Dear Mr Zuckerberg: Here are the features Facebook needs.

Dear Mark Zuckerberg,

We are writing to you regarding your little known social networking site which goes by the name of ‘Facebook‘.

At this stage, you have 1.49 billion monthly active users, your site generates $1.4 million in revenue every hour, and there are more US citizens with a Facebook account than voted in the last election.

So, if there’s one thing a guy like you needs, it’s unsolicited advice about how you should run your business.

In The Social Network, a wise man (Justin Timberlake, it was Justin Timberlake) said: “We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we’re going to live on the internet.”

Well Mr. Zuckerberg, if we’re going to live on the internet, and more specifically on Facebook, then we have a few gripes about our living conditions. As our landlord, we’d like you to address some of our concerns, which include series-ruining spoilers, unflattering tagging, and the free reign our mum has to share and post things that don’t make sense.

Spoiler block

Unfortunately, that friend who cannot help but post sporting results/Game of Thrones twists/the winner of The Bachelor is here to stay. Mr Zuckerberg, do you have any idea what it’s like to be at work, or at some event you were obliged to attend, and not be able to check Facebook out of fear that it will reveal something we’ve been holding out to watch?

God forbid we have to put our phones away and speak to the people around us. Yuck. This is 2016, not 1916.

Enter: The spoiler block. The feature would allow us to identify key words eg. ‘Masterchef’ and block any content featuring that word. No longer will people have wasted 100 hours of television viewing to be told the winner via Tom Smith’s grammatically incorrect status.

Smart tagging

Zuckerberg, let’s be real. There are photos where it’s blatantly obvious that the person will NOT want to be tagged. When the following photo is posted to your wall by a “friend” on your birthday, it becomes very clear that Facebook is not doing it’s job:

When someone attempts to tag their friend in an objectively unflattering photo, Facebook should respond with the following message: “No – Sir/Madam, this picture is revolting. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for trying to humiliate a friend like that. Shame on you.” Thanks Facebook, you have our back.

If Facebook can predict faces, it must also have the potential to predict when our face…no longer looks like a face. Let’s launch smart tagging, so that we don’t log onto Facebook after a long day and find 14 photos of ourselves looking like Gollum.

Set our mum’s account to invisible…please

Okay, so this is less of a suggestion and more…begging. We’re begging. It’s a free country so our mum has the right to have a Facebook account and comment on things she doesn’t understand. But there should be a way to set someones account to ‘invisible’.

Mr. Zuckerberg – she shares photos that aren’t hers. She uploads blurry pictures where you can’t make out what it’s of. She comments on articles and gets trolled by hundreds of people. Once she challenged a random internet man and got SENT A DICK PIC. This is for her own good Zuckerberg. Please. Our mum needs to believe she is engaging with the Facebook world, but actually be invisible. PLEASE.

Invisible tagging

Mr Zuckerberg, what are we to do when we see something horrendous on Facebook, such as a cringey fitspo picture of a girl we went to school with, or one of those ‘share if you agree’ posts, or a racist status? We want all our friends to see, but don’t want to publicly tag them because that looks like we endorse the material.

We need invisible tagging. We want to alert our friends to something, without the subject (eg. racist friend from school) knowing that we’ve alerted our friends. Screenshots are inconvenient. Copying and pasting their status doesn’t have the same effect. We want a direct, invisible tag, that hurts no one, but has high entertainment value.

Fact checker. By God we need a fact checker

See, the great thing about Facebook is that everyone has a platform for their opinions. But the downside to that, is of course that EVERYONE HAS A PLATFORM FOR THEIR OPINIONS. We need a fact checker. Or sources. We want footnotes. If someone is going to make a status about how vaccines cause autism, or refugees come here and drain our welfare system, We. Want. Evidence.

At the bottom of the status there should be either a red, orange or green light. If the status is absolutely disproved by all existing literature, you get a red light. Not all voices are equal, Mr Zuckerberg.

Watch the trailer for ‘The Social Network’. 

New features in group conversations

We need to talk about group conversations. Putting our phone down for 5 minutes and coming back to it with 204 messages isn’t ideal. We need to be able to tag people in group conversations when the content is relevant to them. Also, sometimes something is said and we want to ‘like’ it, but instead we have to go to the trouble of typing ‘haha’. We repeat – this is 2016, not 1916.

Furthermore – ‘Jessie/Clare Stephens has left this conversation’ appears rude and abrupt. If someone is leaving a group chat, they ought to provide a valid reason. Eg. ‘your constant chatter lowers my IQ every time I engage with it’, or ‘ my life is too important for these pointless notifications’.

We hope you have found our suggestions useful and insightful. We do of course have countless others, including a feature which warns you that what you’re about to post is a humble brag, and we need to get rid of the thumbs up because frankly, it always looks rude.

Mark Zuckerberg, in a world that bows down to you, you can always count on us to tell you the truth.

Yours sincerely,

Clare and Jessie Stephens.