Facebook's 'Ask' Button Allows Friends to Bug You About Being Single

Apparently, Facebook really really really really really wants to know who you’re fucking. The social network has introduced an annoying new feature it’s calling the “ASK button” which will allow your nosy friends to, with the click of a mouse, directly ask you about the relationship status that you have deliberately not filled out. In my day, if we had questions about a Facebook friend’s relationship status, we clicked through all of their tagged photos and formulated elaborate theories about whether or not the girl he has his arm around is just a friend or a sex-friend under the cover of darkness like normal, mature adults.

Business Insider’s Caroline Moss tried it out, and it’s just about as annoying as a person might expect. The ASK button (which could easily be called the “Annoy” button, or the “Bug” button) appears to the right of a person’s relationship status on their Facebook profile, but only if they haven’t indicated a relationship status. If you click it, a small window opens with a text field for explaining what in the world of fuck possessed you to request someone’s relationship status on Facebook rather than just texting them. Here’s what it looks like when I bother my roommate about it.

My roommate will then receive a notification that I specifically want to know about her unfilled out relationship status and why. She will respond by rolling her eyes and/or punching me.

As someone who has left her relationship status blank on purpose (enough breakups will do that to a person!), I find this mildly annoying and mostly unnecessary. I’m not over here rending my clothes or calling my Congressman demanding change, but, you know, I’d probably unfriend anyone who used the Facebook relationship ask button on me in a non-joking manner.

But that’s not to say that the feature is entirely useless; here are some people for whom this feature will be helpful: people who hit it off with a cute person at a party and wants to ask them out on an IRL date but don’t want to step on any toes. Or teens. Teens will love this. And this tool will most definitely be used by Nev on an upcoming season of Catfish.

But most of all, this feature is useful to Facebook, the company that convinces you to volunteer personal data so that they can bundle it and sell it to advertisers who will, in turn, try to do a better job selling things to you. Now they’re just nakedly asking your lovesick and socially inept friends to do their legwork.