Facebook “10-Second Rule” on Auto-Sharing Spam

If you use Facebook a lot then you probably noticed that every time you check out Viddy or Socialcam post from one of your friends that your feed is now stating you watched the same thing. Even Zynga has gotten into the act of auto-spamming your news feed when you play one of their games it will post on your timeline that you won a million dollars, join in now, or any number of other activities that you may or may not want made public. Facebook as also added over 60 new apps with approved auto-sharing abilities. Tecca has a list of these here.

What can you do to stop this? You could always go to Account Settings, navigate to Apps, then click the small x next to "Post on your behalf," or change the apps posting permission visibility to "Only Me."  Seems to be a real pain in the rear end. But it is the culprit that approved all these auto-sharing spam apps that might be helping us out by instituting a 10 second rule before the app can auto share to your timeline. Basically, if you click on one of the many videos circulating on Facebook, you would have 10 seconds to watch it and click out of it before it could auto-share it. There have been many times that the picture and wording of the video was very misleading and I clicked immediately out of it and had something auto-shared on my timeline. that is why I have quit watching all videos and keep Facebook browsing to a minimum. Natively posted pictures and videos are all that I click on these days.

So if you are not wanting things auto-shared just remember that you will have 10 seconds from Facebook grace period before the app can auto-post it.

[read]