Why few bother to insult businesses on the social network.

Facebook is no place for Ralph Nader. Or Naomi Klein. Or a freegan. As TBM has shown with its Facebook 50 coverage, the social network is steeped in consumer culture. Fan pages have sprouted up to hawk corporate wares and seed the site’s newsfeeds with product placements. It is no sanctuary for those who sculpt their profiles around an anti-consumerism ideology.

This, in and of itself, is no surprise. The deflowering of new technologies has become one of the Web’s most predictable rituals. If something is cool, it will attract an audience. And if something has an audience, it will attract corporate America. Facebook, with more than 300 million users, now splits time between bored high-school students and the marketers who so crave their attention.

Far more interesting than the presence of these companies is how embraced by users they are. The fan numbers are often in the millions, with one study saying 40 percent of tech-savvy users have subscribed to a brand’s fan page at some point in their Facebook/MySpace career. But the pages don’t just generate fans, they generate discussion. The general tone of the wall posts and comments on all of the Facebook 50 sites is overwhelmingly positive. As TBM spent time with the more than 100 companies that were candidates for Facebook 50 over the last few months, we noticed almost all the sites were littered with compliments. Surprisingly, in a medium dominated by insults, ad hominem attacks, and flame wars, Facebook users are—for the most part—sparing corporate America. Each fan page has an ecosystem of devotees who reinforce one another’s positivity. Facebook has become an impromptu salon for anti-anti-consumerism.

But before we go further in interpreting the phenomenon, we need to familiarize ourselves with the players. A rough taxonomy:

The Lover

By far the largest demographic, the lovers have an earnest goal: to share their appreciation for the company’s products. The gratitude is unadulterated; no message is too simple or nonsensical. For example: Fahad Ahammed drops by just to type Coke’s name out loud. “Coca cola!” he exclaims.