Facebook private message increases the Like counter on the link’s originating third-party website. This would suggest Facebook is scanning your private messages for shared links to Web pages with Like buttons, so it can increase the number of corresponding Likes for those pages. Facebook confirmed this information today.
Facebook sent me the following statement about this issue today:
We did recently find a bug with our social plugins where at times the count for the Share or Like goes up by two, and we are working on fix to solve the issue now. To be clear, this only affects social plugins off of Facebook and is not related to Facebook Page likes. This bug does not impact the user experience with messages or what appears on their timelines.
Facebook got in touch again to further explain the situation. Here’s what’s happening: “Our systems parse the URL being shared in order to render the appropriate preview, and to also ensure that the message is not spam.”
Yet this was clearly the case before as on the Like button Web page over on Facebook Developers, the social networking giant says the number shown on a Like button is the sum of:
- The number of likes of this URL.
- The number of shares of this URL (this includes copy/pasting a link back to Facebook).
- The number of likes and comments on stories on Facebook about this URL.
- The number of inbox messages containing this URL as an attachment.
I’ve known for a while that the Like button isn’t a counter of just Likes: it also includes Shares as well as comments on Liked and Shared items on the social network. Private messages, however, are something completely different, and they have privacy questions attached to them.
The most important one: if I use Facebook to privately share a link (especially if it’s to something controversial), and the company increases the Like counter, will the Like button on that site show my name to my Facebook friends who also visit that site? I don’t expect anything to show up on my Timeline, but maybe on the site itself, since Facebook already does this for things I actively hit the Like button for.
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