How can we conceive of access to a social media website account as a type of property right?

Social media websites such as Facebook are both large private companies, as well as important social institutions. Through this medium is a careful performance of self on what is essentially a corporation's property. This type of contractual community raises many issues regarding who owns what, and how personal information can be used. Online communities such as Facebook, as they become more popular and used more frequently raise a number of issues for property theorists as they demonstrate a performance of identity dependent upon another's property. To raise the issue more technically, the technology means that a large portion of an individual's life can occur on a private server, miles from their home, owned by a corporation that the individual is contractually linked to by a standard form contract, that they probably have not read. This is an interesting case of an individual requiring access to private property in order to conduct their affairs. It is also an important issue, regardless of it seeming frivolous as data shows, people simply exist on social media, spend their time expressing themselves and communicating through it enough that there is clearly the potential for abuse. In papers such as Jane B. Baron's Property as Control1 use the example of health records in a similar fashion. Others look at issues relating to integrity of identity online.2 Can ownership of online identity be considered a property right? It contains many aspects that would appear to correspond to property law including exclusive right to access, use and occupy, the right to alienation (although this is surprisingly difficult), theoretically the right to sell (hard to gauge the legalities surrounding the sale of an online identity), grant access rights etc.. There are a number of questions related to this area including what is the relationship between real property and intellectual property in this scenario. While a person's words on a social networking site can be regarded as intellectual property, once there is a sheer bulk of information, photos, conversations etc. arranged and catalogued in a complex manner it becomes clear that this is not merely a person's replicable ideas, but rather it is a substantial chunk of what they consider to be their memory, their history, their identity that they are able to use economically and even politically as evidence of their existence and the way in which it has unfolded. This type of organised catalogue of a person's self presentation, no matter how inconsequential it may seem is only growing in its importance and thus, many property theories only partially account for this form of property. If we look at it through the lens of property as control, we see that the property rights surrounding online identity are an exceedingly complex issue with regards to an individual's rights against a corporation's rights in controlling their intellectual property, the character of their social relations and their personal information to an ever-growing extent.

1 Jane B. Baron, Property as Control: The Case of Information, (2012) 18 (Mich. Telecomm. Tech. L.) Rev. 367 2 Wesley Burrell, I Am He as You Are He as You Are Me: Being Able to Be Yourself, Protecting the Integrity of Identity Online (2011). 44 Loy. L.A. L.Rev. 705.