How to Avoid a Facebook Photo Tagging Fiasco

Posted by Jeff Vreeland
Wed, 2010-01-13 01:21

One thing I have had many campaign staffers ask me about is the ability on Facebook to block people from tagging their candidate in photos. I tell them unfortunately there is no way to do so if they are already your friend. I then proceed into my rant about how I wish Mr. Zuckerberg and his team of experts would take the time to develop a approval process for photo tagging done by a "networked friend."

The usual response is then, "Ok, well how do we prevent some idiot from tagging our candidate on the picture of a [fill in your own bad picture scenario]."

Unfortunately there is no way to prevent this - but you can keep the photo tagging going viral in a few easy steps. 

If you log into facebook and navigate to your application settings page, you will want to click on the 'Edit Settings' link next to the Photos application (as pictured below):

From there you will want to deselect the option that states "Publish to Streams" (as shown below):

The same feature can be repeated in the Video application settings to prevent a video tag from being published to a news stream. 

Is this the perfect option? Absolutely not, but it can save you some headache when/if your campaign turns ugly.