About

Share If You Agree, sometimes phrased as Like If You Agree, is an expression used to solicit more interaction on Facebook posts in order to expose them to a wider audience. The phrase is often mocked for its close association with clickbait.

Origin

The Facebook content-sharing ability was introduced internally to Facebook in 2010, when during a revamp of Facebook pages and groups.^[1] The ability was granted for users to share content through an API that could be installed on any web site for users to share individual articles or pieces of content to their own walls, later rebranded as Timelines.^[2]

The share link also allowed users to share the content of a post made by a page or group, and later, the feature was introduced for the posts of individuals.) The purpose of this was to enable page administrators, who were often paying customers of Facebook, to distribute content more widely through viral means, imitating the "retweet" functionality of Twitter.^[3]

Spread

After the functionality went into wide release, users began creating posts using the phrase; criticism began soon after. On October 22nd, 2012, Social media blogger Daylan Pierce wrote about extensive "Like" and "Share" scams, where users looking to sell social media exposure stole photographs and paired them with made-up stories to farm for viral hits.^[3] On Soshable, author Conor Livingston wrote and article titled "Like and Share if You Agree Needs to Stop" on November 1st, 2012, saying those using the phrase were "playing the guilt card."^[4] In 2015, the Telegraph of Great Britain ran an opinion article titled "Viral memes are ruining our politics. Share if you agree," ridiculing the phrase and others like it for the way they eliminated subtlety from online political conversation.^[5]

As of October 22, 2015, the phrase remains in wide use in both ironic and un-ironic senses. For example, the Facebook group "Hit Like If You Agree,"^[6] which is devoted to sharing a variety of un-ironic, un-themed viral content, has over 71,000 followers, while the Facebook group "Share If You Agree,"^[7] which is devoted to sharing image macros combining the phrase with bizarre images, has over 5,000 followers. Thousands of links on Reddit use the phrase in their titles, with a mix of sincerity and irony;^[8] a similar phrase, with the "sharing" substituted for "rt" (as in retweet) is used over 550,000 times per month on Twitter.^[9]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References