You know what facebook is, right? You also have a profile on there? Check it regularly? Well, you’re no different than millions of other facebook-addicts. Living in a world where in order to be influential you need to be popular and have “the right connections”, social networking sites spring up like mushrooms.
I have always been somewhat reluctant to join these sites and indirectly support the widespread mentality of “I’d better keep in touch with him… I might need his help one day”, where an individual becomes a means to an end.
And I’ve always been concerned about sacrificing my privacy… even with very elaborate privacy settings, personal information will come through that will give people a chance to gossip and God knows what else. Sure, your friends list will start off including a selected group of best friends who know all about you anyway. But after a while your random acquaintances will outnumber by far your more or less “intimate” friends and the troubles with restricted profiles start.
I’m certainly thankful for Facebook, being an avid user myself, and it definitely makes it a lot easier to satisfy our curiosity about the well-being of people we haven’t talked to in a while. Yes, I suppose we all feel a little inhibited when it comes to picking up the phone and calling someone we’re not very close to (anymore?).
So let’s all join together and thank Zuckerberg for his brilliant idea!
BUT… there’s another side to the story… facebook’s other face.
So I was doing some research for my social media class and I came across several reports and blogs of people being banned from facebook for violating their terms of use.
They were not aware of doing it (sure, we all should read those every time, but who really does?), in some cases got no warning and got banned for good even after contacting customer service in order to clear things up.
So, what are the things that you should NOT do on facebook?
- Do not have TOO many contacts! But what’s too many? This seemed to be the primary reason for a ban, now the limit is 5000 contacts. I’d say that’s plenty!
- Use your real name! People have been banned from Facebook for using fake names or using initials instead of their full name.
- Don’t make up your date of birth. Just like the issue with the name, they will find out somehow.
- Don’t publish breastfeeding images. Seriously. They don’t like that.
- And most of all, don’t do anything that could make you look like a spammer: don’t join too many groups, don’t post too many messages, don’t poke too many people (yep, you heard me right), don’t copy paste messages to friends because you’re too lazy to personalize them.
Here’s a good overview of do’s and don’ts (well, it’s mainly don’ts) regarding Facebook.
The only question I still have is: how the heck do they find out?? My real name, my date of birth, whether I really graduated from that college? Well, Facebook certainly has its shrewd ways.
