Ahem.
Ignoring the whole parental supervision issue, there is a larger issue: many erotic romance authors had accepted friend requests FROM A MINOR. Think about that for a moment.
I know some erotic romance authors post naughty pictures on their profiles.
Sit and think about that for a moment. There could be legal ramifications to that.
When I went and looked at the profile in question, I personally pegged it as a religious troll, because the only other post on there was a graphic with the caption, "God sees all."
Yes, unfortunately, there are religious trolls out there who will friend romance authors and then report the profiles to Fb.
I admit I rarely accept friend requests any more, and it's even more rare I send a friend request. It's for several reasons, the first being that I'm over the 4k mark on friends. The second being I just went a couple of rounds with a stalker. The third being crap like this.
With a Facebook page, you can set age and even location restrictions on your page. This means you can promo the crap out of your Facebook link without worrying about an account held by a minor (if they haven't lied about their age) accessing your page.
This is also another excellent remind to everyone to set your friends list to PRIVATE. Because I guarantee you, this troll went down friends lists of people who friended her and started mass-friending people. If your friends list is set to private, people cannot do that. Do you open your phone contacts to the general population? No? Then why open your friends list the same way?
Pages, people. Pages. Set up a page, grab the custom url from Facebook to match your pen name, and use that as your main Facebook link. It will save you headaches like this in the long run, because unfortunately there are people out there more interested in causing erotic romance authors problems than dealing with their own lives.
Excellent advice - wish I had read it sooner :) I recently had someone go through my FB friends list and send out a mass mailing that got me a lot of annoyed emails from friends. I have since made it private, but I have to admit I have never thought to check the age of any of my friends. I did have this particular woman as a friend and I have removed her. Thanks for making me sit up and take notice - I'll be checking ages for sure from now on.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the warning. I am going over to my Facebook page and making sure I checked Private and then I am going to try to use Pages instead (if I can figure out how to do that).
ReplyDeleteThank you for the warning and advise. I have a fanpage. Now I just need to figure out how to get the people from my Facebook page to that fanpage.
ReplyDeleteHow do you make your friends list private. I looked for a setting but did not see one that explicitly stated it keeps your friends list private. Thanks!
ReplyDelete@Robin - Click on your friends list. Then, somewhere in the upper right corner of that section, below the header, should be an edit button. The settings should be in there. (Used to be.)
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