Dwight Watt - Newspaper Article #471 8/21/2019


Question: What are friends and followers on Facebook?

Answer:

Friends are people that see your posts on Facebook, and you see their posts. These should generally be people that you know, and you want to share information with them.

Followers are people who see your posts on Facebook, but you do not see their posts. Followers should be people that are interested in seeing what all you post but you would not be interested in their posts.

When you request someone to be a friend and they accept then you both automatically become followers of the other one. It is a two-way street. However, you can choose to follow anyone, and you see their public posts in your newsfeed, but they do not see your posts and you do not see items not posted on public news feed.

There are continuously posts going around claiming they need to either limit their number of friends or that you need to reply so that you get their posts. Basically, those are spam and could be harmful spam. There are reports that these sometimes are done by Russia or other threat agents to collect names of active people on Facebook to better aim at their accounts. Likewise, the aging posts you see that will show what you will look like in 20 years or something are also supposedly many times by these same threat agents to compile databases of people’s pictures to identify of use the pictures in not good ways.

According to Facebook you are limited to 5,000 Friends including requests from people to be friends. If you are approaching limit on this, I would suggest looking at the list and changing a number of them to Followers, as I really don’t know people that have 5,000 people that they want to know all the stuff that they post on Facebook. More than likely many of them really are followers of yours. Politicians and business owners would have lots of Followers but same number of Friends as ones not in those groups. I think currently I have about 450 Friends on Facebook and I suspect at least 100 should be followers as they are people interested in my activities in Kiwanis or other things or me running for governor of Kiwanis, but I am really not needing to know what is in their life. However, I am nowhere near 5,000,

According to Facebook you can have an unlimited number of Followers.

Hope you have some good Friends (which include family) and lots of Followers but if you don’t, don’t panic life can be fun with just 10 Friends.