Be careful what you 'like' - Facebook Graph Search might make you rethink those ridiculous groups

Whenever a new technology is unveiled there are always unforeseen consequences, and the results returned by Facebook’s new ‘Graph Search’ feature are no exception

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Let’s face it, we say, share, and ‘like’ some pretty ridiculous things on Facebook sometimes, but most of it disappears from our newsfeed and gets lost inside Facebook’s servers.

Out of sight, out of mind and all that. It doesn’t matter that some of the things we share are public, because only our friends are looking at our activity, right? Wrong.

Thanks to Graph Search, Facebook’s brand new social search engine on steroids, all of those stupid public shares, ‘likes’ and groups we follow, can now be made much less difficult to be dragged out of the abyss and presented for all to see. Simply by searching.

Graph Search makes it super easy to find people who have specific interests, or like specific things. Such as ‘People who like surfing’ or ‘Women who like action movies’ for example. This can be a great tool for meeting new people and finding new friends with similar interests to you, but it can also be used to find entirely different results, regardless of their original context.

Such as:

People who like Dogging
People who like clubbing seals
People who like DEATH TO THE JONAS BROTHERS
People who like Klu Klux Klan
Men who like sh*gging sheep
Men who like farting in the bath
Men who like a virgin
Men who like to flash people
Women who like sh*gging your mates girlfriend for banter
Women who like shoplifting
People who like sex on the first date
People who like punching old people
People who like… you get the picture!

These may have been funny at the time, but might not have the same effect when displayed in search results.

Facebook states that the new service “helps you find people, places and things—and explore Facebook in a whole new way”, and they’re not kidding! Some of these embarrassing search terms even autocomplete themselves!

All these ridiculous and offensive things we publicly share, like, and join, will soon be easily searchable by anyone and everyone on Facebook. Stripped out of context and exposed for all the world to see. Even the stuff we don’t share publicly can still be seen by our friends, and if you have a ton of friends on Facebook, that’s going to be a LOT of people.

Perhaps it's time to purge that list of stupid and offensive things that you ‘like’, and maybe you should leave that racist Facebook group you joined ‘for the LOLs’.