I must say, Facebook does a rather good job providing privacy customization for it’s users. Not only can you block other people, you can enter stealth mode and keep users as your friends but block them from your status updates, or edit the amount of information they can access on you (those people cursed with obligatory Facebook friends: the once you’d love to delete but who would cause a notable amount of real life grief for you if you deleted them from your friends list, undoubtedly consider this a godsend). You can delete annoying wall posts from said obligatory people who just doesn’t know how to take a hint, remove the clutter of game updates (Farmvile bonuses run out after a certain amount of time) or un-tag horrible pictures of yourself tagged by well meaning friends. My favorite is the “Hide” feature which allows me to politely remain Facebook friends with people about whom I have no complaints other than that their lives (and by extension their status updates) are boring. But there is one thing Facebook does not yet protect us from, and no, I’m not talking about those totally creepy “Make a Fake Baby” adds where desperate women splice pictures of themselves and the jock they fell for 20 years ago in high school (obligatory friend on said jock’s part) to make an infant that will never exist. Though, wow, I should write a whole blog on that, because let’s face it, that’s fucked.
Nope, I’m talking about fan pages….now “Like” pages, for whatever reason the titles of said pages were changed.
I’m subjected to a daily barrage of commentary from serial clickers who “Like” everything with a Facebook page, who think that every single link that that band, or television show or author posts to Facebook would somehow be incomplete without the grammatically incorrect, punctuation and capitalization deprived pseudo sentences they so generously provide us. The comments are usually entirely irrelevant ranging from “I love _____” to the even more aggravating “first” these people feel the need to share with however many thousand others are also fans of said page. Let’s face it, if I cared what you thought I’d friend you and read your updates. So, Facebook, could I have a button that hides all “likes” and comments from my news feed and publishes only the links? Of course, it would behoove all of us to be able to undo this setting change, on the off chance that our fellow fans acquire some relevance.
