Warning: Facebook may be tricking you into posting things you don’t mean to
Oh, Facebook, we have such a love/hate relationship with you. Though more and more people, teens especially, don’t think of Facebook as a “cool” social network, it’s still a big part of most peoples’ lives, and serves both our best and worst impulses. On the one hand, how else are we going to keep up with news from a complete variety of sources, the lives of everyone who knew in grade school, or long-running friendship interactions? On the other hand, could the company maybe not manipulate your user interactions?
The Daily Dot tech reporter Taylor Hatmaker noticed something strange on Facebook: When she went to comment on an article, she automatically hit “Enter,” but later found that Facebook had automatically switched her from the commenting command to the sharing command, leading to her unintentionally sharing an article on her personal page.
To help visualize what exactly is happening, Hatmaker created a .GIF of the switch in action:
Facebook, that’s some sneaky stuff.
While the feature hasn’t rolled out across the board (Facebook often releases new updates to small groups of users first), the intention is definitely to up user engagement with media content. Instead of commenting, which keeps the user interaction just on the specific post, promoting sharing naturally expands the audience for the content, and would encourage discussion — whether or not you wanted any of that or not.
If you’re one of those unlucky few in the trial phase of this feature, make sure you double check what tab you’re on before you press “enter” after writing what you think is a comment. And of course, if you needed another reason to get off Facebook, we think you’ve found one.
