Facebook is ‘impersonating’ people on the social network without their consent. What Facebook is doing is re-posting one of your ‘likes’ every once in awhile accompanied with a related article. The posts are in your name and they appear in feeds as if you posted them. People have no idea this is even happening, because posts that Facebook makes on your behalf don’t show up on your feed — but they do show in your friends’ and family’s news feeds.

Because it is re-posting your likes, the company isn’t making up things you never said per se. And, from a marketing perspective, it makes a lot of sense. The re-post gets the article more visibility, and it also somehow humanizes it due to it being accompanied by a like from someone you know or trust. However, Facebook users seemingly have no control over what is being posted. There’s no way to filter what gets posted — the only solution is to unlike everything. To make matters worse, Facebook considers this an intentional feature and “denies any wrongdoing and any liability whatsoever.” Meaning, they’re not going to fix this anytime soon.

The problems this can cause range from making your friends or family think you like inappropriate content to dead people liking posts and creepily popping up on your feeds again. One way to showcase this is by going through your feed now and spotting a ‘like’ by a friend that has a ‘Related Article’ next to it. Ask them about it — they probably don’t know it was posted under their name.

[via Bureau of Minds]