Things You Should Definitely Do On Facebook

In some parallel universe, all of the following are considered socially acceptable.

Comment and Wall Confusion

You know when someone posts a status update? Why not use this as a convenient time to recognise they actually exist by posting some irrelevant and mundane comment? Bonus points if you interrupt a comment chain during a conversation. Forget writing on their wall, where that stuff should actually go, that’s too many clicks away, and there’s a data limit to deal with!

“Checking In”

Why not update all your friends on your exact location and current activities by “checking in” on Facebook? Everybody gives a shit about what you’re getting up to, all the time. They’re just sitting there (at home, obviously. Probably crying and simultaneously masturbating because they’re not as popular as you) and just waiting to comment on your every move.

Even better, if you’re one of those people who has everything public, applications using the Facebook Graph API can see where you are too!

Spam Posts

Posting spam to your wall accidentally, say, if some rogue app got installed, is for losers. You should be publishing everything that every application you use wants you to publish. That’s just how we roll, we like to know what fun things you’re doing while we sit and eat and stalk people’s profiles. We’re all waiting for the call to arms to visit your fucking farm. Don’t bother creating friend lists so that your application wall posts are only seen by people who are genuinely interested, that’s just a waste of time. Imagine how many flowers you could have planted in that time!

Abusing Your Friend’s Trust

There is nothing funnier than somebody logging into your profile and saying you love anal sex. Decades of the LGBT community desperately trying to become less and less prejudiced against is just forgotten with that clearly well-written piece of wit. Every time it cracks me up, honestly.

Regardless of the cause, I love it when you create a group and invite me into it. I’ve pretty much given my permission anyway, what with their being no way to turn this off by default. It fills me with joy when I hear my phone chime every 2 minutes with every successive wall post on the group. All those people who become suddenly hostile to your cause to raise money for a charity are just freaks of nature, right? Weirdos.

Remember how I said I love it when people check in to places? It’s even better when you tag your friends too. Especially when they’re going to be away from the Internet for a while so they can’t remove the tag and we can all have a good lol about it. It’s just funny when they change their relationship status to single because you checked them into their girlfriend’s sister’s bed.

Seriously

Some of these annoyances, such as people starting a wall conversation on a status update and application wall posts, are a mixture of idiocy and poor usability design. Checking in to locations and updating status/profile picture/photo albums every five minutes is nothing more than a desperate plea for attention.

People create groups for genuine reasons, such as raising money for charity. The constant spam in those groups, coupled with Facebook’s “everything on by default” standard settings makes people instantly hostile to your cause (the lack of ability to disallow people inviting you to a group is disgraceful, by the way). Again, the frustration here is a mixture of bad UI design, idiocy and ignorance/oversight.

The worst abuse of trust is when people decide to take your information into their hands. Again, Facebook’s standard settings allow your friends to check you into locations, and allow their applications access to some of your personal information. That can be misjudged as you acknowledging the share. Facebook rape is so common that it takes something truly creative for anybody to find it funny anymore *, and I’m really surprised more people haven’t added the check-in scenario I posted above to their utility belts.

Privacy Is Key

Tom Scott showed us what is possible using publicly-available personal information from Facebook, and I’m sure that’s on the moderate side of what the Graph API can open. The main principle to abide by is if it’s public, Google can see it. Try googling your phone number, or even your name (if it’s sufficiently uncommon). Employers can look at that, they can see your drunk photographs, and it will affect your employment prospects. Have a look through your privacy settings and keep information private where necessary – and try to make looking through those settings a monthly/bi-monthly habit. Here’s some ones you should probably turn off.

In terms of reducing the amount of nonsense you see on your wall, I highly recommend the Fluff Busting Purity extension, which is available for Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari. It sits quietly in the background and filters out annoyances. It is fully user-customisable so you can moderate exactly how the tool works, and even remove some ads. WIN.

* I in no way condone Facebook rape (and I also believe the use of ‘rape’ does no good into affecting how we as a culture perceive the severity of actual rape) and in fact might be a crime under the Computer Misuse Act 1990; but the most ingenious one I’ve seen is to change somebody’s birthday to two day’s time. As this e-card perfectly sums up, people don’t bother fact-checking or questioning what they see:

Not Giving Them Money

New Statesman blogger Steven Baxter, or as he’s also known, Anton Vowl, recently published a post called “Don’t Click on the Daily Mail!”. The crux of the argument is that the Daily Mail (and they are by no means alone in this) encourage millions of webpage views using a utility-belt of tactics, and we should avoid them at all cost. Some of these tactics are:

• Flamebaitery – Offensive columnists such as Richard Littlejohn, Melanie Phillips and Jan Moir attack homosexuals for being in public, dead and homosexual. Outrage drives page views.
  
• Lots of pictures – Oh my this is offensive! Let’s post lots of pictures to show you how offensive this is from every angle! Oh yeah, the offensive thing might be underage, too. Or it might be an upskirt shot that was kicking about on our image database.
  
• Celebrity Drivel – Whether they dye their hair, or you have an image of a thin woman who you want to call fat – all of it builds up into traffic-heavy non-stories.
  
• Insult Muslims – Unfortunately, these stories are far too common, far too contrived and far too easily believed by bigots. Idiots shout the loudest, and it all contributes to their traffic.
  
• Insult Facebook – At least 10% of the Mail’s traffic comes from Facebook. It is a massive revenue stream, but it’s something their older readership won’t necessarily use or understand, so it makes perfect sense to say it gives you cancer (like a lot of things, apparently). That’s one way to get a news article to virally spread across a social network!

I hate to say it, but they know what they’re doing and it’s paying for them big-style. But can we fight back? I’d like to summarise some of the tools out there that you can employ to starve their revenue streams, have a laugh at them, and avoid them altogether.

Journalism Warning Labels

Tom Scott created a set of warning labels that can be printed and stuck onto newspapers. The Newscrud tool lets you add these to websites! You can even attach a rebuking blog post or information source, which is awesome. This then gives you a newscrud link which you can send to peers, rather than the plain old Daily Mail link. However, I think this still links to the Daily Mail within an iframe, but there’s a way around that too.

Istyotsy

Istyotsy lets you view the Daily Mail, Daily Express etc by proxy. Istyotsy stores a copy (a cache) of their articles on their own servers, and provide an istyotsy web link you can use. When this link is accessed, the cached version of the article is displayed, rather than going off to the original source every time. This reduces the number of page views to one! Huzzah!

When an istyotsy link is combined with newscrud link (give the istyotsy link to newscrud; the other way around won’t work) – you attack the weak point for massive damage.

Furthermore, Istyotsy strips adverts, doesn’t perform tracking, doesn’t index to search engines like Google and Bing; so cuts off as many page view streams as possible.

AdBlock and Tracking Cookies

The AdBlock extension for Firefox and Chrome is amazing. It pre-filters web pages to reduce the amount of adverts you see online. The built-in filters work well and are regularly updated. You can create custom filters, and even make exceptions. It’s worth getting for general internet browsing.

Advert revenue can be generated in several ways:

• Revenue is paid on a per-click basis.
  
• Revenue is paid per page view.
  
• Both of the above.

AdBlock reliably denies click revenue, but won’t stop page revenue unless the adverts perform some clever trickery to check if they’re not being displayed; which is why I’ve previously suggested istyotsy .

Next up are tracking cookies. Cookies are essentially text files which store information that websites can use. Cookies are the basis of how your shopping basket is stored, or how you can automatically login to websites. They’re not evil, but can be exploited to perform tracking of your web browsing sessions. Tracking isn’t always malicious either, a website may want to track which products you’re viewing to suggest recommendations. Tracking cookies can also go and look across web sites, or even across multiple uses of your web browser. Some search engines do this to improve their search listings.

Your web browser’s options has cookie-related preferences so you can tweak how cookies are handled. If you have the option to clear all data when you close your web browser, do it. You can turn off cookies altogether, but it becomes annoying as you then have to log in to every website manually. It’s a trade-off that can take a bit of tweaking to get right, or you can get extensions to help you .

Google has released advertising opt-out cookie extensions (here and here), and the Disconnect extension for Chrome automatically blocks the big players. This can go a long way to stop websites gaining information from you which can be used to their advantage.

When In Doubt, Laugh

Comedian Chris Coltrane launched the Polljack twitter account, which suggested to its legion of followers various Daily Mail polls to hijack, for the sheer fun of it. This often produced hillarious consequences; but be warned, the Polljack account was retired after Chris realised this was driving ad revenue to them.

Abstinence

For times when someone gives you a plain old Daily Mail link, you have the choice to click or not click. I always advise not clicking, but what if you do? Don’t worry, I have your back.

Chrome users can get the Istyotsy Chrome extension, which automatically displays the article through their proxy. Handy.

Firefox users can get the Tea and Kittens extension, which automatically redirects you to teaandkittens.co.uk if you try and visit the Daily Mail or Daily Express. I hope more newspapers are added soon!

Conclusion

If you’ve made it this far, I hereby declare you King / Queen / Non-Gender-Aligned Monarch of the Internet. You can avoid giving as much money to unregulated, racist, homophobic, ableist, sexist, ill-informed, manipulative scumbags as much as possible, like a boss.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this (rather long) post as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it – even with the immense chest pains I’m having right now. I better see to that.