#1A Security and Being Out: Facebook

Over the last 10 months, the page has received a number of questions about how to follow this page’s content without outing themselves through Facebook’s overeager information sharing settings. First, if you Like the page, you can go in to your facebook profile, enter your Likes section, hit “manage” and set audiences for each of your categories of Likes. You cannot hide specific likes. The process is also similar if you are following a page or person but have not liked or friended them. This information is only current as of the original posting; who knows how Facebook will change it in subsequent updates. For that reason, Facebook does offer a “Security Checkup” feature on both mobile and desktop. This is point number 2, and mainly helps you be aware of how your default posting is set up. You can edit the audience for individual posts using the drop-down arrow on the upper right of desktop posts, or the edit feature on mobile. If you edit your audience while making a new post, subsequent posts will be made with those same settings. For that reason, I like to edit my audience retroactively, after I post, so that I don’t have to change it back to my default every time I deviate. Third, Facebook allows you to set different audiences, but you must manually create and add people to the audience lists. By default, they give you Public, Restricted, Acquaintances, Friends, Close Friends, and Only Me. These are a good start, but they also affect how often a person shows up in your feed. Set someone to Close Friends and you will see their posts more often. Set them to Restricted and you’ll almost never see their posts. Choosing whether to follow someone and using the options under “Hide Post” (also from that upper-right drop-down) can help you regulate facebook’s algorithm. But, since we’re talking about security, here is the link to how these lists are defined, and how you access them: https://www.facebook.com/help/200538509990389?helpref=related And how to select audiences: https://www.facebook.com/help/120939471321735?helpref=faq_content This link will bring you to Facebook’s online help search on desktop. https://www.facebook.com/help/?helpref=facebar_dropdown_help On Thursday, I’ll bring you #1B on Facebook Messenger