Collegiate Times

As I’m scrolling through my newsfeed, I often find myself asking “Why would you post that on Facebook?”

Like most people I know, I’m on Facebook pretty frequently — whenever I sit down at a computer, it’s the first thing I check. Being that it’s become so popular in recent years, interest in defining a sort of universal “Facebook etiquette” has also been on the rise. I thought I might as well take a stab at creating my own set of do’s and don’ts — OK mostly don’ts.

First of all, and it almost goes without saying, don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your boss, pastor or grandma to see. We’ve all heard that Facebook is used by prospective employers to check out potential job candidates. I can’t attest to whether this is true, but in general it doesn’t seem like a bad rule of thumb to follow.

Moving on to some issues that are of lesser consequence.

These aren’t things you should avoid because they’ll potentially cause you to lose out on a job or deeply offend your sweet old grams, but things that are just, in general, annoying.

Take it easy with the requests for your farm, restaurant, desert island or whatever. They are a classic Facebook annoyance.

If you’re like me and you can’t stand to let the little notification “You have 1 Farmville Gift Request” just hang out on the side of the page forever, you spend a lot of time clicking “ignore” on every little request that comes your way.

Also, spare us all the explicit details about what a crazy night you had last night — especially if last night was a Tuesday. Let’s leave the, probably highly exaggerated, tales of drunken escapades to Texts From Last Night. Being that Facebook is in no way anonymous (like TFLN is), it looks less hilarious and more pathetic.

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A version of this article appeared in the Sep 16 issue of the Collegiate Times.