What is it with Facebook? Or, as my sister calls it, Facef**k! As a social media network Facebook is no longer social. Once again I am not seeing posts from family and friends in my newsfeed even when I’ve interacted with them previously by liking, sharing, commenting, tagging and pinning. But no, And a few months ago it combined the old separate lists for Close Friends, Acquaintances, Groups and Pages into one homogenous list called Favourites in which you can only have up to 30 favourites. Well that takes care of close family then! The rest of the folks I had on my previous lists are now scattered amongst the rest of the dross churned out by the Facebook clickbait algorithm which keeps insisting on filling my newsfeed with posts I don’t want to see from people I don’t know and companies trying to sell me stuff I’m not the slightest bit interested in. Not to mention the pointless memes and cute animal videos, fake news and “Calls To Action”. It now takes me no longer than five minutes to scroll down the cyber billboard that makes up my newsfeed attempting to skip past all the junk, to find nothing of interest. And at the side of my newsfeed I have to put up with “Trending” articles about uninteresting celebrities, from minor royalty to Z list actors. Oh, I forgot, aren’t they one and the same these days?
Now, I have a blog; as you know since you are reading this; and once upon a time I was able to link my blog to my Facebook account so that every time I published a post a link to the blog was automatically posted to my timeline. Then Facebook decided bloggers couldn’t do this anymore unless we created a Facebook Page so I dutifully created a facebook page. So now the links to my blogs were being posted to this new page as I published them, but here’s the thing, you can’t link your timeline/newsfeed to your page which means most of my family and friends don’t realise it even exists. What Facebook does do is keep bombarding me with ways to “boost” the page post for a fee. Now this is all well and good if my page is for a business and I want to get my wares noticed but my page is for a personal blog which I only want to share with my family and friends. I did try a workaround involving the creation of a cover photo which, when clicked on, leads to a hidden post where I could put a clickable link to my page or blog-site. This didn’t make much difference since no one realised there was a link and before long it stopped working anyway. I now get round this ridiculous situation by sharing the link directly from the published post. The next irritation came with the transition of Facebook into Meta. As if a change of name is going to make it any better. Suddenly I can’t find my page. It has been incorporated into something called Business Suite and I can’t see my page timeline but I can see pages of stats, planners and links to boost the post so the page is heading for the bin.
Since having to learn about GDPR for my job and for my blog I have also become more mindful of all the security issues arising out of Facebook being able to track your every move, in both the digital and the physical world; which explains all the aforementioned rubbish littering my timeline. I got rid of the Facebook App many years ago since it was depleting my phone battery by tracking my location, if it could do that, I surmised, what else could it track? I became more aware of what information they could gather without my knowledge and I have now switched to a search engine which deletes all cookies automatically and, for extra measure, I always sign out of Facebook on all devices and clear my history and cookies after each session. I do have to fully sign in every time but I’d rather do that than have Facebook do a better job than Track And Trace did through the pandemic. What with its increasingly messy interface, outright monetising and stupid algorithms it is fast becoming un-user friendly, irrelevant and no longer useful in my world. Now, apart from the odd post or link to my blog, my Facebook presence is going to be minimal and I will spend as little time as possible on Facebook. On the up side this means I will have extra time to spend with my kids and grandkids pursuing more interesting activities. Unfortunately; since Facebook/Meta have scooped up nearly all the messaging services in their tightly woven net; there is not a lot of choice out there for keeping in touch and sharing our exploits with family and friends so I will have to stick with it until something better comes along. A development my sister will probably revel in since she’s never liked Facebook anyway.