Facebook wants to help you make friends

Not content with maintaining a constant and increasing invasion of privacy for personal economic gain, and having actively or passively collaborated in spreading false news that could have even influenced electoral results (US presidential elections, referendum of the “Brexit” in the United Kingdom…), Facebook has decided that it should also act as a “matchmaker” in terms of friendship and will help us make new friends with the new “things in common” function.

Facebook, the matchmaker of friendship

Those who have not yet read "La Celestina" (Fernando de Rojas, 1499), I encourage you to do so. It is a very funny tragicomedy, and although it is not about Facebook and its influence (rather negative) in society, I am sure that you are going to find a certain similarity between the character of Celestina and the company of the powerful and influential Zuckerberg. And it is that the next step of Facebook is to exercise as a therapist to our supposed socialization problems helping us to make new friends and, as fellow Chance Miller points out in 9to5Mac, "find new excuses to analyze personal data". Specifically, according to a report published by CNET, Facebook wants to help people discover things they have in common with other people through a new tag in public conversations…

Basically, what it is about is that when you read a public conversation (such as comments about a brand or editorial publication) Facebook will show you what you have in common with the people who have participated in that conversation, as seen in the next screenshot. In this way, the company will reveal aspects of you to people who care nothing about your life.

For example, if you are reading the comments in a certain publication, you may see a label that says "Both went to the University of Murcia" next to the name of another participant. Other potential common points that Facebook says you could highlight include being part of the same Facebook public group, your company or your place of residence.

Right now, Facebook says it is testing this new feature with a "small" number of users in the United States. However, the company has not yet provided more details about its intentions to expand, or not, this feature to other users in the countries where Facebook operates, nor has it obviously provided specific dates in this regard.

The objective of this function, according to Facebook, is "to help people connect" and for this, it aims to serve as a "springboard" to make us see what points we have in common. This is how the company has put it:

Like Miller, I have no doubt that Facebook's new “make friends” feature is just one more excuse, one more step to collect and analyze more of the personal and usage data of its users, and of a more efficient way, with the firm intention of continuing to improve its advertising strategy and making money at the expense of people who, in many occasions, but not always, we are consciously allowing it, despite knowing what we know, and at a time when Facebook could have already peaked in terms of user growth. As Alex Barredo recently replied in a tweet, “in 10-20 years I think the Facebook issue is going to look much worse. In plan 'how could we let it happen' ”, although I fear that this period of time will be noticeably reduced.