsidiary services and products, like WhatsApp and Instagram (owned by the newly styled FACEBOOK), from its main app, Facebook (retaining capitalization).

This fooling-no-one caps-lock maneuver was chosen “for clarity,” marketing chief Antonio Lucio insists, as if THIS IS CLEARER than this. Because having more users than the world’s largest religion has followers, and the three largest countries have people (combined), isn’t conquering enough, controlling enough, self-aggrandizing enough. Facebook had to find another way to go big. Smashing style guides everywhere could be its not-so-subtle attempt to dissuade politicians and the public from dismantling the company, a mounting movement fueled by a distrust of corporate consolidation. That might be the real reason Facebook went FACEBOOK: Too big to fail is now, we’re asked to believe, TOO BIG TO DISMANTLE.

This style switch is the latest attempt to make the company seem distributive and invulnerable to antitrust intervention. No monopoly here, nope. Nothing to break up. We have FACEBOOK and this other appendage, Facebook. See? So many moving and unrelated parts. The world is LOLing at Facebook’s FACEBOOK. Laughter may be cathartic, but a better option is legislative action: The call to break up Facebook is growing louder, and coincidentally the company’s all-caps switch was announced just weeks after the wandering, barely coherent testimony by Mark Zuckerberg in his attempt to be held accountable in a congressional hearing for his company’s harm to elections and democracy. When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grilled Zuckerberg about Facebook’s breezy indifference to disinformation in political ads, his response was so far from an articulation of a policy that you have to wonder if he even knows his company’s policy—or if his company has one at all. You also have to wonder if Facebook’s corporate copy editors (hey, colleagues) actually equate all-caps with all confidence and a hierarchy of products, or if they don’t see a distinction (or haven’t convinced their marketers there is one).

I don’t mean to single out Facebook’s marketers or copy editors, at least no more than any corporation whose style guide allows ALL-CAPS FOR NON-ACRONYM BRANDS. I’m going after their reasons for doing so. “Clarity,” the stated reason, is a familiar refrain from certain marketers who peddle its opposite: obfuscation. If anything is clear, it’s that Facebook’s ALL-CAPS is not about clarification; it’s an exercise in domination, desperation, overcompensation, and misdirection. These are the imperatives of a Trump era that values SHOUTING as virtue—the stylistic mask for vulnerability. All-caps does not make a brand bigger; it makes it smaller.

Those of us working in media who are fortunate enough to have a shred of independence should AVOID SHOUTING AT READERS. Many good style guides use all-caps only for acronyms and defy the wishes of brands that would have us become their megaphones. It’s Fox (not FOX), Politico (not POLITICO), Wired (not WIRED), and Vice (not VICE); none are acronyms. The corollary is also true: Just because a brand lowercases each letter, like adidas, doesn’t mean we have to oblige, and there’s good reason not to (like consistency and clarity).

If Facebook wants the news media to cap FACEBOOK, the company has to pass a simple acronym test: Are you an acronym? (I’ve asked Facebook’s marketing team whether FACEBOOK is, to their minds, an acronym, and if so, what for. I’ll update this post if I hear back.) Any guesses? I have a few:

Forever Aspiring to Condition Everyone’s Behavior and Obliterate Other Kompanies

First and Always a Company Endeavoring to Build Obedience Over Knowledge

False Ads and Cryptocurrency Exchanges Become Oppressive and Overwhelm Kingdoms

Fake Ads, Corruption, and Empire-Building Obstruct Our Knowledge

Flashing All-Caps to Entice, Beckon, and Own Our Kids

Forcefully Asking/Coercing Everyone to Behold and Oblige One Korporation

Got more? Send them to styleguide@motherjones.com, and if they’re good, we’ll update this post to include them. (Let us know if you want your name credited.)

—MOTHER JONES’ copy department

WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

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Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

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