Facebook Removes Ticker News Feed For Monitoring Friends’ Activity

Have you noticed the tick­er is miss­ing when view­ing your Face­book news feed? It’s not just you— Face­book has offi­cial­ly removed the tick­er and con­firmed it’s no longer available.

Since its launch in 2011, the tick­er has been a per­ma­nent fix­ture of peo­ples’ news feeds. It allowed users to mon­i­tor their friends’ pub­lic activ­i­ty on Face­book in real-time.

Face­book has been qui­et­ly phas­ing out the tick­er over the past few weeks, before final­ly address­ing the mat­ter in a Help Com­mu­ni­ty thread‘.

You may think that the removal of such a long-stand­ing fea­ture would come with some kind of an announce­ment. How­ev­er, unless you were look­ing for it, Facebook’s offi­cial state­ment could be eas­i­ly missed.

Face­book’s deci­sion to remove the tick­er could be anyone’s guess at this point, as the com­pa­ny didn’t pro­vide any fur­ther information.

Users have long crit­i­cized the tick­er news feed for being a “creep­er feed,” since it allowed peo­ple to eas­i­ly keep track of every­thing their friends were doing on Facebook.

Per­haps remov­ing the tick­er is Facebook’s way of respond­ing to the crit­i­cism, or it may just be because the fea­ture wasn’t get­ting used enough.

Yet anoth­er expla­na­tion could be that Face­book is try­ing to change its pub­lic per­cep­tion, and being a place to “creep” on friends is no longer how it wants to be viewed.

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