Is this a Facebook stalking or not?

It appears on the right hand side of the page when you are posting anything. Maybe this person was just clicking to see the person added and accidently clicked like.
I wouldn’t worry about it unless it continues, then I might unfriend them if it is bothering you.

As someone told me long ago, nothing on Facebook is private and so we should think of everything as public. Even if you think it’s private, it may not be. I don’t think of what that person did as stalking, I think of it as them just clicking around.

The feed at the top right of Facebook (the sidebar) is not limited to posts that will appear in your newsfeed; it also includes your friends’ interactions with their friends, who might not be people who you are friends with. Likewise, your interactions with all of your friends will appear on your friends’ sidebars. Some people don’t like having quite so much of their Facebook activity declared to their friends, so you’ll frequently see some variation of this post:

“Please do me this favor: Hover over my name above. In a few seconds you’ll see a box that says “Subscribed”. Hover over that, then go to “Comments and Likes” and please unclick it. That will stop all my posts showing up on the side bar for strangers to see. If you repost this I will do the same for you. You’ll know I’ve acknowledged you, because if you tell me that you’ve done it, I’ll “like” it.”

Sometimes these requests are full of misinformation (e.g., “strangers” can’t see your posts in their newsfeeds, although strangers can see their friends’ posts on your wall, partly depending on your permissions). Regardless, you can’t control what shows up in your friends’ sidebar, only they can. So whether or not they choose to do as you request is entirely up to them.

All of this is to say that the “thanks for the add” post by your new friend (let’s call him Frank) would have appeared in the sidebars of all of Frank’s friends, unless they clicked “unsubscribe” for Frank. It would not have appeared in your friends’ sidebars, though it would have appeared in their newsfeeds (centre of the page). So, even if you’d sent out one of those “please unsubscribe from me” status updates, and even if all your friends unsubscribed from you, you could not have prevented that post from appearing in Frank’s friends’ sidebar.

I wouldn’t consider it stalking for someone you don’t know to notice it.

Good question. I get the feeling a lot of people don’t know how what the sidebar is doing.

No, this is not stalking. Stalking a person requires much more than you have posted here.

On an unrelated note, why would you write “thanks for the add” on someone’s wall?

Some people have nothing better to do. Kinda like people who anonymously subscribe to collective question and answer websites and spend their time giving and taking advice from strangers. In the scheme of life, I wouldn’t spend too much time worrying about someone who clicks a “like” button on everything you post.

You can always amp up your privacy settings. Assuming this person is not a friend, it’s definitely creepy. He’s following you from a far. Why not amp up your privacy settings? Simple solution.

I agree that kind of “stalking” is annoying.

Some people just enjoy going around Liking everything they see. It’s their way of letting their friends know that their posts have been seen by a friend. They’re just being friendly, not singularly obsessed with you. Or to put another way, they’re obsessed with Facebook in general.

If you don’t like it, then you can exclude that person from seeing your posts, unfriend them, or just ignore it.

This is not even close to a form of stalking. Everything on Facebook that is not a private message or a discussion inside a private group is completely public to the people you have deemed “friends”. Just like @robmandu said, if it makes you uncomfortable, just unfriend them (I hate the fact that “unfriend” is a word now, but that is another discussion).

@Neophyte @robmandu It is possible that the person isn’t friends with them, but a mutual friend, in which that other person could be “liking” things from a far, which this user is creeped out by. However, if it’s on a public space like Facebook, you need to amp up your privacy settings.