I think you just misunderstood the article. This isn't FUD, mostly because it wasn't an attack on Facebook, not even slightly, and also is entirely true.
I am gay and have noticed exactly what the author is talking about with myself and many others. I don't write anything ever on Facebook (sorry, it bores me to tears, I don't hold Facebook use against anyone though :), but it is completely obvious from my mutual friends, from the fact that my profile says who my boyfriend is, etc, that I am gay.
It is a simple fact that Facebook (and other social networks to a lesser extent), blur together social circles that otherwise never would have blended. For example, both sides of my extended family in totally different areas of the country friend me. These are people who I never bothered to formally come out to (because we aren't in reality that close). Simply accepting their invite is also an act of uncloseting. For someone who actually is in the closet, that degree of uncloseting is possibly very uncomfortable, and hard to know if you are even doing it (is it obvious or not from my mutual friends that I'm gay?). This absolutely is not a kind of thing that happened in the pre-social network world.
But, this also is not, in any way, because of Facebook privacy problems or controls or whatever. It is an inherent property of the kind of very transparent, mixed "all social circles are one social circle" model that Facebook (and other social network sites) have. Maybe other people don't notice this as much because a lot of gay people (especially closeted gay people) were more used to having extremely disjoint social groups which the online world suddenly makes dramatically less disjoint.
Anyway, if you actually read the whole article, the author writes about this as a positive thing, because it makes the closet much harder to choose, since the traditional problem of policing your life to your closet door closed becomes so much harder. The author interprets this in the end as being a social positive since coming out is in a way a political and socially influential act.
I am gay and have noticed exactly what the author is talking about with myself and many others. I don't write anything ever on Facebook (sorry, it bores me to tears, I don't hold Facebook use against anyone though :), but it is completely obvious from my mutual friends, from the fact that my profile says who my boyfriend is, etc, that I am gay.
It is a simple fact that Facebook (and other social networks to a lesser extent), blur together social circles that otherwise never would have blended. For example, both sides of my extended family in totally different areas of the country friend me. These are people who I never bothered to formally come out to (because we aren't in reality that close). Simply accepting their invite is also an act of uncloseting. For someone who actually is in the closet, that degree of uncloseting is possibly very uncomfortable, and hard to know if you are even doing it (is it obvious or not from my mutual friends that I'm gay?). This absolutely is not a kind of thing that happened in the pre-social network world.
But, this also is not, in any way, because of Facebook privacy problems or controls or whatever. It is an inherent property of the kind of very transparent, mixed "all social circles are one social circle" model that Facebook (and other social network sites) have. Maybe other people don't notice this as much because a lot of gay people (especially closeted gay people) were more used to having extremely disjoint social groups which the online world suddenly makes dramatically less disjoint.
Anyway, if you actually read the whole article, the author writes about this as a positive thing, because it makes the closet much harder to choose, since the traditional problem of policing your life to your closet door closed becomes so much harder. The author interprets this in the end as being a social positive since coming out is in a way a political and socially influential act.