Deception and Lies on Facebook

I have a Facebook Profile and visit and use Facebook often but there are a few things that happen there that I find really, really annoying. Such as the lies and deception.

For instance I regularly get messages that say one of my friends has rated me as dumb or that three of my friends who live in the same suburb as I do have a crush on me. I very regularly get messages saying that my friends are dumb, think I am dumb, are much smarter than me or have crushes on me. I know that these things are all completely untrue but I imagine that this deceptive advertising sucks in many of the unwary.

Also many of the Facebook applications and quizzes ask you to nominate a number of friends before proceeding to your desired destination and this sucks people into believing that this needs to be done. This is deceptive also and I invariably press the 'Skip" button. Many Facebook applications regularly expect you to nominate twenty or thirty friends to send invitations to. This kind of behavior, to me smells very much like spamming though, as the convener of a number of Facebook groups and Facebook pages I have had the Facebook powers that be email me to warn me that they may be about to disconnect my account if I try to email such a number of people simultaneously.

Many of the quizzes, though providing mindless and sometimes interesting distractions are also equally as misleading and many of them require you to enter in your mobile phone number in order to gain access to your results. At this point in time you may have already spent up to twenty minutes answering various questions and are anxious to see your results. I think such quizzes should ask you at the outset if you are prepared to give the application owners your mobile phone number. Once again Facebook can be seen to be endorsing the use of deceptive techniques and/or downright lies.

Thankfully I'm too bright to know that any of my friends or associates would call me dumb and too old and wise to be concerned if they did so or whether or not they are smarter than I. And as far as three friends living in the same suburb having a crush on me I'm too demographically aware to know that to be blatantly untrue also. Such advertising techniques hit 'below the belt' of younger, more vulnerable sorts who may be unsure of their acumen, intelligence and/or vanity, sexiness or attractiveness.

Hopefully Facebook will ban the use of such advertising techniques.

Keep posted.