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Your Facebook Friends Aren’t Real

Posted by Nick O'Neill on March 28th, 2008 4:11 PM

According to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, a British judge has “made official what many of us have long suspected - that being ‘Facebook friends’ with someone doesn’t necessarily make you their friend.” Apparently a woman accused her ex-boyfriend of harassing her by sending her a friend request on Facebook. I’m not quite sure how that qualifies as harassment. Apparently the judge agreed.

The boyfriend’s argument was that “the contact was highly innocuous because being ‘Facebook friends’ could not be defined as ‘friendship in the traditional sense’”. I currently have a ton of friend requests and most of them are not from actual friends. I frequently approve people as friends that I don’t know and don’t expect much out of that relationship. So if you are a friend collector and have added me as a friend, no worries, I’m not expecting anything from you ;)

Dr. Dick, a senior lecturer at the University of NSW (not sure where it is), said that “removing someone from your friend list is almost a declaration of war.” Just as I don’t count my eggs before they hatch, I don’t count my friends on Facebook but I’m sure there are people that do. As such, don’t be surprised if you get an angry stalker when they realize you are no longer their friend.

Do you usually connect with real friends or do you have fake friends on Facebook?

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 4:11 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 6 Comments

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    What's the point in adding a hundred or so people you don't know just for the hell of it? I never have and likely never will understand that, maybe I shouldn't criticize people who do that, but on the other hand it's rather pointless, wouldn't you say? The only thing that happens in the end is you make yourself look popular, except anyone taking a critical eye to that kind of case would not believe it and would see right through this anyway.

    Sebastian
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    NSW = New South Wales = Sydney and Environs. Have a nice day!

    PS: Oh, and of my far too many (700+ish) friends on facebook, I probably know all but four of them on a first name basis (and can remember their names when I see them).
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    apropos "counting friends", what I really don't like is that now (for ~ a month or so) the first thing on my facebook profile is "View Chris's friends (xxx)", that cannot turned off as far as I know, and even if you send email invitations, they say sth like "Hi I'm Chris, I have yyy Wall posts and xxx friends...." ?!?
    That number is, as Sebastian said, pointless, and the more 'friends' you almost don't know are in my list, the less interesting the News Feed gets..
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    I've only been playing with Facebook for 8 months, but I'm adding five types of friends.

    a) 50% current friends & acquaintances
    b) 5% current work/networking contacts
    c) 30% old friends & acquaintances 1981-2002 that I lost touch with (college, grad school, work)
    d) 10% my invites: people I've never met in person, but I found their internet presence interesting...or want to contact them in real-life later.
    e) 10% people who found me on Facebook.

    On LinkedIn, I have 8 contacts of another type
    f) 7% ultra-networked people (20,000-40,000 friends)

    Due to the way LinkedIn shows information, it helps to have at least a 3rd degree connection when trying to view someone (or to pay $240/yr). Connecting to a few ultra-networked people allows me access to 5+ million out of the 23 million people.

    In practice, I almost never (
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    It's a bit late now, but I think the more appropriate term is not "friend", it's "contact". Adding someone to my friends list, to me, means little more than adding their email address to my contacts list. My genuine friends are all contacts, where possible, but not all of my contacts are genuine friends.
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    I don't have a consistent friending policy. When I get a request from someone I don't know, I look at mutual contacts and their profile to get an idea if I want to connect, and make a decision on an individual basis.

    Where it gets dicier is unfriending and selectively friending people you know. I've unfriended a couple loose acquaintances who pollute my newsfeed with melodramatic status updates (only to have them stalk me with requests). I've also *not* unfriended a person because I don't want to deal with the fallout (thank you limited profile groups!).

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