As a teenager on Facebook, I liked any page I could get my grubby hands on when it was my turn to use the family computer. A page my crush liked? Click! A page about a TV show I had not watched but seemed, aesthetically, nice? Click! A page for every single book John Green has ever written? Click!
And that fit in reasonably well with my peers who, in the early days of Facebook, were also liking every page that might fit how they’d like their personality perceived. Recently, though, I’ve been spending time on the platform trying to clean it up. I have to keep an account for work, and also because I think it’s a fascinating ecosystem of old friends and family members who live far away, but I don’t particularly need to know everything that goes on with Ed Sheeran’s fan pages.
So I went to my Facebook profile, selected « more » and scrolled down to my likes. I unliked everything that gave me the option to unlike it, but a dozen pages remained. I can’t unlike them, because the page no longer exists. So, in perpetuity, I will like « True Colors Tucson, » « The Perks of Being a Wallflower, » « Wake Up Joel, » and a bunch of my old friends’ parents’ defunct realty pages.
At first it seems like just an odd bug. But upon closer inspection, Facebook simply will not allow you to unlike pages that no longer exist. My roommate will forever like « DID SOMEBODY SAY DRACO MALFOY??? » and « Sometimes you forgive people simply because you still want them in ur life. » One of my coworkers can’t unlike the page for Loius CK’s old show, Louie, and another is stuck liking a photo from Drake and Josh with the page caption: « I <3 when Josh repeats stuff for emphasis. EMPHASIS!"
The only way I can figure out to unlike these pages is to completely delete your Facebook page and start a new one from scratch. But the effort that would take is just too much. So please, Mark Zuckerberg, give us just the slightest bit of control over our likes and let us erase our past selves. I need this.
We’ve reached out to Facebook about this, and we’ll update this post if we hear back.
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