Ignoring your friends’ dumb events—no, I will not go to your sock puppet gallery opening—and then pretending you never saw the invite in the first place—wait, what sock puppet gallery opening?—is a time-honored Facebook tradition. It’s just like pretending you never got their voicemail, or claiming you totally sent a text when you absolutely forgot. Facebook, unfortunately, is about to put a stop to all your deception with a very rude new update.
The Daily Dot reports that Facebook is beginning to implement “read receipts” on event pages, which will allow organizers to see which of the 372 close, personal friends they invited to their birthday party looked at the invitation and didn’t even bother to say “yes” (read: maybe) or “maybe” (read: no) as a sign of human decency.
Now, that one person whose backyard birthday party you avoided thinking about all summer because you’re allergic to her nine dogs and don’t really like her that much anyway has been armed with the tools for an actual confrontation. Now, your uncle can come at you from all sides about the fact that you didn’t come to his Fourth-of-July BBQ/divorce. Now, friendship will become a minefield, every conversation becoming a potential Real Housewives reunion about why the hell you couldn’t, I don’t know, just say no if you weren’t going to come anyway, I’m not like mad or anything, but you could have just been honest. Did you consider that?
And here’s the even worse news:
In both Groups and Messenger, there is no option provided by Facebook for disabling the read receipts. Of course, there are unofficial workarounds that will do the trick for you if you feel strongly enough about protecting your right to not respond immediately to everything.
Just like Facebook’s other iterations of the read receipts, there is no option to opt out of the confirmations in Events. (Though give it a week and it’s likely someone will figure out a solution.)
Time to delete your account and go home.
Contact the author at mark.shrayber@jezebel.com.
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