Facebook users urged to check privacy settings by local social media expert

A SOCIAL media expert from Carlton is encouraging Facebook users to double-check their privacy settings after the site made changes which allow public posts to become searchable for the first time.

Before the changes to the index, which took place this week, Facebook’s search function listed mainly groups, events and locations. Any public post would be difficult to find without going directly into a user’s profile page.

Now following the update, two trillion old public posts were added to the index and can now be found by users.

Geoff Wing, who lives in Carlton and advises firms in London on social media strategy, urged users in the area to change their settings if they didn’t want these posts to show up in searches.

He said: “Every post on the network is now indexed and the only way to stop your old posts appearing is to make sure they aren’t public by going into your account and checking privacy settings.”

“They are making these changes to be able to compete with other sites like Google and Twitter and allow users to find posts on trending subjects for the first time. It does make sense for them to do this. People just need to make sure they hide posts they wouldn’t want people to find.”

In a blog post, Tom Stocky, Facebook’s VP of search, said: “When you search, you’ll now see the most recent, relevant public posts along with posts from your friends. Search results are organised to help you cut through the noise and quickly understand what the world is saying about a topic in the moment. You also can pull-to-refresh and see the latest public posts.

“The diverse experiences and perspectives that are shared on Facebook can’t be found anywhere else.

“You control who can see your posts on Facebook and it’s easy to change the audience of your past posts any time.”