Facebook is automatically publishing posts under your name and placing them at the top of the News feed for your friends. In some cases, these posts can include controversial political content that you would never voluntarily post.
If at some point you ‘liked’ any kind of political page in your Facebook life then according to ZDNet the page could be posting on your behalf. By this point it should come as no surprise that Facebook doesn’t see this as a problem… it’s a feature. Ed Bott, explained the latest Facebook feature:
If you actively share a link, a post, or a photo, you expect that shared item to go out to your friends immediately. In this case, however, the posts are going out under your name because at some point in the past (in some cases in the distant past), you visited a page and clicked like.
Yes, you voluntarily liked that page and made it part of your Facebook profile. If a Facebook friend wants to go through your list of likes, they can learn that you like the NRA, or PETA, or a seemingly innocuous group that you probably didn’t realize was funded by Karl Rove’s political action committee.
But I doubt that you expected that simple click to result in a flood of posts under your name months later.
One associate whose name was attached to a rabidly right-wing political post said she disagreed vehemently with the sentiment it
Here are two examples of political posts that have appeared on Timeline without user consent:
Again, this isn’t a bug. Facebook calls this a new feature that is intended to help people find pages that their friends like. A Facebook spokesperson told Bott about this:
To help people find new pages, events, and other interesting information, people may now see posts from a page a friend likes. These posts will include the social context from your friends who like the page and will respect all existing settings.
Sure Facebook… whatever. The worst part is that if your the friend that’s getting these messages there is no way to stopping them from popping up in your news feed. While you can hide individual stories as they appear, you can’t block the page from posting again, and again, and again. And even if you remove the friend completely from your news feed, the forcibly shared posts appear. The only way to stop it is to unfriend the person whose Facebook identity is being misused. All if this is popping up right after their recent email fiasco. Grrr… Facebook… grrrr….
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