The Ins and Outs of Facebook Creeping

The increasingly popular pastime on social media

Creeping refers to "stalking" someone on social media, typically checking them out or following what's going on in their life on Facebook and other social media accounts. It's not as creepy as it sounds. Creeping means browsing their timeline, status updates, tweets, and online bios to learn more about them.

Facebook creeping is a cultural phenomenon and a popular pastime, especially among young people. It was called "stalking" in the early days of Facebook but more often now is known as "creeping," a word that carries a gentler connotation and is not associated with criminal activity, as stalking can be. It's not nearly as offensive as real-world stalking, but it is still controversial, even though it's an increasingly common activity.

Person on a laptop with Facebook open.
Christ Jackson/Getty Images

The verb "creeping" literally means to move slowly and cautiously, often so as not to be noticed or detected by others. People sometimes say a person "creeps down the hallway," for example, when they mean tip-toed or walked quietly.

This concept of doing something without others noticing is why checking people out on Facebook has become called "creeping" or "Internet creeping." The social network's interface allows people to check each other out without notifying the user that someone else is looking at or has looked at their timeline or personal profile area.

People also use "creeper" to refer to someone who likes to do a lot of creeping online by constantly checking people out. But don't call them "creeps," as a creep refers to a weird person, not a normal one who "creeps" online to follow what their friends are doing and check out people they'd like to know more about.

Facebook Creeping: Routine Activity

Facebook creeping is especially common among young people. They regularly spend time checking out the friends of their friends on the network, often looking to see who they might want to befriend or even date.

Of course, there are natural limits to creeping on Facebook. Users can set their privacy profiles so that only their friends can see what they have posted.

But many people also post material on their Facebook timelines that anyone can see. Also, suppose a mutual friend has posted something to someone's timeline. In that case, you should be able to know that posting even if you are not connected to the individual because you are allowed to see most of what your friends have posted, even on other people's timelines.

How to Tell If Someone's Creeping You on Facebook?

Everyone would love to know who's been checking them out on Facebook, right? Well, that's not easy unless the "creeper" takes some overt ​activity, such as liking or commenting on your posts or photos or favoriting/retweeting your tweets.

Facebook has opted not to allow users to see who has viewed their profiles or individual posts and photos. Facebook's help center listing common myths about the network explicitly says the network does not show or allow third-party apps to show who's viewed your posts or profile.

LinkedIn does allow some people to see who's checked them out through a feature it calls "who's viewed your profile." By default, this feature shows users how many have checked out their profiles in the past 90 days. For some users, it also shows the names of those creepers.

Rules of the Road for Creeping

In online culture, a few commonly accepted guidelines have arisen on how to do Internet creeping without offending anyone or embarrassing oneself.

One big no-no, for example, is letting on to semi-strangers that you have already checked them out in great detail online. It can be off-putting to the person who's been "creeped." For instance, copying something you saw on a person's Facebook is a terrible idea for a first date. In general, with people you are just meeting or acquaintances you barely know, it's rarely a good idea to reference personal details such as birthday parties, trips to Spain, and favorite food.

This is especially true if the item being referenced is older, like a year or two, because it tells the person that you were actively browsing their timeline instead of merely seeing it in your news feed, which is populated with more recent items. If you click the like button or comment on something older, that person may be notified that you have done so, making your action stand out since it's an older item that no one else is talking about anymore.

Another good rule of thumb is not to like or comment on anything posted by the person you're checking out if you don't know them in real life. Such actions give them an instant clue that they are being watched online by a stranger or someone they barely know, which makes many people uncomfortable.

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