Facebook enables abusers. And they know that they do it. In a world full of online stalking, cyber bullying, and intimidation of the abused and traumatized, the fact that Facebook has never given users the ability to turn off Facebook Messenger read receipts may be one of the most egregious hand-offs of power to abusers ever to be perpetrated by a social media platform.
Many other platforms allow you to choose whether someone who messages you can see that you read the message, but even if they didn’t, Facebook is by far the platform with the most users who are using the platform for personal use. As of the writing of this piece, Facebook has nearly 3 billion users. That’s ‘billion’, with a B, and as many as 2 billion (with a B) active daily users.
According to DemandUsage.com, 43.4% of Facebook’s users are female, with the majority of them being aged 35 or over (~20%), and 12.6% of them being between ages 25 and 34. You do the math; any way you slice it, that’s a whole lot of women who are using Facebook every day.
And if any one of those millions and millions of women on Facebook have someone stalking them through Facebook Messenger or bullying them through Facebook Messenger, they have no way to stop the bully or stalker from seeing that they have received and read the offending message. If they have been abused and their abuser is messaging them, their abuser knows the moment that they have seen that abusive message.
Sure, they can block the person sending the offending messages, but a) that’s not always possible (think of a divorced single mother who has to be able to communicate with the father of their children), and b) that’s not the point. The point is that Facebook needs to enable and empower people to NOT have people who message them know the moment the message has been read!.
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While Facebook may not choose to recognize or consider this an issue – or, more likely, they’re aware that it’s a huge glaring issue but are unwilling to do anything about it – lots and lots of other people recognize it for the issue that it is. This is why you see posts offering suggestions for various hoops through which one may jump and contortions one may go through in an effort to try to get around those read receipts, for example this post on AirDroid.com:
“Unfortunately, Messenger does not provide any option to disable read receipts. Therefore, you have to use alternate ways to make it possible. Turning on the airplane mode, using Chrome extensions, Facebook Web, reading from notifications, and restricting message features are the options one can use for this purpose.”
There are also several browser extensions for the various browsers that may disable Facebook Messenger read receipts for a while, such as Unseen for Chrome but they always end up failing with the next update, or the next way that Facebook manages to undo it.
And, again, really this is something that Facebook needs to man up and address.
The question is, what’s it going to take to get them to do it? Does somebody have to die in order for them to finally decide that it’s enough of a priority? We hope not. But we fear so.
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