Fol­low­ing up on last week’s post about how Face­book is chang­ing the mean­ing of “like” online, I’ve been notic­ing more dis­con­cert­ing behav­ior on Target’s Face­book page.

Until yes­ter­day, Tar­get hadn’t posted any­thing to its wall since July 26th. It wasn’t clear if they were build­ing a strat­egy inter­nally, but the new post makes it obvi­ous that they’ve decided to ride out the storm by ignor­ing it and let­ting their cus­tomers duke it out on their wall. The new post links to spe­cials for col­lege stu­dents and makes absolutely no ref­er­ence to the con­tro­versy. As of this morn­ing, there are 303 com­ments on that post and 367 peo­ple “like” it.

Tar­get clearly isn’t going to men­tion the issues, respond, or engage in a con­ver­sa­tion on Face­book. Inter­est­ing strat­egy, and we’ll see how it plays out. But as I’m watch­ing this case study develop, some themes are emerg­ing and rais­ing some prob­lem­atic flags.

As one might expect after what seems like an eter­nity online, the com­menters are no longer mostly peo­ple upset with Target’s actions. And pre­dictably, as seems to hap­pen with so many dis­cus­sions about pol­i­tics and homo­sex­u­al­ity, the dis­cus­sion is devolv­ing pretty quickly. Some users are flag­ging each other for bad behav­ior, just because they dis­agree with the person’s opin­ions. Some are insult­ing other com­menters, and the whole wall is becom­ing a ref­er­en­dum on a polit­i­cal issue. I haven’t read every com­ment, but I’m con­fi­dent Godwin’s Law is proven there somewhere.

None of this is new behav­ior to be sure, but has this hap­pened before on such a main­stream company’s page, espe­cially while the com­pany itself is ignor­ing it? The fact that it’s Tar­get makes for some inter­est­ing issues.

For exam­ple, if you read a sam­ple of the com­ments closely, you’ll find a poten­tially wor­ri­some infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy prob­lem. If you go back to the begin­ning of the com­ments thread on the August 12 post, there are some users whose entire com­ment con­sists of, “If you don’t like Tar­get, why do you ‘like’ this page?” or “If you don’t like Tar­get, why did you become a fan of them?”

It’s unclear to me whether these folks real­ize that users have to like the page in order to com­ment or if they’re just being snarky about it. Even though these folks had to “like” the page them­selves in order to leave their own ques­tion­ing com­ments, I’m lean­ing towards believ­ing that they truly don’t real­ize that “like” now means “com­ments enabled.” As David Lee King said on my pre­vi­ous post, “it looks like the ‘Like’ but­ton is really an entrance fee/ticket, or the ‘door’ to the event.…” But there’s a large group of peo­ple out there that don’t real­ize that “like” now has sub­text and is loaded with new mean­ings and require­ments. I worry that they truly don’t under­stand that the boy­cotters have no choice but to “like” Tar­get if they want to par­tic­i­pate in the discussion.

Other com­menters hon­estly can’t seem to under­stand why some­one who is upset with Tar­get would be post­ing on the company’s wall in the first place. It seems that there’s still a dis­con­nect between “a company’s web pres­ence” and an inter­ac­tive, com­mu­nity.” Heck, this is true even for Tar­get, which con­tin­ues to ignore the com­mu­nity and treat its page as a one-way announce­ment chan­nel. A lot of folks par­tic­i­pat­ing in this thread haven’t made the men­tal leap from “Just Tar­get” to “Tar­get + Oth­ers” as a new norm, even though they’re able to scratch their heads in the com­ments themselves.

Close read­ing of the threads also makes it clear that quite a few Tar­get fans didn’t know any­thing about the con­tro­versy until they vis­ited the Face­book page and saw the com­ments. This fur­ther con­firms the ongo­ing switch from a small num­ber of “offi­cial,” main­stream news sources to per­sonal news streams on social net­work­ing sites. More and more peo­ple are get­ting their news online from their net­works, not from news­cast­ers. (Inci­den­tally, if you need to make a case for why your library should be on Face­book, this is a pretty good rea­son — in order to be part of your users news stream.)

Over­all, there’s a lot going on here, and I encour­age you to keep tabs on Target’s page to see how it plays out. It can be dif­fi­cult to dip into the emerg­ing inci­vil­ity and dis­re­spect, but it’s edu­ca­tional, espe­cially for any orga­ni­za­tion that has a Face­book pres­ence. These types of cases are illus­trat­ing how the shift from us going out to find infor­ma­tion to it com­ing to us, fil­tered through our net­works, will have an impact on orga­ni­za­tions. They also expose a whole host of other issues, from infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy gaps to pri­vacy con­cerns. For exam­ple, I was going to erase the names of the com­menters in the screen­shots, but tech­ni­cally it’s all pub­lic infor­ma­tion, so why hide it? Do the peo­ple leav­ing rants and invec­tives on the Tar­get post/wall truly under­stand that those com­ments are com­pletely public?

On Face­book, 831 peo­ple “like” con­fu­sion, but I’m not sure any­one really likes it in the Tar­get context.