The Weekly Ringer

The University of Mary Washington Student Newspaper

Facebook Invading too Many Aspects of our Lives

2 min read

Not a week goes by that I don’t hear the phrase, “Facebook is taking over the world.”

If this is true, I’m not really sure what kind of world we’re living in anymore.

Monday night, I logged onto my Facebook and was greeted by a fully naked girl standing in front of a pool.

This morning, I accidentally logged onto someone else’s account on a computer in Combs, where a picture of a dog sitting in blood waited for the unsuspecting user to come check their news feed.

After several of these and many other pornographic and violent pictures were reported by Facebook users this week, an investigation was launched by the company, as reported by ZDNet.com earlier this week.

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that these images were the result of a deliberate spam attack, which Facebook said was designed by the hackers for financial gain.

For me, this is the cherry on top of every other topping at the bar to make Twitter my new favorite social networking site. My life in less than 140 characters, without any weird privacy settings that I don’t understand.

Mark Zuckerberg and his pals may have been a little too ambitious when they decided to completely change the way Facebook, and the rest of the Internet, operates, linking every website (except, of course, Google and YouTube).

A few weeks ago, my always reliable Facebook news feed told me that 16 of my friends read an article in the Washington Post. At first, I was ecstatic. I was never going to leave Facebook again.

But when I clicked the link to the article, it didn’t take me to my trusted news source. Instead of being able to read the article automatically, I had to install the Social Reader app.

Eventually I succumbed and let the Washington Post have full access to my Facebook and news feed.

But it has been less than impressive, to say the least.

It seems as though the Washington Post is using the social reader as a way to appeal to the masses. Catchy headlines grip audiences attention, like “Kelly Clarkson Spills All: ‘I Want to Punch Adele in the Face!’” or “No sex on campus?” however, are not indicative of the article at all. The articles my friends read seem to be the rejected articles of Yahoo! News, irrelevant and superfluous.

I would say that maybe I just need to make better friends, if the articles weren’t sometimes sloppy, as well.

I won’t go so far to say that Facebook is the new MySpace, because as I understand it, musicians still find use for the seemingly stone age website. Which, if things continue the way they have been, I’m moving to Twitter.

If Facebook thinks that I wanted all 964 of my friends to know that I listened to my “sad&lonely” Spotify playlist, they were mistaken.