Facebook Is Recycling Your Likes To Promote Stories You've Never Seen To All Your Friends

If Facebook‘s new Graph Search feature has you thinking a little harder about what you’ve “liked” for fear that an ironic dalliance in years past could come back to embarrass you, here’s one more thing to worry about. Facebook is now recycling users Likes and using them to promote “Related Posts” in the news feeds of the user’s friends. And one more thing, the users themselves have possibly never seen the story, liked the story or even know that it is being promoted in their name.

This was brought to my attention through a story by Minneapolis developer Craig Condon in which he accuses Facebook of “impersonating people without their consent.” See video above for his lucid documentation of the phenomenon, including the use of a fabricated account as a demonstration tool. In his own case, he had liked the irreverent media empire, VICE, and as a result, a rude post showed up on his mother’s timeline below a heading “Craig Condon likes VICE” and a divider with a slug that said “ RELATED POST.” His mother, of course, urged him to take the post down—but he couldn’t because he had never posted it!...