Should parents stalk their kids on Facebook? The Onion reports:
Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids
Facebook stalking by parents
Should parents stalk their kids on Facebook? The Onion reports:
Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids
Sometimes the greatest truth lies in satire. This facebook-stalking dilemma is a very real one for me and my peers. I've been "friended" by many friends' mothers, siblings and other relatives I barely know. My own relatives have started to sprout facebooks of their own.
There is a very specific and unspoken etiquette to the "friending" of someone on facebook. The person who has more to "lose" from the friendship must be the initiator, or a serious faux pas has occurred. For example,a boss or professor should not go around finding and friending their inferiors. The employees/students likely have all kinds of incriminating information on display on facebook- drunken pictures,crude status updates, perhaps even an "open relationship" with their facebook beau. The discretion falls on the person who would be outed- and who would feel consequences for their outing.
The same etiquette applies for the friending of family members. A friend's mother should never "friend" me, but I can "friend" her. The initiation must fall on the side of the younger, or less status-ed person. Also, a parent cannot leave comments or wall posts willy-nilly on the profiles of their child's friends. Again, only the child's friend should initiate this intergenerational social networking.
Many parents totally miss these rules, or even created FB profiles with the intent of stalking their kids and their friends. I know several people who were "outed" as atheist or gay in this weird manner.