Is It Possible to Control Access to Public Content on Facebook?

Hm, two weeks and no replies. It appears the answer is no, it is not possible to do this.

Sorry, but if you answer to a public post, your friends can see that. You can only control access to your own posts. You can try to set your friends in question to an acquaintance status and might be able to get away with a public response and them not being able to see it. I know that people of "acquaintance" status see only limited posts.

True.

If I comment on a post by, say, The New York Times, then it'll show. The permissions lie with them, and not with me.

You can shut down a lot of what goes out there of your preferences. Hit the gear wheel and do some investigating. But even with tight preferences, stuff still comes through. Facebook is notoriously bad for privacy.

Hm, that was pretty much what I figured but I was hoping there was something I was missing.

To put this in context the reason I ask is I have an ex who is a tad on the jealous side. We are trying to still be friends but she has a bug up her butt about this other person I've been seeing. Not much in the way of drama and I'd really like to keep it that way. I have both set to close friends and both have me set to close friends as well. The new partner has all of her activity set to public so every time I comment or she tags me in post or whatnot the ex gets a notification. So she goes looking and gets upset every damn time.

So, I was hoping there was a way to block when the ex saw I commented on the new partner's things. I dug through the setting but couldn't find anything of the sort.

Thank you both of you for popping by to help out.

Well, there is a reason she's your "ex" - so be brave and go to the next step and put her as acquaintance. The one who should be upset is your new partner who doesn't deserve to be on the same level as the ex Just kidding, but food for thoughts.....

@CalamityJane
You have valid point. Despite the fact that we are still very good friends outside of Facebook, I've set the ex to acquaintance (as well as some co-workers I will likely be removing in my next round of purges). She still has me set to close friends but hopefully that will reduce the number of notifications she receives.

You can set at least some of your notifications to go to a group or all but one (or more) person in your friends list. Click the gear wheel and do some investigating. It might just be the notifications, so do what you can to exclude the ex from notifications.

Changing the person from close friend to acquaintance fixed the problem. I went and checked to view my page as her and it looked just fine. She hasn't seen any tagged posts or comments I have made on public posts so despite that she has me set as a close friend it seems to have worked.