Let us search for people on Facebook again

Let us search for people on Facebook again

Started
June 18, 2019
Petition to
Signatures: 4,200Next Goal: 5,000
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Why this petition matters

In 2014, Facebook launched a tool called graph search, which let you find people by location, company, school, interests, gender, and more. It let you find events, photos, and posts by specific people. It let US have access to the data that our friends were sharing.

Facebook removed this feature and disabled Search is Back, a tool I built in 2015 which has seen 26 million uses by 2.89 million users. With just a single article promoting it, 1/1000 of Facebook users found and used this tool, using it on average ten times each. We want to search!!

Facebook! We want to find friends of ours who work at a specific company! We want to know who's in a city we are traveling to! We want to know who likes hiking, who likes techno, who likes Italian Food! We are trying to connect with each other, and you're making it difficult.

We are asking you to re-enable the URLs that made Search is Back, or create an ability to find people in the way we used to.

We recognize that there are privacy and safety with allowing search, and we ask that you look for ways to solve them that don't involve removing the ability to find other people.

Connecting with people is about more than an algorithmic cannon of images and text. If you give advertisers the ability to target to our tiniest demographic and we can't even find each other, we're not happy about this imbalance.

Thank you for listening.

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Signatures: 4,200Next Goal: 5,000
Support now
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