This week, Facebook launched Facebook Stories, their equivalent to Snapchat…and Instagram Stories. Facebook Stories lets you upload visuals and videos to the Facebook app while using filters and text as overlays. The videos and images disappear within 24-hours, and recipients can respond with their own filtered videos. Yes, it is essentially an exact model of Snapchat. Yes, this copy-cat effect is getting ridiculous now. This function is available within your main Facebook feed, just above where you would normally post text.
There’s something quite interesting about this new feature update, though – and it’s one thing you won’t have thought about. Facebook have finally given us an insight into who is stalking our feed. Until now, we had no ‘official’ conformation about who viewed our Facebook page, who clicked through our pictures at 2.33am on a Saturday and who anonymously scrolled back through our time line. With the introduction of Facebook Stories, though, we can see all. You can see who viewed your stories, meaning you know who’s keeping tabs on you.
Wave goodbye to stalking your ex over late night chips and cheese – he can see that. God forbid you accidentally go to check out your boyfriends new work mate, who happens to be a hot girl – and oh whoooops you click on her stories. PANIC. HELP. FUCK. She knows. Until now, we used Facebook as our sole means of stalking – it was the number one social media platform to do all your social stalking on. Given that most people you have on Snapchat you have there because you’ve added them within the past two years – so it’s more than likely they are your actual friends. And on Instagram all the stories you actually want to watch are pushed right to the front of your feed (because you’ve stalked their feed so much) so chances are, you don’t mind those people knowing you’ve stalked them. With Facebook, though, we’re sneaky, we hide behind our phones and laptops and hope no one knows we’ve gone 4 years down the line on some girl you met at a party three weeks ago. Until now, Facebook had never revealed to their users just who was looking at their updates. Until now we could stalk in private.
So what does this mean? Is Facebook stalking over forever? Or can you just tactically not watch people’s stories? The latter is probably destined for failure as we all know what happens come a messy night out. Help us all.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.