Woman Goes On A Deep-Dive Stalk On Facebook Not Knowing She's About To Be Exposed By A Glitch

If you've been on Facebook long enough, you probably know that no matter how many best-of-the-best computer whizzes keep it intact, some things ought to go wrong eventually.

Facebook's newest whoopsie saw the app auto-send friend requests to any profiles people had viewed. As @kimmysnail, a TikToker, shared in her recent video, "Facebook absolutely slaughtered me for snooping." After realizing that all of the people she stalked in the last 48 hours had received a friend request from her, she was mortified. And while Facebook did apologize for the mishap, the damage had already been done. As another victim in the same shoes as @kimmysnail accurately remarked: "That's it, guys. See you in another life."

That social media giants, like Instagram, Twitter or Facebook, occasionally slip up, is nothing new, however. A couple of years ago, Facebook's bug exposed anonymous admins of pages, allowing anyone to easily reveal which accounts posted to Facebook pages — including celebrities and politicians — for several hours. Random posts on celebrities' pages was a doozy of a glitch, too.

In 2018, Instagram users encountered a puzzling glitch that resulted in the appearance of bars over their images, giving them the impression of being distorted by a scrambled VHS tape or an unusual filter. Imagine going for a casual Insta feed check after midnight and seeing this... Jeepers creepers! A couple of my colleagues at Bored Panda actually thought that their phones were acting all weird. But that's nothing when compared to Facebook's newest whoopsie which left @kimmysnail and other unlucky snoopers wanting to bury their heads in the sand.

Of course, people at Facebook were quick to patch up the issue and apologize to the poor souls who couldn't be any more embarrassed about this: "We're notifying people about a recent update to the Facebook app that briefly caused Facebook friend requests to be sent mistakenly. We've stopped this from happening, and have canceled any requests that were sent because of this error. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused," a Meta representative told Bored Panda in an email.

But this doesn't change the fact that such slip-ups reveal just how much social media enables cyberstalking. A recent study indicated that in the US, 1-in-3 individuals confessed to engaging in online stalking of their exes or current partners. Shockingly, 8% of respondents admitted to going as far as creating new profiles solely for the purpose of monitoring their subjects on social media platforms.Sure, it's just one of those things people do: scroll through a person's (they fancy) pics, check out what an ex is up to. The kind of stalking most people, particularly women, it turns out, would not consider a criminal offense.

The reason why women are more likely to be Nosy Nancys, however, is kind of biological. "[...] Because mistakes made in partner choice are potentially more costly for women, who invest more in parenting compared to men, then cyberstalking may be a relatively low-risk strategy women employ to avoid making such partner choice errors," Martin Graff, a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of South Wales, wrote. Unsurprisingly, they are also more likely to be cyberstalked than men.