Recently I have been hearing people who are quite upset that their FB groups have  shrunk by over 400 people.  At first I wondered if this was happening only to Conservative groups.  I still don’t know the answer to that.

But I came across this article which explains what FB is doing.  I never trust them; I always think that they have an angle to anything they do. But I must say that in this case I can understand their rationale.

From miamiherald.com

The actual policy change is that Facebook has removed users’ ability to directly add their friends to groups, instead allowing for friends to invite their friends into groups. As a result, the invited member is not to be counted among a group’s members until he or she visits the group page and accepts the invitation. Until then, they are placed on a list of “invited” potential members.

Before, the policy change notes, “some people may have been added to your group, but have never visited it.”

Well, now retroactively, those people who were added to a group by a friend and who have passively just viewed the group’s content in their news feed without ever visiting the group’s page are also being moved to those groups’ “invited” lists. It has resulted in the member rolls of groups all over Facebook being cut down to size, and group admins are concerned that the former members may not have any clue why they’ve been moved to the invited list or what to do about it.

That’s why “kicked out” is exactly the terminology that Internet fact-checking site Snopes used when they judged the rumor that “Facebook is kicking people out of groups who don’t participate,” to be “mostly true.” To the individual Facebook user, and to the Facebook group administrator, it appears that group memberships are declining.

It should be noted, though, that the move to the “invited” list only happens for those users who have never visited the group page or interacted with any of its content, so, theoretically, all it would have taken is one “like” on one cute photo, or one comment on one post along the way to ensure that you’re still a member of your groups, and haven’t been moved to “invited” status.

Users will want to check the groups that they belong to before Feb. 10. The new group membership policy went into effect the week of Jan. 13, according to Snopes, and users who have been placed in groups’ “invited” lists will get 28 days to decide whether to accept or decline the invitation on the group Facebook page, before the invitation expires and the group’s content no longer appears in the users’ feeds.

Facebook group admins can also remind users, within that 28-day window, to respond to their group invite.   source

So there you have it, brethren.  At least now we know the reason for our groups losing so many people.

As an admin of a few groups, I must say that I would rather have people try to join the groups because they want to join – not because a friend thinks they should be in the group.  It does cause a lot of problems.

Shalom b’Yeshua

MARANATHA!