Facebook: Taking choice away, bit by bit

February 28, 2011 12:45 AM

OK, facebook started doing this thing where every time I click the Like button on any website, it generates a facebook post on my behalf, complete with wrongly selected thumbnail. Anybody know how to deactivate this?
posted by Silky Slim to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

Response by poster: Update: Seems like they have no intention of changing this back.
posted by Silky Slim at 1:14 AM on February 28, 2011

It's new functionality that's meant to be happening, btw. They just launched it over the weekend.
posted by wackybrit at 1:14 AM on February 28, 2011

Best answer: This is yet another one of Facebook's ill-thought-out changes. I would suggest avoiding the Like button, or else immediately go back to Facebook to delete the post you don't want. I've already had to do the latter today.

If there's another way to avoid it, I hope someone will let us all know.
posted by litlnemo at 1:37 AM on February 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

I seriously dislike (erm, pun mildly intended) Facebook's cross-website interactions, and I'm quite thankful for a Firefox addon that removes that possibility. One of the reasons I started using it is because of what others mentioned -- them rolling out changes that you can't turn off or change the setting on.
posted by Heretical at 3:19 AM on February 28, 2011

typical facebook arrogance.

there's a meta tag of some sort in their developer section that allows a developer to specify a thumbnail image to be used upon share or like. if nothing's specified, facebook starts its guessing game.

i have no doubt that you seeing the wrong image is, in their mind, the site developer's shortcoming—not theirs.
posted by patricking at 5:17 AM on February 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

Herectical, what's the add-on?
posted by canine epigram at 5:17 AM on February 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

You can use greasemonkey, adblock, or noscript to get that effect.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 6:47 AM on February 28, 2011

The dedicated add-on for Firefox, Chrome & Opera is Facebook Blocker.
posted by scalefree at 7:37 AM on February 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

Err, make that Safari, Chrome & Firefox. No Opera.
posted by scalefree at 7:38 AM on February 28, 2011

Maybe I'm missing something here- isn't the point of liking something on FB to add it to your feeds and/or let others know about it? If you don't want it showing up, why don't you just not click the like button? Not that I'm defending FB here-I disagree with most of what they do. But in this instance it seems like you're unhappy that it's doing what you just told it to do.
posted by MexicanYenta at 8:57 AM on February 28, 2011

The addon I use is Request Policy. It's a bit fiddly and requires some serious tweaking to get things to work, but frankly I prefer having very little/no ads, no web tracking (take that, fastclick!) unless I want it. You can whitelist sites (so, like, Flickr for all those forum image posts) too.
posted by Heretical at 12:47 PM on February 28, 2011

@MexicanYenta No, that's what Share is/was for. Sometimes I want to Like something that a friend shared, and I don't especially want to share it. Also, I'm anticipating that sometimes I might want to share something but will feel odd about clicking "Like" on "700 Dead in Quake" or "Kittens Die in Fire" or whatever.

Maybe it's just me.

(Even better, it's "いいね!" on Japanese Facebook, something like "Good!" or "It's nice!")
posted by wintersweet at 11:57 PM on February 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

So I went to paste a link directly into my facebook status today, and after attaching it, couldn't edit anything or remove the wall of text that came up. Is this part of the same thing, anybody know?
posted by peep at 1:39 PM on March 1, 2011