Cybernews has confirmed that a five-year-old Facebook bug is sending automatic friend requests to Facebook profiles you visit — leaving some online stalkers, we mean snoopers, pretty embarrassed.
Whether it’s your last date in Hinge, an old crush from high school, or even the new neighbors down the block, we’ve all done it. Social media snooping, that is.
Usually, when you spy on a social media profile, that person has no idea and will never find out.
But some Facebook users are finding that an unknown bug in the social media system is exposing their mysterious behavior by automatically triggering a Facebook friend request when visiting certain individual profile pages.
The privacy flaw is sure to raise some eyebrows and even cause panic among users all over the world.
“There’s a Facebook sparkle that doesn’t comment on Facebook anyone who sends them a friend request,” one social media expert tweeted.
Statistics show that nearly 74 percent of people have admitted to looking at their crush’s social media profiles — and half of them do so at least once a day, accordingly. To study social stalking behavior by OnlineDoctor.
Less alarmingly, the study found that only 12 percent of people reported checking up on their ex at least once a week, while 8 percent still looked up every day.
It’s no surprise that the most popular social media site to hack on is Facebook of course. (Instagram and Google search round out the top three).
Although not everyone would admit it if they took part in the provocative practice, our research team at Cybernews had no problem testing the theory on one another.
After trying a few different scenarios, Cybernews can confirm, this Facebook bug is definitely something.
But it’s not all bad news. It looks like the person you’re hacking must have their friend request settings set to “everyone”.
Under Facebook’s privacy settings, the platform asks, “Who can send you friend requests?”
Options: “Everyone” or “Friends of Friends”.
When the Cybernews team experimented with the privacy feature, we found that Facebook accounts set to “friends of friends” did not trigger an automatic friend request for the individual whose profile the team was viewing.
Meaning, if you’ve come across a creep on your crush recently, there’s still a 50/50 chance you’ll be in the clear.
It’s worth noting that Facebook remains the most popular social media platform in the world, with nearly 3 billion monthly active users as of 2023, according to data analytics website DemandSage.
Meanwhile, Facebook friend requests date back at least five years.
In the summer of 2017, Facebook users complained about dozens of random friend requests regularly plaguing their profiles, with one user claiming to have received 700 requests in just one day.
Although Facebook never addressed the issue at the time, some blamed scam bots for the surge in requests. Others have claimed Facebook’s error as the most likely culprit.
Months later, another Facebook bug surfaced, allowing blocked users to resend friend requests to the profiles of individuals they had blocked.
Since Facebook has not commented on this latest glitch yet, we can only speculate if they will fix the bug, offer a workaround, or leave the average social media in its self-imposed spiral of shame.
Cybernews will follow up on the story.
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