Those Facebook followers you’re posting about are not harmful | Truth of Facebook 'following me' hoax exposed

Those Facebook followers you’re posting about are not harmful | Truth of Facebook 'following me' hoax exposed: 

If you’ve spent anytime on Facebook the last couple of days you have likely seen a version of this status:

I just did mine … found X-number of people that I did not know following me. Checked out a few of the profiles and they were shady. All of them are now blocked. I’ll be checking this regularly. My account is set to private for a reason, I’d like to keep it that way.
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Friends and Family please check this out! I had tons of weirdos following me and blocked them all!
****If you go to account settings (in FB), blocking, block users, and type in “following me”, without the quotes, you might be surprised just who is following you. You will see accounts from random middle eastern countries who are following you. You have to block them 1 at a time, I don’t think there is a way to do it all at once. Check your followers and tell your friends and family to check theirs as well!! Scary …

Those Facebook followers you’re posting about are not harmful

This message is, quite simply, bogus. As long as your status updates, photos, shares, etc. are not public, your followers — whether they’re from Afghanistan or Albany — will not see anything. (SN: I am not sure why a follower from a middle eastern country is somehow more concerning than a “scary” follower who lives here, within striking distance, but anyway …)

Followers are no more harmful than a random person who is not your connection who comes across your status (which can only happen if your settings are “open”) due to a notification or a search.

Of all the things people should be concerned about in regard to social media (ex: posting images of kids on the toilet or announcing they’re going on vacation), this is most-certainly not one of them.

So go ahead and check your settings, but do so to make sure those you want to see your posts are seeing your posts — that can be one person or every damn person on social media. But please, please stop spreading that panicked, cut-and-paste message that is full of fallacy.