(The Root) — It's an unwritten rule that in polite company or in professional situations, some conversation topics are off-limits. Politics and religion are usually not the best subjects to start small talk with, but if your business colleagues are your Facebook friends, that discussion may already be getting off on the wrong foot without your even knowing it.
Thanks to a new Facebook feature, the possibility now exists for posts to appear on your friends' newsfeeds under your name from pages you have "liked" in the past. So if you've visited and clicked "Like" on pages for gun control, abortion or the Republican Party, your friends may see a post from that page that appears to come from you. Facebook explained the feature to ZDNet this way:
To help people find new Pages, events, and other interesting information, people may now see posts from a Page a friend likes. These posts will include the social context from your friends who like the Page and will respect all existing settings.
To make matters worse, there is currently no way to control when or if these posts show up, or which of your friends will see them. If you have any doubts, take a little inventory and "un-like" any potentially troublesome pages. And if you've received one of these posts in your newsfeed, the only way to make sure you don't get them is to un-friend the person they were sent from. Hiding that friend's posts from your newsfeed won't guarantee that you don't get posts from the liked pages.
In a perfect world, our personal and professional lives would be completely separate. But in the real world, those two entities often overlap, and in order to avoid a potentially offensive or embarrassing situation, you might just want to think before you "like."
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