Image via CrunchBase, source unknownSvetlana Gladkova over on profy (one of the better blogs out there if you want to bookmark it or grab the RSS feed, you will not be disappointed) raises the idea of random friending on Facebook and its inherent dangers. I will argue that this holds true for many if not all social networking systems that a person can use. The other inherent issue that is not raised but should be is the weirdness that surrounds the concept of unfriending. Some people get seriously disturbed when you unfriend them or do not friend them back, meaning you really did not want to friend them in the first place. For some people, the social network is all they have, and as the old adage goes “on the internet no one knows you are a dog.”
In the sociopath in the cube next door, Martha Stout estimated that nearly 1 in 25 people is a sociopath, they do not care about you. However, at a rate of 5000 connections on Facebook, statistically 200 of them are going to be downright sociopaths. They will in turn see what they can get away with when dealing with you. Then when you unfriend them, they can become quite belligerent, hostile, and consider the very fact of unfriending as open season on you and what you are doing on line. As far back as 2005, fast company was talking about this very idea but applying it to the corporate boardroom, that many people power that inhabit the corporate office can be and at times are seriously out of tune with the damage that they can inflict on others.
This is why when someone randomly friends you, you really do need to check them out, where do you know them from as Svetlana says. No one wants to be ripped apart in public, and no one wants to deal with people who are in it only for themselves. You really do need to know people first, and while it might be a sign of your social networking prowess to have so many friends, the dangers that can be randomly encountered in using social networks should not be far from someone’s minds. While people will have bad days, some people are on a permanent bender and will simply do things that are outrageous, or like the Lori Drew case, have serious consequences for the people involved.
There are so many stories out there how friending on many of the social systems has gone very badly for people, adults, as well as teenagers. These are important things to know, and important things to remember for any social network you might be involved with on line.
Tags: Facebook, random, friending, interesting, profy
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=b95b27d0-2014-4d4f-af55-e861c01e3f9b)
I have to agree with this. Facebook is bad for random friending and not just because Facebook is so fast to land the banhammer. I had a few ‘friends’ demand that I write about their companies on my blog and when I did not they marked my Facebook messages as spam which resulted in the loss of my account. Because of that I lost a lot of great contacts, including the founder of Mashable.
First, thanks for the kind words about Profy, appreciate your opinion a lot. As for the post itself, you are certainly right in thinking that there are inherent dangers in almost any social network you happen to use online - it is only a matter of how much information you make available to people you are connected to on each of the networks. Excellent post all in all and we should really obsess less about our online lives and the size of our networks and finally realize exactly what value we expect to get on every network and only use it accordingly - not the way someone else expects you to use it.