Do you really like what you "LIKE" on Facebook

From facebook.com

A Facebook Hoax

Facebook.  Most of us use it, I would even bet a large number of you found our blog through Facebook.  Well today when I logged into Facebook, there are a number of post all over my newsfeed was another privacy hoax about Facebook starting to charge for the use of the service.  FYI, if the currency is not in US dollars, dealing with a US (granted multi-national) company, it most likely is a hoax.  Now this is trying to get you to click on a fake link and by now you have people calling out the hoaxes quickly, but it got me thinking about other posts on Facebook

Tugging at your Heart Strings

Images encouraging people to like and share if they love Jesus.  An image of a premature baby, pictures of military troops cuddling puppies.  Anything that's going to kind of tug at the heartstrings: the sick kids, the animal abuse, acting like it's some kind of pet shelter.  All of these post are created to get you to like and or share.  But here is the question that you need to ask, why did someone take the time to create this post?

Many Facebook pages are created with the sole purpose of spreading viral content that will get lots of likes and shares.  Once the page creators have piled up hundreds of thousands of likes and shares, they'll strip the page and promote something else, like products that they get a commission for selling. Or, they may turn around and sell the page through black-market websites to someone who does the same.  They do this to trick Facebook's News Feed algorithm, which is designed to give more value to popular pages than the ones, like scams and spam, that pop up overnight.  Thats why your post don’t always show up in chronological order.  The more likes and shares and comments and that sort of thing you have, the more likely it is to be seen by other people ( so make sure your like The Tech Ninja Blog Facebook page and this post).  

If you see a post like this, that seems to be focused only on gaining traffic, hover over the top-right corner of the post and click the arrow to report it.