It’s no accident that the president’s change of heart happened to make for a perfect sound bite. Nearly as fast as Barack Obama, leader of the free world, could utter the words “Same-sex couples should be able to get married,” to ABC News correspondent Robin Roberts, @barackobama — the president’s not-nearly-as-popular-as@JustinBieber Twitter account — was announcing “Same-sex couples should be able to get married.” As of Thursday morning, it had been retweeted over 56,000 times and counting.

And just like that, what had been a fuzzy campaign issue for Obama just a week ago became a defiant stance – and an easily forwarded post. The president’s Twitter and Facebook accounts wasted no time issuing a photo of Obama with his statement, under the heading, “history.” The campaign’s main page itself immediately splashed up the quote, along with the ABC News clip and the invitation to “stand up with the president.” And the campaign’s colorful, friendly-looking poster stating that “Every single American/Gay Straight Lesbian Bisexual Transgender/Deserves to be treated equally in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of our society/It’s a pretty simple proposition” popped into a place of honor on the Obama Pinterest and Instagram pages.

Elections can turn on a few provocative words – from “Read my lips” to “It’s the economy, stupid” to, simply, “Hope.” But there’s never been a time when a single sentiment could be parroted across so many different platforms. The Obama campaign knows this, and has shrewdly seized upon the immediate, visceral reaction that one sentence can inspire with impressive immediacy. Watch and learn, Romney. Though we’ve yet to see how the president’s “evolved” stance will shake out into real votes in November, for now, it sure makes for a whole lot of likes and pins. Whatever happens next, Obama’s won Twitter.

“He’s not sure how he feels about you?!” I shouted. “You are smart, beautiful and kind. For God’s sake, you play piano for old folks at nursing homes and knit hats to support children in Africa! You’re borderline perfect. What’s he not sure of?”

Katie told me to take a deep breath. It would all be fine, she assured me. She explained that John was a nice guy whom she enjoyed getting to know, but ultimately they had very different interests. They lived on different coasts. It could never work.

“But … he was so cute,” I said, pouting.

I asked if Katie wanted to ease the heartbreak by cracking open a fresh pint of Chunky Monkey and playing an endless loop of Amy Winehouse. She did not. I offered a marathon of cheesy romantic comedies so we could sob together at all of the sappy bits, even though she didn’t seem very sad. She declined and said she had to finish her position paper for Junior Model United Nations. I stared at her, incredulous. Was she having no reaction to being text-dumped by her first boyfriend? Maybe she needed a maternal embrace to just let it all out.

“Do you need a hug?” I asked.

“Uh, do you?” she replied.

In fact, I did. Katie told me that there would be other boys. “If he can’t see what a great mom I have, he’s not worth it,” she joked. Then, more seriously, she explained that this was not a rejection, but two people realizing that they aren’t right for each other.

I held her shoulders, examining my daughter at arm’s length. “Are you sure you’re 14?” I asked.

“Are you sure you’re 45?” she retorted.

I felt a bit guilty that my protracted adolescence might force Katie, in response, to grow up too quickly. She may have felt that one of us had to be mature, and since I’m clearly not up to the task, it fell to her.

I wondered if I was cheating her out of something precious and irreplaceable by becoming too emotionally embroiled in her private life. Did my romance with her love life short-change her experience?

Later, I confessed all this to Katie, who told me that I mustn’t overthink things. She said she knows how to establish boundaries and she would certainly let me know if I’d crossed any. Katie returned to her homework; I turned back to my novel, the pink one with the cupcake on the cover.

I realize that becoming involved with my daughter’s love life is a somewhat pathetic attempt to dip myself into the Fountain of Youth. Because the reality is that being the mother of a teenager is a reality check, a constant reminder that I am no longer young, nor will I ever be again.

I miss the simpler life of my teen years when I’d spend hours on the phone twirling my hair around my finger and giggling about boys. (It’s not quite the same with graying hair.) I miss the days before my feet needed their own doctor. I miss the time when I truly believed anything was possible. Now, I’m not so sure it is. After 45 years of living, there has been too much disappointment. Hope is alive, but it’s taken a few hits and may be a little worse for wear.

As much as I admire Katie’s ability to feel whole outside the context of a romantic relationship, it poses a painfully stark contrast to who I was at her age. In fact, I’m not certain that I’ve come all that far. My need for validation is bottomless, and I am both astounded and grateful that I haven’t passed on this character defect to my child.

My husband of nearly 20 years tells me he loves me every day. William humors me by making grand Shakespearean-style proclamations of his affection. (Sometimes there is even a horn involved.) He has been known to playfully throw down his jacket to demonstrate his chivalry. It is a loving gesture with an added layer of meaning: Is this enough? Are we there yet?

Katie’s first boyfriend was special to me for several reasons. The two met at my 30-year summer camp reunion, the place where I shared my first kiss with Finn O’Lee under a crabapple tree near the playground. He had a mop of red hair and carried a basketball everywhere he went. It was true like.

Camp St. Regis closed in 1981, but the owners, the Kennedy family, kept their 15-bedroom home and a large waterfront lot in New York. Through the miracle of Facebook, a camp alumni group was started and plans for a summer reunion began.

At the event, the flag was lowered by two grandsons of the long-deceased “Papa Don” Kennedy, and the sun began to set on the bay. I’d spent 10 summers at Camp St. Regis and each sunset was a spectacular display of either fiery orange brushstrokes or sheets of pink cotton candy against the sky. This one topped them all.

An hour later, a bonfire was blazing and old friends were singing Simon and Garfunkel classics with the usual suspects strumming their guitars. I was chatting with my old friend John when our heads instinctively turned toward the grassy area leading to the beach. We saw two silhouettes, a girl and a boy sitting 4 feet apart, their backs toward the rest of us. The tension between them was palpable as they looked out toward the water.

“Who’s that girl with my son?” John asked, almost giddy.

When I told him it was Katie, he did a little gallop-in-place girly move, which I took to mean he approved. We wondered how long they’d been sitting there and noticed that they had inched closer. Soon they were sitting just close enough that their arm hair touched.

The youngest Kennedy grandson scurried to join us, and asked if John and I saw what was going on between our kids. We told him we had money on what time they would kiss. We had become helicopter cupids.

Ultimately, the mutual first kiss never happened, and I honestly don’t know which parent was more disappointed. The elder John managed to snap a photo with his cellphone, which was such low quality that it wound up looking like a sonogram of twins.

Katie and I returned home to San Diego, and the texting with young John continued for months. He added to his Facebook profile that one of his interests was waiting for Katie to return his texts. I thought that was the cutest thing I had ever heard. Katie shrugged and said she thought there were more direct ways to communicate that he wanted a quicker response. I looked at her like she was out of her mind. “Yeah, but none half as adorable!”

“Want to Facebook stalk him?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

I collapsed in a sigh of exasperation. I had so much to teach this child. “We check out his page and see what’s he’s doing, where’s he’s been, what’s on his wall, whose wall he’s writing on,” I explained. She looked blankly. “We can see photos,” I said stressing the word to entice.

“This is really creepy, Mom.”

I chose to see it as investigative. Remembering that she had an interest in joining the CIA or FBI, I tried to show her the parallels between Googling boys and saving the world. She wasn’t buying it. She gave me some lame response about how if she wanted to know something about him, she would simply ask.

Days after the breakup, John and Katie were texting each other again. They were buddies now, and he told her he had a big date with a new girl. If his intent was to make her jealous, he missed the mark and instead hit me. Hard. “He has another girlfriend so soon?” I spat.

“Why not?” Katie shrugged. “She sounds like a nice girl. They seem well suited for each other.”

My love and admiration for Katie grew even more. I closed my eyes tight and I wished that she would never know heartbreak. I knew this was impossible, but in this moment, her life was perfect and I wanted to keep it this way for her.

Katie reminds me of the delicate glass Christmas tree ornament I am always terrified of breaking. It is a clear, paper-thin glass teardrop that catches the light and sparkles on our tree perfectly. Each year when I pack it up, I am always surprised and relieved that it hasn’t fallen.

John will probably always have a special place in Katie’s heart. He most definitely will have one in mine. He was the first boy with the good sense to adore my daughter.

Even in his breakup text, John acted with integrity. He didn’t lash out or get mean. He didn’t play games. He told her the truth and I respect him for the way he handled the relationship from start to finish. He was a sweet kid. I miss him already.

It’s tempting, and a little easy, to focus on the more bizarre edicts that Facebook offers here (“blatant depictions of camel toes” as well as “images of drunk or unconscious people, or sleeping people with things drawn on their faces” must be removed; pictures of marijuana are OK, as long as it’s not being offered for sale). But the absurdity here is really an artifact of having to draw this many lines in this much sand. Any time we play the game of determining what is and is not appropriate for public view, in advance and across an enormous and wide-ranging amount of content, the specifics are always going to sound sillier than the general guidelines. (It was not so long ago that “American Pie’s” filmmakers got their NC-17 rating knocked down to an R after cutting the scene in which the protagonist has sex with a pie from four thrusts to two.)

But the more important story concerns what this document reveals about the kind of content being posted to Facebook, the position in which Facebook and other content platforms find themselves, and the system they’ve put into place for enforcing the content moderation they now promise.

Facebook or no, it’s hard not to be struck by the depravity of some of the stuff that content moderators are reviewing. It’s a bit disingenuous of me to start with the camel toes, when what most of this document deals with is infinitely more reprehensible: child pornography, rape, bestiality, graphic obscenities, animal torture, racial and ethnic hatred, self-mutilation, suicide. There is something deeply unsettling about this document in the way it must, with all the delicacy of a badly written training manual, explain and sometimes show the kinds of things that fall into these categories.

This outpouring of obscenity is by no means caused by Facebook, and it is certainly reasonable for Facebook to take a position on the types of content it believes many of its users will find reprehensible. But that does not let Facebook off the hook for the kind of position it takes: not just where it draws the lines, but the fact that it draws lines at all, the kind of custodial role it takes on for itself, and the manner in which it goes about performing that role. We may not find it difficult to abhor child pornography or ethnic hatred, but we should not let that abhorrence obscure the fact that sites like Facebook are taking on this custodial role — and that while goofy frat pranks and cartoon poop may seem irrelevant, this is still public discourse. Facebook is now in the position of determining, or helping to determine, what is acceptable as public speech — on a site in which 800 million people across the globe talk to each other every day, about all manner of subjects.

This is not a new concern. The most prominent controversy has been about the removal of images of women breast-feeding, which has been a perennial thorn in Facebook’s side; but similar dust-ups have occurred around artistic nudity on Facebook, political caricature on Apple’s iPhone, gay-themed books on Amazon, and fundamentalist Islamic videos on YouTube. The leaked document, while listing all the things that should be removed, is marked with the residue of these past controversies. It clarifies the breast-feeding rule somewhat, by prohibiting “Breastfeeding photos showing other nudity, or nipple clearly exposed.” Any commentary that denies the existence of the Holocaust must be escalated for further review, not surprising after years of criticism. Concerns for cyber-bullying, which have been taken up so vehemently over the last two years, appear repeatedly in the manual. And under the heading “international compliance” are a number of decidedly specific prohibitions, most involving Turkey’s objection to their Kurdish separatist movement, including prohibitions on maps of Kurdistan, images of the Turkish flag being burned, and any support for PKK (The Kurdistan Workers’ Party) or their imprisoned founder Abdullah Ocalan.

Facebook and its removal policies, and other major content platforms and their policies, are the new terrain for long-standing debates about the content and character of public discourse. That images of women breast-feeding have proven a controversial policy for Facebook should not be surprising, since the issue of women breast-feeding in public remains a contested cultural sore spot. That our dilemmas about terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, so heightened over the last decade, should erupt here too is also not surprising. The dilemmas these sites face can be seen as a barometer of our society’s pressing concerns about public discourse more broadly: how much is too much; where are the lines drawn and who has the right to draw them; how do we balance freedom of speech with the values of the community, with the safety of individuals, with the aspirations of art and the wants of commerce.

But a barometer simply measures where there is pressure. When Facebook steps into these controversial issues, decides to authorize itself as custodian of content that some of its users find egregious, establishes both general guidelines and precise instructions for removing that content, and then does so, it is not merely responding to cultural pressures, it is intervening in them, reinforcing the very distinctions it applies. Whether breast-feeding is made more visible or less, whether Holocaust deniers can use this social network to make their case or not, whether sexual fetishes can or cannot be depicted, matters for the acceptability or marginalization of these topics. If, as is the case here, there are “no exceptions for news or awareness-related content” to the rules against graphic imagery and speech, well, that’s a very different decision, with different public ramifications, than if news and public service did enjoy such an exception.

But the most intriguing revelation here may not be the rules, but how the process of moderating content is handled. Sites like Facebook have been relatively circumspect about how they manage this task: They generally do not want to draw attention to the presence of so much obscene content on their sites, or that they regularly engage in “censorship” to deal with it. So the process by which content is assessed and moderated is also opaque. This little document brings into focus a complex chain of people and activities required for Facebook to play custodian.

The moderator using this leaked manual would be looking at content already reported or “flagged” by a Facebook user. The moderator would either “confirm” the report (thereby deleting the content), “unconfirm” it (the content stays) or “escalate” it, which moves it to Facebook for further or heightened review. Facebook has dozens of its own employees playing much the same role; contracting out to oDesk freelancers, and to companies like Caleris and Telecommunications On Demand, serves as merely a first pass. Facebook also acknowledges that it looks proactively at content that has not yet been reported by users (unlike sites like YouTube that claim to wait for their users to flag before they weigh in). Within Facebook, there is not only a layer of employees looking at content much as the oDesk workers do, but also a team charged with discussing truly gray area cases, empowered both to remove content and to revise the rules themselves.

At each level, we might want to ask: What kind of content gets reported, confirmed and escalated? How are the criteria for judging determined? Who is empowered to rethink these criteria? How are general guidelines translated into specific rules, and how well do these rules fit the content being uploaded day in and day out? How do those involved, from the policy setter down to the freelance clickworker, manage the tension between the rules handed to them and their own moral compass? What kind of contextual and background knowledge is necessary to make informed decisions, and how is the context retained or lost as the reported content passes from point to point along the chain? What kind of valuable speech gets caught in this net? What never gets posted at all, that perhaps should?

Keeping our Facebook streets clean is a monumental task, involving multiple teams of people, flipping through countless photos and comments, making quick judgments, based on regularly changing proscriptions translated from vague guidelines, in the face of an ever-changing, global, highly contested, and relentless flood of public expression. And this happens at every site, though implemented in different ways. Content moderation is one of those undertakings that, from one vantage point, we might say it’s amazing that it works at all, and as well as it does. But from another vantage point, we should see that we are playing a dangerous game: the private determination of the appropriate boundaries of public speech. That’s a whole lot of cultural power, in the hands of a select few who have a lot of skin in the game, and it’s being done in an oblique way that makes it difficult for anyone else to inspect or challenge. As users, we certainly cannot allow ourselves to remain naive, believing that the search engine shows all relevant results, the social networking site welcomes all posts, the video platform merely hosts what users generate. Our information landscape is a curated one. What is important, then, is that we understand the ways in which it is curated, by whom and to what ends, and engage in a sober, public conversation about the kind of public discourse we want and need, and how we’re willing to get it.

Twilt (n): the particular brand of guilt or self-reproach that results from posting, liking or commenting on items on Facebook or Twitter while simultaneously not responding to emails, text messages, phone calls or other types of personal communication with the knowledge or anxiety that the specific message senders will notice your public offerings and question your lack of private ones. Twilt, while related, is not the same as the guilt that results from general Internet-specific procrastination such as browsing blogs or online shopping, which, though it may result in its own brand of self-disgust, generally has no public shame component.

Adam Zagajewski, in his essay “The Shabby and Sublime,” says that the poetry of recent years is “marked by a disproportion … between powerful expressions of the inner life and the ceaseless chatter of self-satisfied craftsmen.” The same could be said for Facebook updates, our contemporary confessional. I have eaten the plums in the refrigerator, and they were yummy. Facebook is bad for me because I not only embarrass myself but I keenly feel the embarrassment of others whose lack of discretion, as I perceive it, I quietly judge and am embarrassed by all the same.

When someone starts a conversation with me on Facebook, in public, I’m mortified. There’s a message function for that! I have email and a cellphone. Let me respond when I can, away from the watch of hundreds. Sometimes I disable my Wall so people can’t write things there, until someone points it out and I feel guilty that I’ve done this so I change it back. I don’t like to talk on the phone in public and when a friend speaks too loudly in a cafe I am nervous that someone will overhear our conversation. At home I don’t like the sensation of my husband overhearing me order pizza, let alone having more sensitive conversations with friends. I have never been one to kiss and tell, and I like to keep my private life private. Why I have a Facebook account at all still perplexes me. I like the idea of seeing what’s going on, but I don’t want to always be a part of it. I don’t want to not be a part of it either. I want to swoop in and swoop out. But Facebook doesn’t allow for inconsistency without amplifying it, a constant record of our obsessions and our contradictions to the point of caricature.

The conversations between couples embarrass me the most, whether they’re sentimental or self-referential. It’s not that you live with that person and somehow don’t need electronic communication — I often text my husband across the table at a bar to make a snarky comment, or sometimes I send ridiculous things to the online printer in his office just to be impish. But it’s done in private, between us. That’s the point. It’s something about the relationship having a public facade so contrived and self-aware that makes my eyes water with shame. We all have facades and personas, of course, that are not Internet confined. Game faces. Once, at a reading, a poet thanked his wife so gushingly that I whispered to my friend, “That guy is totally having an affair.” I didn’t know a thing about him. But it turns out, I was right. Maybe the wife requested the shout-out, but if I were his wife I would have smiled at the crowd and taken flight. Up, up and away.

Do you remember “This American Life’s” 2001 episode about Superpowers, which poses the question: If you could have a superpower, would you choose Flight or Invisibility? My first reaction was and remains, flight. To fly! I’m petite and have spent a lifetime trying to fight invisibility, being intellectually overlooked, or feeling insignificant (this is not simply a result of my size but an entire slew of issues that would benefit from Lacanian psychoanalysis, which if I had I’d have to talk about in my status updates). I still have dreams where I’m flying, frequent dreams, and when I wake up I feel inexplicably happy. When I fly in my dreams, I don’t sputter or start or anxiously hover. I soar, I glide, and it’s fluid, like a manta ray moving through water. When I fly in my dreams I am all grace. My desire for flight would get me places faster, and in style.

But maybe my desire for flight is a sort of conditional invisibility; the idea of flight not only as the act of flying but the act of fleeing. I want to be part of the scene but to float somehow above it, to engage in the action but then be able to gracefully exit. I want to swoop on in and then glide away. But I want to be seen, for sure, and present. I just don’t want to have to stay, and I certainly don’t want anyone to comment on it.

It is also, of course, part of being a writer, to be part of a scene but also removed. Writing is about observation, but if I observe and immediately state then I’ve lost it, released it. The essay allows an expression of doubt but the Facebook update or conversation has a sort of self-satisfied glibness to it. It doesn’t invite dialogue but somehow challenges it. There is also the lack of control. It could go anywhere. Someone could say something too revealing or racist or just plain idiotic, and there it is, linked to your name. It is not a place for the anxious, Facebook.

And there is the difference of stance. An essay is an attempt at dialogue but a status update is a solicitation; the first is a meaningful hesitation or an assertive pronouncement, a languorous dip in a warm sea or a fast-paced race in a pool. But the essay swims all the same. A Facebook update is a haphazard nose dive into a near-empty watering hole. What if I break my neck? Will someone find me if my head is bleeding? If I post and no one comments, do I exist?

The comparison between the two forms needn’t be made; we know the difference, yet it might explain my relative comfort, even ease, with the personal essay and my fear of any public sort of dialogue. Do I want to be invisible or do I want to fly? Although the personal is intimate there is also the artifice of distance. When I fly in my dreams I can see myself flying while being aware of my place on the ground. Philip Lopate argues that a good essayist must see oneself from the ceiling, must turn oneself into a character. He is not advocating a “self-absorbed navel-gazing” but instead “a release from narcissism,” an ability to be able to “see yourself in the round.”

I admit I am often self-amused by my status updates (what else are they for?), but I am rarely satisfied with them. In the rare case I am amused with myself when writing anything, that to me is a sure sign that it’s going to need a very careful edit, or that it’s garbage.

What I love best about that episode of “This American Life” is the moving analysis at the end, immediately after several of the show’s guests comment on what it means to want invisibility or flight. John Hodgman reflects:

Flight and invisibility touch a nerve. Actually, they touch two different nerves, speak to very different primal desires and unconscious fears … In the end, it’s not a question of what kind of person flies and what kind of person fades. We all do both. … At the heart of this decision, the question I really don’t want to face, is this. Who do you want to be, the person you hope to be, or the person you fear you actually are?

Am I becoming someone on Facebook or am I trying to escape her? I’m happy my partner is not on Facebook because I am spared that public embarrassment, of people wishing us happy anniversary or the pressure to comment, or not comment, on his witticisms or offerings: J. just made fabulous butternut squash ravioli! From scratch! Natalie likes this. And then he would like my liking, and another friend would find it cute, and like it too, and no one would know that we spent the last hour fighting because I overloaded the dryer and almost burned down the house.

I wouldn’t mind if he joined Facebook, though, because he is the face man of our relationship and it would take some of the completely imagined but hugely felt pressure off me. (“Could you please like so-and-so’s photos of her daughter’s dance recital?”) If we had a band, he’d be the lead singer and I’d be the bassist, hiding behind my hair. (No, not the drummer! No one sees the drummer!) The bassist can look up and make eye contact with the crowd for a moment and the crowd will go wild. They don’t expect it but they hope for it all the same. The face man: He has to be on all the time. It’s his job to be on.

Do you remember the scene in “Sex in the City” where Carrie, upon receiving an email, ducks underneath her desk and shrieks, Oh my god, can he see me? A decade later it seems charming, like a text message from our grandmother. Yet the anxiety remains. Now, I suffer from what is surely a new psychological disorder: a DSM-IV classifiable paranoia that all my personal conversations are somehow being broadcast on Twitter. Is there a word for that?

But the sign is also turned away from East Palo Alto, a neighboring low-income community of color adjacent to Menlo Park. That city will be the gateway to Facebook for many commuters and may be the future home of some of the 9,000-plus employees who are expected to work at the new location. And while the rest of the Valley celebrates the expansion of the new company that is redefining how the world communicates and uses technology, East Palo Alto residents say they see more of the same: another powerful Silicon Valley corporation that will benefit at the expense, and perhaps displacement, of their city.

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“No doubt they are doing the same ‘giving back’ as other Silicon Valley companies, and they get points for that. But maybe some of that is good P.R.,” says Carlos Romero, East Palo Alto City Council member, and current San Mateo County supervisor candidate.

“They have their bottom line to protect, and if they can move into an area and not pay to mitigate costs they create, they are going to do that,” he said.

The East Palo Alto costs Romero is referring to are the transportation and housing impacts that will occur with the influx of thousands of new Facebook employees to their region.

As obligated by the California Environmental Quality Act, Facebook conducted a draft Environmental Impact Report of its expansion for Menlo Park, the city of its residence. Despite the proximity and overlap of entering roads, the report did not address the environmental or potential housing displacement issues with East Palo Alto.

The East Palo Alto Community Development Department registered its dismay in a letter: “We are disappointed that the draft EIR does not adequately consider the potential impacts to the City of East Palo Alto, or consider potential mitigation measures to address those impacts.”

Through the EIR process, at the end of January, the City of East Palo submitted a collection of comments, from city officials, residents and civic organizations, expressing their concerns.

Facebook has three months to respond to each listed claim.

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Yet even outside of the formal EIR process, a disagreement over the impact has developed along lines of housing displacement in East Palo Alto. In response to a letter from the City of East Palo Alto regarding the concern that thousands of new Facebook employees with higher incomes could drive out current local residents with less economic power, the company’s consulting firm, Keyser Marston Associates, is equivocal.

They write, “Impacts will be minimal if a very limited number of workers seek housing in East Palo Alto; conversely, if East Palo Alto is viewed as an attractive option by a large share of Facebook’s workforce, impacts would be greater.”

The response brief then goes on to say that Facebook employees are “unique” in that they are “younger, more affluent, more mobile, and newer to the Bay Area.” Consequently, the hipper Facebook employee would “be more interested in living in San Francisco to be joined in the ‘youth scene’ in the city.”

Romero contends the rationale defies logic, saying that even a fraction of Facebook employees living in East Palo Alto will impact its housing costs.

“Just a low estimate, say, 450 people, entering the housing market, that is going to have an impact,” he says.

East Palo Alto’s relatively small population attributes to the sensitive market. On last census count, East Palo Alto was roughly 30,000 residents, so the number of Facebook employees, estimated at 9,600 at full capacity, would represent a third of the city.

But even having a majority of Facebook residents living outside of the area can also be a problem, with an increased number of people using East Palo Alto as a thoroughfare to the new campus.

Anna Turner, a 27-year-old program director for Youth United for Community Action, an environmental justice organization, is a lifelong resident of East Palo Alto. She says the city’s neighborhoods are already overrun with Silicon Valley workers trying to avoid the larger streets such as University Avenue that connect Silicon Valley with the Dumbarton Bridge heading toward the East Bay. “University, which connects 101 to 84, has over 30,000 drivers during peak hours. It gets so packed drivers will take side streets, ignoring traffic signs, making life hard for residents.”

Her organization, along with others, has partnered with the city to form a sort of united front to ensure Facebook hears their concerns.

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Though young, Turner is a veteran of East Palo Alto’s organizing history, well versed in EIRs, land-use issues and, more recently, housing and tenants rights. She says the Facebook move-in is yet another piece of a development pattern that is built for Silicon Valley, but with no considerations to the well-being of East Palo Alto.

She points to buildings such as Ikea, the high-end furniture store that prompted new traffic management strategies to accommodate shoppers; the posh Four Seasons Hotel, which required the paving over of the nerve center of East Palo Alto, known as Whiskey Gulch; and Romic, a toxic waste recycling business that was finally removed from the city after residents contended the company polluted the air for decades.

Most recently, Turner and her organization have been battling the monopolization of sales of apartments, as housing concerns skyrocketed with the foreclosure crisis. Her concern is that newer real estate companies such as Equity Residential, which just took over a major apartment complex of 1,800 units – making it the largest landlord in East Palo Alto — may mow down the rent-controlled apartments to make way for a more affluent Facebook crowd.

Romero finds Turner’s perception that the East Palo Alto she grew up in is being developed away a common one – one only emboldened by the Facebook expansion. “The fear by many community members is that local residents will be left out of the economic environment that is improving, meaning displacement,” he says.

Of the concerns from East Palo Alto officials and residents, Facebook spokesman Tucker Bounds says, “We are hopeful that East Palo Alto sees the enormous benefits of our move. We are having an open dialogue to see how we can work together.”

When asked if the Facebook move has impacted her usage of the social media site, Turner, a youthful, connected, tech-savvy woman in her own right, says yes. “I ‘deactivated’ my personal page and don’t even check my business page.

“I mean, so many people use that site worldwide, and it’s amazing that here is the place where Facebook actually lives.”

Romero says he doesn’t use Facebook, though many people “he respects a lot” want him to utilize the device for his supervisorial campaign.