A colleague of mine asked me today about the limits of adding friends across different mediums of social media: If you’re friends on Facebook, should you follow them on Instagram?
It’s a question that I had to ask myself lately, or rather, a question that I had to ask of my followers. Last week, someone I didn’t know requested to follow me on Instagram. My profile on the popular image sharing app is private, and users must request to follow me — I don’t want everyone and their mom to see all of my sepia-toned updates. However,  I’m not opposed to use Instagram for its true purpose: to network. The guy who sent the request, known only to me as drunkbastard801 – a username that he probably doesn’t want everyone and their mom (read: potential future employers) to see — seems to know people I know. That’s good enough for me.
But then I posted a new profile picture to Facebook, which racked up a fair share of likes. One of those came from someone that I didn’t know. Like on Instagram, my privacy settings on Facebook are geared up to be an inpenetrable barrier. Yet still, this one “like” seeped through – and no, it was not from the eloquent drunkbastard801.
And what did I do? I panicked.
Why did it offend me so badly that a stranger could not only see my profile picture, but could also like it? This happens to me on Instagram every day, and I’m fine with it. Why was I so upset not only at Facebook for breaching my unreasonable sense of privacy, but also at the mysterious liker? Why did I even expect that the photo would be private? Was I learning the hard way about the inherent privacy issues on social media? Am I becoming crochety?
Because two of our mutual friends had also liked the photo, it showed up in this mystery liker’s news feed. He, being a less-crochety social media user than I, saw a picture of a girl and decided that it was fair game. When I sent him a Facebook message to confront him about that insidious digital thumbs up, he responded that he innocently liked the photo just because his friends did. It was on his feed, so it was his for the liking, right?
That’s what Facebook assumes. If you put it out there, those who see it are probably meant to see it. By using an array of user metrics, if I posted a status about “The Great Gatsby” or cat videos on Facebook, suddenly other users who also like “The Great Gatsby” or cat videos are suggested to me as potential friends, regardless of whether or not I actually know them in real life. Facebook can infer through our declared tastes and preferences that we’d get along, regardless of whether we would or wouldn’t. I don’t know, maybe the mystery liker and I would be friends in real life, but I think we have a pretty different world view on things. If I saw a photo of someone I didn’t know on Facebook, I’d leave it alone for fear of being a creep or intruding on someone’s personal space. I, for one, didn’t realize that anyone but my friends could see my photos. Not only would I not want to similarly freak anyone out, but I don’t see Facebook as media to be consumed. Call me old fashioned, but I see it as a networking tool. Remember when MySpace would ask you about more intimate details, such as whether you smoke or drank? Those were the good ol’ days, when social networks really were about getting to know new people, not just liking their photos and then disappearing back into the woodwork.
Maybe drunkbastard801 and I will never get to know each other on a deeper level aside from just mutual appreciation of our Instagram-filtered adventures. Maybe the mystery liker didn’t care about the implications behind this one click. But as long as these sites claim to be about social networking, let’s move it back in that direction. In the ever-prescient words of the Spice Girls, if you wanna like my photo, you’ve gotta get with my friends.