Facebook.com Users for the Retention of Exclusiveness

From the beginning, Facebook.com set itself apart from other internet community sites. Originally tailored exclusively for college and university students, it became more than a jumble of virtual friends. With the ability to post class schedules, dorm assignments, and majors in such a way that allowed unprecidented communication between those with similar interests, while at the same time granting users the privacy control to allow who saw what information, if anyone at all, Facebook.com became a safe network of real friends who went to school together.

It created a community in which students could do anything from find someone in their Chem class to help with homework, to see what was going on on campus tonight, to creating groups of similar interests. All this without the worry of people not being who they claimed to be, without inundation with ads, without obnoxious profiles, sexual predators, and the endless list of other characteristics that make other sites, most notably MySpace.com, the subject of so much debate.

We believe it was primarily the requirement of Student status in order to join Facebook that has thus far kept Facebook the pure, well-intentioned community it is now. We also fail to see any legitimate reasoning to remove this requirement, especially considering it is in fact the only thing that sets Facebook.com apart from the rest of these networks. Thus, we also believe it is not in the Facebook.com user community's interest to drop this requirement.


We demand the administrators of Facebook.com do the following:

- Retain the requirement that users be students in order to be eligible for membership.
- Establish a democratic system in which all Facebook.com members are informed of all future changes to the Facebook.com site, then provided the option to vote on those changes and thus given the final word before changes are put into action.