Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2012, as an opinion piece. The figure that only 19% of a page’s followers see each post, Facebook’s promoted-post pricing and its privacy policies at the time have all changed many times since.
Facebook is starting down what is probably the wrong road. It is getting more and more complaints from users about its constant changes to privacy policies, and new problems are piling up on top of that. On one hand, there are fake “likes”. You’ve probably noticed posts showing up on your wall from pages you don’t follow and don’t even like.
Sometimes you get these posts because a friend of yours has “liked” them, and more and more often that friend doesn’t know they clicked “like” at all. Today on Eldiario.es, journalist Leila Nachawati wrote that a friend of hers had subscribed to an insurance sales page. Nothing odd about that, except that her friend has been in prison for some time and, obviously, isn’t allowed on Facebook. Stranger still, people who have died are “liking” some posts.
In other words, fake “likes” are starting to be disliked, especially when you consider that tomorrow you could find out you’re a follower of the PSOE’s page when you support the PP, or vice versa (Spain’s two main parties, the Socialists and the conservative People’s Party). There’s another issue I personally don’t like:
Our Facebook page has 4,475 “fans” as I write these lines. It’s nothing to write home about, but every single one of them clicked “like” voluntarily, because we’ve never used methods or tricks to inflate the clicks. So I assume these 4,475 people are, in some way, interested in what we publish.
Facebook has decided that when I share an article on Facebook, only 19% of our followers will receive it. If we want to reach more people (the rest of our followers), we’ll have to pay for it. What’s more, Facebook also offers paid rates to reach people who are neither fans of our page nor likely to be interested in what we publish.
In short, we can’t reach our own followers, but for a modest fee we could bombard the walls of your friends and your friends’ friends.
I understand that Facebook needs to increase its revenue and make its advertising more effective. But if Facebook users are already losing control over what they do and don’t want to see on their walls, that’s a bad sign. Add to that users being subscribed to pages without their consent, and it’s even worse.
“What was once a social network for sharing tastes and hobbies and following your interests is slowly turning into a commercial network for receiving ads and being chased by other people’s interests.”
Featured image: John Robert McPherson, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
