Here’s How To Be Less Annoying, An Open Letter To Facebook

Yesterday Facebook plunked this message into my feed, seen, they said, only by me.

Here’s how to keep your audience engaged with your Page
Anne, we’re here to help you stay connected to your audience. Posting regularly to your Page gives people who visit your Page an opportunity to engage with you. Posts that have the most engagement feature photos or videos. We can show you how to create these types of posts.
–The Facebook Help Team

There was the usual sort of pastel cartoony banner over the message. Blocky people in shades of blue and pink faced each other with vague smiles on their faces, like they were drugged. A bird, for some reason, sat on the head of the gender neutral person at the end. I should have clicked the post, just to irritate myself, but instead I hid it, and muttered some things I can’t repeat here under my breath.

To satisfy myself, I am going to eviscerate this little prompt to me, line by line. First, the title. I know we’ve dispensed with proper titling, and we have to immediately address whoever might be wandering by on the internet, to get their attention, and by we I do mean all of us all the time, because we’ve been joined into one big electronic family, each person connected to every other person whether they like it or not, and how dare you even suggest that you might not like it. Nevertheless, it is clunky and awful to start out with “Here’s how to.” If you want my attention, if you want to say something to me, you can think out an emotionally neutral “Audience Engagement,” or “Practical Tips To Restore Traffic To Your Page After We Decimated It On Purpose With Our New Algorithm, Sorry Not Sorry.”

For real, Facebook, don’t put this on me. Take responsibility for your decision to surpress posts that you think are boring, like posts with words and thoughts. That’s on you. Most users of facebook would like to see the people they have accepted as friends, with posts coming into the feed in order, logically, instead of you mucking around with it to privilege what you think we ought to like and want.

Second, and I guess this has just turned into me rebuking Facebook directly, I would prefer that you call me Mrs. Kennedy, honestly. You don’t know me. You don’t need to address me as Anne. That is reserved for people I actually want to be friends with, and my husband. If you feel uncomfortable with Mrs. Kennedy, you could say Madam. That would be fine too.

Third, I think we both know that you are not really interested in keeping me connected with my audience. Your primary purpose is to make a buck off me. You get my free content, which I am diligently typing out at this very moment, and my pictures, my search histories, everything I say in the vicinity of my phone, and my soul, and in return I am supposed to go even more out of my way to give you pictures and video content. Because it’s never enough, is it? Until I deliver up the very blood in my veins, my inmost thoughts and feelings, you will never be satisfied, Facebook, will you?

Fourth, listen Honey, I do post regularly. I post literally once a day. Every single day I come here and link all the words, All Of Them, and then I go diligently through and like the people you’ve spasmodically allowed me to see–of course not all the people. The people you have deemed unworthy I have to remember to go find on my own. even though the reason for me signing up was so I wouldn’t have to do that.

And then, whilst I’m wandering around the wasteland of your platform, you intrude into my beleaguered concentration with little messages about the weather, and who I ought to be wishing happy birthday to, and the fact that I can give money hither and yon, insisting that I every moment pay attention to you, and not to the people to whom you promised to connect me. You want to “connect me to the world?” Really? It seems more that you want me to know that you are god, and that I am to worship and obey you. Would you like my first born? I know you would. I know you want her to start posting pictures and videos so that you can get your algorithms into her soul as well.

Dear Facebook Help Team, you have misunderstood the manner in which I came to you. See, when I signed up all those years ago, I planned to use you as a tool, like a blender, or a hammer, or a car, or a camera, or a pair of shoes. I was going to use you to be friends with lots of interesting and lovely people who I want to talk to and see pictures of. And I knew that you would want to make money off of my participation on your site, which, I’ll just say it again, is a Tool. But I did not intend to develope a personal relationship with you as my lord and savior. I did not intend to give you any emotional space. I did not intend to think about your needs and wants and desires. If I had known you would become so clingy, so cloying, I would have given given up and tried to figure out google plus.

But here we are, stuck in a co-dependent, dysfunctional relationship where you think I care for you a great deal more than I do. I am sorry to be so blunt. But I think you should see a therapist, and go to church, and take some walks, and stop trying to control me. You’ll be happier in the long run. But, more importantly, so will I.