Until this week, I didn’t know that you could buy a $15 Balloon Knot modesty cover to plug between the buttocks of your lifesize sex-doll to cover up “doll gape” when not in use.
I know now, thanks to a link posted by a friend on Facebook. And thanks to my comment on that post, and the social network’s news feed algorithm, so do several of my aunts and cousins and my great aunt. And my mum.
“Facebook is focused on our mission to connect the entire world,” said Mark Zuckerberg as he announced the company’s latest financial results this week. His degree of focus on connecting half my extended family to pretend anuses for lady-shaped love-dolls is presently unknown.
There’s a serious point here, though. Every day, Facebook’s news feed algorithm narrows down more than 1,500 stories that you could see when logging in, to the 300-odd that it actually shows in your feed.
The chance of a post appearing in your news feed is based on how often you’ve interacted with the person or page posting it; how many likes, shares and comments that post has received already; whether you’ve interacted with that kind of story in the past; and whether people are hiding and/or reporting it.
Facebook controls what you see, then, but you have a degree of control over how your posts are seen: you can set them to be public, for friends only, or use other options to dictate who will and won’t be able to see them, if the algorithm lets them through.
These privacy options have improved over time, and Facebook now offers a Privacy Basics guide explaining them, as well as a Privacy Checkup tool to help you understand exactly who you’re sharing with. But this all relates to your posts on Facebook.
What you can’t control, it turns out, is whether your friends see other people’s posts that you’ve commented on. Which brings us neatly back to Balloon Knots.
When I logged in to Facebook and found a fake bumhole staring me in the eye, courtesy of a link posted by a friend, I posted a quick, light-hearted reply then – in an all-too premonitory follow-up – suggested that “if Facebook’s algorithm now puts this post into my mother’s news feed, I’m suing Mark Zuckerberg”.
Not that I’d need to put any lawyers on standby, because my mum doesn’t know the friend who posted the link. So there’d be no danger of...
“Don’t know about your mother but I much appreciated having the Balloon Knot for Dolls link appear in my news feed,” a cousin posted on my Facebook timeline, sparking a cheery discussion with various other relatives piping up.
“I haven’t got this...” replied my mum. “I got it... And can’t turn off the immediate play,” added an aunt. “I got it,” chipped in my great aunt, adding a blushing emoji for good measure.
“I still haven’t got it!!!!” replied my mum, who was saved from having to google “balloon knot” from her work computer by another aunt’s visual description – “Practical joke dog turd comes to mind!” – and by a family friend helpfully explaining how she could get to the original post.
I love my family, they’re a broad-minded bunch of marvellous people, and I’m sure they’d agree with me that there is nothing wrong with people exploring the rich banquet of consenting human sexuality with anyone (or any platinum silicone thing) they like.
Even so, I inserted plugged put a sex-doll accessory into the news feeds of my family members by accident, and that feels awkward. Although possibly not as awkward as it will at the next family party. There may be balloons.
I checked in with Facebook and confirmed that there is no privacy setting to stop this happening. If you comment on someone else’s status update that’s set to “Public”, then it may appear in your friends’ news feeds, even if they aren’t connected to the original poster.
It’s made me think again about our real-world social silos, and how our behaviour varies between them. You might talk to friends in the pub about different subjects in a different way than you would to your boss or your nan.
Those conversations are public, but you generally know who can hear them and have a degree of control over who joins in. Facebook, however unintentionally, is breaking down those conversational silos.
In my case, the results were a good laugh for my relatives, and perhaps a decent idea next time they have to buy a Secret Santa present. At least I could tag the friend who posted the original link into the conversation to make the culprit absolutely clear.
“So you want me to post the Goatse picture now, right?” he replied. As my extended family turned en masse to Google with puzzled expressions on their faces, I realised that perhaps Balloon Knots weren’t so bad after all.