“I know nobody will read my status but…” Facebook statuses

Do silly Facebook games that assert to promote awareness for good causes detract from serious issues, or is it just all a little bit of fun?

If you’re a regular Facebook user then there is a good chance that at some point you’ll have come across various Facebook users posting updates that begin with the sentence “I know nobody will read my status but…” following by some intriguing, albeit rather odd, status.

For example…

I know nobody will read my status but sometimes, when I’m bored, I get wrapped up in my tutu, put a giant horn on my head, lather sparkles all over myself and prance around the kitchen pretending I’m a magical unicorn!

Or

I know nobody will read my status but sometimes, when I’m bored, I get wrapped up in a sleeping bag and lather butter all over myself and slide around the kitchen floor pretending I’m a slug

Or even

i know nobody will see my status but sometimes when i am bored, i go into the garden, i cover myself in earth and i pretend i am a carrot.

And if you’re intrigued enough to respond by either liking or commenting on the post, you’ll probably soon be getting something like the following response messaged to you by the user who posted the update…

As per the rules! Dear fellow unicorn I am really, really sorry. I have lost at this game and now so have you! You liked or commented on my status so you must now post the following message as your status to continue the game for Breast Cancer Awareness (unless you have lost your sense of humor).

[followed by aforementioned status update]

And thus the cycle begins again and the message spreads throughout Facebook.

It may seem like a silly and harmless game on the surface, of which there have been plenty over the last few years.

But many have spoken out about games that purport to justify their existence by asserting they are “raising awareness” for a charitable cause like breast cancer, claiming that in reality these games promote the social media phenomenon of armchair slacktivism and that they result in doing more harm than good to the causes they claim to be helping.

Slacktivism refers to the illusion that you are helping a charity in some way by performing a task that is easy and that requires no real sacrifice in either time or money. The question it raises is that does it lead the person to believe they have genuinely carried out a charitable act, and thus less likely to follow this up with an actual charitable act (such as a tangible donation) in the future?

Put simply, or perhaps bluntly, copying and pasting a message that asserts you are raising awareness for breast cancer and telling others to do the same doesn’t help breast cancer causes.

Many argue that such games are emotionally manipulative, whether intentionally or not. For example those who create such copy & paste driven games on social media append the assertion that the game is to raise awareness for a good cause as a social engineering technique to increase the chances of the game spreading virally, despite not having any real concern for the specific cause.

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It’s perhaps easy to feel good that you “helped” raise awareness by performing a task that was neither demanding on your time or your wallet, but this is the essence of slacktivism. You haven’t helped. Charities need to be tangibly funded, and they need people to take their time to help with genuine causes or drives or donate real money, and these games do neither.

There is nothing wrong with participating in such games, providing they don’t ask you to reveal personal information about yourself or perform any sort of undesirable or potentially malicious task, but consider leaving out the part about raising awareness. Because that is not what you’re doing.

Facebook initiatives can help good causes though, if you remember the Ice Bucket Challenge that did implore users to donate money in support of ALS, and this did result in large donations making their way to ALS charities.