The Soapbox | Where South Africans Speak Out

Like most other people my age (actually, those older and younger too) I have a Facebook account. This morning I logged onto Facebook and was greeted with the news that I had “1 friend request”. Now friend requests are always exciting because, until the page loads, there’s no way of knowing who it is. This morning’s Facebook request was unfortunately disappointing. Yet another person I do not know had had the audacity to invite me. I simply do not understand the phenomenon of inviting people that you have never met in your life (and often who do not even live in the same country – I have had friend requests from the Czech Republic before!). I mean, what does the person expect? Are you going to fall in love with their profile picture, eagerly accept the request and begin an epic romance? Or a lifelong friendship if love is not on the cards? I’m all for meeting new people and forming friendships across the globe but I hope I am not the only one who gets just a little freaked out when I receive a request from someone I do not know.

This morning, however, I decided to give the person the benefit of the doubt and see if we did have something in common and possibly had met before (I don’t pretend to remember everyone I’ve ever met and have probably rejected many friend requests due to my bad memory…). Without accepting, I clicked on the person’s name and browsed his (albeit limited) profile for a while. What I discovered was that my potential friend was 32 years old, only has photos of Colin Farrell as his profile picture and has 245 friends. Of these 245 people not a single one was male. However, what shocked me the most was not the fact that I had been invited by a middle-aged man who only appears to make contacts with girls between the ages of 16 and 25, but the fact that we had 23 friends in common. So far I’ve asked 8 of them if they knew who he was and sadly the answer, without exception, has been “no”.

This leads me to my main point: why did they accept the invite of a man they had never met? Everyone knows the dangers of meeting strange people over the internet yet they still seem happy to allow a stranger access to their personal information. This includes phone numbers, addresses, photographs, and just about your entire social history since joining Facebook. Imagine what could be done with that information if the wrong person was given access to it? Of the 23 friends that this man and I had in common, every one of them was an old school friend. My school was a fairly prestigious all-girls Christian school that provided all of us with an excellent education and vast computer and Internet experience. My point in saying this is that they should have known better. From what I can gather in discussing this with the few of them I’ve asked is that they didn’t even browse the man’s profile before accepting his request.

Unfortunately I know that apathy about screening friend requests is a very common thing on Facebook. Many people are simply happy to see their friend count increase and so accept any person that invites them. What should be kept in mind is that this is the twenty-first century. As wonderful as inventions such as the Internet are, they have undoubtedly opened many new doors to people of a questionable calibre. Needless to say I will not be accepting this man’s request and will be reporting him to Facebook. I apologise in advance if he is in fact innocent of any suspicious behaviour but I would rather not take the chance.

Stephanie Venter is an 18-year-old humanities student at the University of Cape Town.