Delete Suggested Pages to Watch

You're all over the place with this. Are you looking to hide your behavior from the Facebook community at large, or just from your fellow page admins (highly unlikely to be possible, I might add. FB tends to treat all admins of a page the same).

I apologize. I don't want for the pages I visit on my personal Facebook to show up under the admin page's "Suggested Pages to Watch." I would like to remove the current ones and prevent more pages I visit from appearing.

Ah, okay. FB isn't going to suggest pages that aren't similar. E. g. if you run a gardening page and you visit a page about dinosaurs, the dino page isn't going to be suggested as a page to watch (unless the dino page is really, really poorly tagged and categorized - possible but something this bad would likely be deliberate, and deliberately dumb. People with dino pages or any other kind of pages are looking to attract like-minded individuals. Bait and switch doesn't work too well on FB).

So, if you run a gardening page and you are visiting other sites related to gardening, they are going to show up as suggested pages to watch. I doubt that there's much you can do about that. FB isn't great with privacy granularity, and they probably don't have a good way of surfing semi-anonymously. Check your personal privacy settings, but this might not be possible under the current configuration of FB's privacy menu.

Consider Mark Zuckerberg's own ideas about online privacy and identity - it took him a long time to conceive of why people might not want to always use their real names. The concepts of drag queens who are closeted to their families, and abused spouses escaping their tormentors, had to be explained to him.

Thanks for the reply. I saw a post where an admin figured out who was watching their page (the page showed up under their suggested pages.) Facebook said they don't reveal this information. Any insight into this?

Ah - I think what the admin may have seen was an indication that your page is being watched by another page. Is it possible that that's what happened? I had this happen with my author page. I was told that it was put on a watch list but not by whom.

Here is the (condensed) post:

"I have just returned to my page after over a 2 year absence brought on by stalking from a local page! Within a week of my return, I have received a 'page watched' notification. Prior to the 'watch', my recommended pages to watch was blank. Now, their page shows up. I tested this theory by having another page 'watch' me and now they also show in my recommended pages to watch!"

Thanks again!

Ah, now I get it.

FB is getting a social signal from Page #2 watching Page #1. It's decided that Page #1 must want to (reciprocally) watch Page #2 because it's using that signal and determining that the pages are similar enough that it would make sense for you to watch it.

See, FB generally works on the basis of algorithms. The site is so enormous that it needs to do almost everything in an automated fashion.

Hence there are, let's say, 50,000 gardening pages (this might even be a low estimate, I might add). FB won't recommend all 50,000 to you to watch. Instead, it attempts to determine this by certain social signals, whether that's a page's location or its listing of members or even the captions on the photos it has posted. It's in FB's best interests for the delivery of "pages to watch" to be as good as possible. Hence out of the 50,000 pages, if you're in Boise and you only sell petunias, it's going to get stronger signals from pages where Idaho is the listed location, or petunias are one of the terms used in the majority of their photo captions.

A very strong social signal is sent out when page #2 follows page #1. FB's just weighing all of these with its algorithm (their algorithms are rather closely-guarded secrets; I'm just deducing this from observed behaviors) and going with a suggestion for a page where the social relationship is being signaled to FB that it's strong.

A similar thing occurs with the suggested friends listing. You're served up people who you have friends in common with, but you're also shown people who attended your High School within about 5 years before and after you graduated, people who list your town as their home town, people with similar interests, etc.

But FB's main product is delivering a semi-captive audience to advertisers. They do like to make things better for pages because page runners, big and small, are some of the biggest purchasers of advertising on FB.

Thanks for the explanation!

One must admit, though, that it's not very anonymous if a page you watch is suggested to watch you. I assume that you're saying the page would only be suggested if it were similar. Let's say that on my gardening business page, it is suggesting that I watch a page I visited about my political views. I don't want my fellow admins to know which way I lean so I want to get rid of the page by watching/unwatching. Since my gardening business page and the political page aren't similar, the political page won't be suggested to watch my gardening page? The pages suggested for my page right now are all over the place. Nothing is similar to the page I manage.

As you've probably figured out by now, I just don't want my fellow admins seeing what I search for. I had no idea the pages I visited would show up on the admin page along with the pages they've visited. This just seems like such a bad idea.

Okay, ignore that last message. I just tried to watch/unwatch the pages. Basically, when you unwatch them, they show back up in your suggested pages. So basically what I'm trying to do (remove suggested pages that I visited), doesn't seem to be possible. I can't believe that! Hopefully I'm wrong here...

Huh, how weird. I wonder why it's doing that.

Are you following pages as your page? I know that sounds odd, but bear with me for a second.

If you're acting as the gardening page, and then you follow or watch the Shamu the Killer Whale for President FB page (if there isn't one, then perhaps there should be), then that might be tripping the social signal. Or it could be cookies gone wild (which sounds like a bad video).

Barring any of those ideas, I'm tapped. I don't believe any of my stuff is coming up as suggestions on pages where I've got shared admin duties. I'll have to check that out, myself (and then delete all of the fangirl pages about Peter Capaldi I keep joining).

Hahaha! Great post.

If I go to Insights > Overview, at the bottom of the page I'm an admin for, it shows "Suggested Pages to Watch." From there, I clicked the + to watch the page. I watched five pages and all of the suggested pages disappeared. Success!, I thought. But no, once I unwatched the pages, one by one, the same exact ones reappeared. I have not liked, followed, or done anything other than visit the pages under "Suggested Pages to Watch" on my personal page. I've also tried to view other pages to see if the current ones get bumped off but it always shows the same exact ones.

Is there any way you could try to delete some of the "Suggested Pages" on your page? I was searching for hours yesterday, trying to figure out a solution before I posted here and it's hard to believe that I couldn't find anyone else who has had this problem.

I took a look at a page where I share admin duties. I went through the list and none of those were pages I had ever visited before. It's possible that my fellow admins had visited them, but it's odd that none of the places I'd been were listed. This is particularly of interest as I'm the most active admin for the page. You'd think the pages I'd visited would be all over that sucker. But they aren't.

Here's what I understand you to be doing:

You see the list, e. g.

• Shamu for President
  
• Fans of Lint
  
• We Hate Aardvarks

You like the Shamu page. And it disappears from the suggestions because - is it because you, fbquestion, liked it, or because you, acting as Gardening Page liked the Shamu page?

I don't want to waste your time, I'm just trying to figure out why this is happening (and it could even be spyware, which can screw with all sorts of stuff that you might not expect).

PS I need to make a Fans of Lint page.

You are not wasting my time. I feel like I'm wasting yours! You are being extremely helpful and I'm so appreciative of the time you've taken out of your day to help me.

I've tried watching/unwatching as both fbquestion and Gardening Page. It has the same exact effect. (The "Suggested Pages to Watch" section goes away and then comes back when I unwatch the pages). I also want to point out that liking and watching is different for the "Suggested Pages to Watch." I'm not trying to be smart but I just want to confirm that I'm not liking/following pages but merely "watching" them to try to remove them from the "Suggested Pages to Watch" list.

I would "like" Fans of Lint... but not if it shows up on the admin page

I don't mind trying to figure this out, but I think I've hit my limit.

I'm sorry I couldn't answer you although I did find that there really already is a Fans of Lint page, but it's not about fuzzy gray dusty stuff.

Good luck! I think the takeaway we both got from this exercise is that Facebook is weird.

I understand and I appreciate your help! Thank you again.

Oh, no sweat. I just hope this helps other people figure it out later.

Feel free to ask other stuff about FB. I'm getting my Master's in Communications (Social Media), so it's helpful if I look into such things.