Who is lurking facebook

If at least three of the seven statements below match your Facebooking behavior, then your right to secretly view everyone's information could be revoked. That's not a true statement, but those rights should be revoked as far as I'm concerned. Although you never upload pictures, you're quick to check for new shots of your ex.

You also subconsciously or purposely check for anyone who has gained weight, or lost all their hair since high school or college. You think, "obnoxious braggart" about anyone who uploads pictures from an obviously expensive vacation, but you look at those pictures anyway.

Sometimes you look twice. You find status updates extremely annoying. A part of you even hates people who write them. Nevertheless, you scroll through your "friends" updates when you're standing in line. Or when you're bored at work. Or when your kids are busy and by busy, I mean asking you to play Candyland for the eighth time in two hours. For a complete guide to this technique, see our tutorial on how to see who viewed your Facebook Story. Facebook notifies you whenever someone likes or comments on one of your posts.

If a somewhat clueless stalker is trying to ingratiate themselves to you, they might be going through and liking and commenting on old material.

This shows you that they are going methodically through your feed — a definite stalker red flag. If another user keeps popping up in groups that you belong to, this is a definite sign of a lurker. What are the odds that someone likes the same ethnic cuisine group, the same dirty joke group, the same local parenting club, and the same dog breed fan group? Facebook helpfully shows you people who are in other groups with you when you look at their name in the list.

This will bring up the members list for the group and Facebook will put the people with whom you have connections either friends, or joint group memberships right up at the top to make it easy to check. Some people get friend requests by the dozens every day, while others only get a new request when they meet someone new in real life.

Instead, message the person back and politely question their bona fides. Hey do you remember what my nickname was in your class? The best defense is a good offense, and the most straightforward way to defend yourself against stalkers is to know who everyone on your Friends list is. Many Facebook users take a much different approach; they have hundreds or thousands of Facebook friends, and pretty much any friend request from a vaguely familiar name is an automatic accept.

This section is searchable, too, so you can find past activity you may be looking for. Facebook also shows pairs of users their friendship history. A drop-down menu will appear and you can choose View Friendship. Ultimately, it seems that Facebook has our profile views both incoming and outgoing locked down tight. For now, you can Facebook stalk with ease. But beware of those oh-so-tempting apps that promise you hidden information. Share Facebook LinkedIn.

Or can you? As persons we can declare how disappointed we are with the new means of communication, can ostentatiously withdraw from them, as though individual choice were the point. But as users, we have made the obvious, inevitable trade-offs. Lurkers are people who witness and seek to learn.

They learn to tolerate and to understand. But McNeil turns this around. When we come to terms with our role as user, when we lurk attentively and with an open mind, McNeil suggests, then it turns out that we are far more securely at home in the digital world than we sometimes think ourselves.

EndFathersDay is a good example: In June , 4chan trolls managed to offer a surprisingly close facsimile of a social justice fracas on Twitter. But people who regularly participated in, or lurked during, such conversations, saw through the mimicry very quickly. And that was—as McNeil rightly points out—precisely because they actually believed in the values they were debating.

No matter what their critics might say about them, they were not posturing or signaling. Being a user means being under no romantic illusions about why you show up where you show up. Part of us still clings to the idea of being a person who just happens to find themselves in some online space or the other and is shocked, shocked by what they find there.