Anyone heard of "sponsored stories"? Whenever a company (or politician, etc.) decides they want to advertise through Facebook, they pay Facebook so that their posts will appear on the newsfeeds of all the friends of anyone who likes their page. It happens quite regularly, sometimes multiple times in a day. For instance, this post has been appearing on my newsfeed about twice daily: http://sphotos.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos.....13478351_n.jpg EVERY TIME that religious group posts something to their page, it appears on my newsfeed, even though I haven't liked their page and have no interest in doing so. I've also been seeing posts from Mitt Romney's page, all because one of my friends liked his page.

Another way that advertising occurs on Facebook is through those "LIKE AND SHARE IF YOU THINK CANCER IS BAD" or "LIKE THIS STATUS IF YOU WANT 2OOO FRIEND REQUEST" posts. Example: http://angryjedi.files.wordpress.co.....t-00-36-53.png Despite being motherfucking annoying, most of the pictures feature teenagers that are stylized to appeal to today's retarded generation. -__- They're usually wearing clothing or displaying something with a brand name on it, and therefore, they're subliminally advertising for that company. These pages don't belong to real people, but are instead controlled by bots and paid for by the company that wants its products advertised in the pictures.

So basically, Facebook is just a giant arena for sneaky advertising. Even worse, there's no easy way to get rid of these advertisements -- Facebook allows you to hide or report individual posts, but you can't prevent it from posting more of them in the future. As much as I like being able to contact most of my friends through Facebook, I'm considering deleting my account just because I'm tired of this bullshit. :/ My newsfeed is becoming increasingly full of advertisements and spam, and all I can do is hide them and wait for more to appear.

Social networking? More like social advertising. :|