Facebook Friends Aren’t Real?

I just saw this story hit Techmeme: it’s entitled "Facebook Friends Not Real Friends." They’re not? Well, at least not in the UK. Not anymore.

Apparently, the story arises from a case where a British judge cleared an ex-boyfriend of a harassment charge after he repeatedly sent his ex a "friend request." Your first impulse may just be to laugh at this story – I know mine was – but after thinking about it for a minute, I grew concerned. If the judge judge set a precedent (if they have those over there, not sure about their legal system in comparison to ours) that Facebook friends aren’t the equivalent to our "real" friends and therefore don’t need to be held accountable for their actions, I think that’s a really bad judgement call on his part. Although I agree with the judge that trying to "friend" someone repeatedly isn’t a charge that deserves jail time, I don’t agree with him on why.

The judge stated that "the contact was highly innocuous because being ‘Facebook friends’ could not be defined as friendship in the traditional sense". But clearly, the two people involved in the case had a "real" relationship in the past – they weren’t just online acquaintances.

It’s simply not true that Facebook friends aren’t real. Many of my social network friends are actual, IRL (real life) friends, as I’m sure are many of yours. If they’re not IRL friends, then they may be categorized as an online friend, an acquaintance, or maybe even "that guy I friended by accident who I don’t even know."

You can’t just make a blanket statement that the people on these networks aren’t real friends. The relationships people form online have the same layers and levels of closeness that people have in real life, too. They just happen to be online. And often, they are an extension of an offline friendship. So, "not real friends?" Bah. That’s just ignorance.

I hope the U.S. judges aren’t this dense.