So last year I took a class from Professor Wendy Chun of Brown university. It was a very good class! But that is beside the point.

She made a facebook page for the class, which didn’t get used much, but at the beginning I decided maybe that meant she was open to being friended by students, which seemed possibly like fun, since she seemed pretty interesting. So I sent her a friend request saying something like “If you don’t like accepting friend requests from students that’s totally reasonable, but if you do, hi!”. She didn’t, apparently, as she didn’t accept the request.

Today (and once before, I think) I saw this in my news feed:

This seems… bad. So yes, facebook does in many cases already show you the friends of people you are not friends with. But is seems quite bad to show people notifications about people they’ve attempted to friend but who haven’t friended them back. And especially this kind of notification: “Hey, this person doesn’t like you very much, but look at all these other people they’re willing to let into their lives!”