When you reject someone’s friend request, there’s a button for “I don’t even know this creep” or something like that. (I think the actual text is “Do you know Domenic outside of Facebook? Yes or No.”) That seems innocuous enough. No sir, I do not, but I’m sure he’s a fine gentleman of good breeding and impeccable manners. So good of you to ask. It’s just that I’m only accepting new friends that I know personally.
Instead, it turns out that if you click it, the requester gets a heavy-handed warning from Facebook along the lines of: “Look, stalker, we’re the biggest, baddest Internet company in the world and if this button gets pressed on you again, your profile is toast and we’ll shut you out of our loving, happy community of 800 million people….
Oh, and for good measure we just killed all your approved logins in all your web browsers and apps and you will be surprised by how many apps require you to login to your Facebook account to use them. We’re everywhere.”
There’s no indication of how to tell who pushed the button on me nor is there any appeal process or even any further explanation anywhere. The worst part is that there’s no way to see what other friend requests might still be pending or how to cancel them. It’s like a minefield in which someone else steps on the mine and you get killed.
Now, I don’t know whether to cower in fear of losing my Facebook profile or just preemptively kill it myself. (I would just ditch Facebook, but I’m responsible for my job’s Facebook pages and you need a personal profile to maintain them. I’m stuck.)
All I know is that I’ll be darned if I’m going to be friending anyone else for fear of triggering the Facebook goon squad.
Flickr photo by MoneyBlogNews
Now I feel bad for every single random person that asked to friend me that I felt I didn’t know well enough to friend.
Ooo… I’m feeling a bit guilty, too… but not because I was the one that rejected your friend request. I only get a button that says ignore. Or maybe I do have that alternate option but haven’t paid much attention to it… Either way, I do feel slightly remorseful for all those people whose friend requests I did reject. *sigh*
To be clear, I don’t think just rejecting a request has any consequences for them, only the additional step of saying you don’t know them.