Tampa woman gets a Facebook “fan badge” and realizes it may have exposed who she’s been stalking

A Tampa-based TikTok creator who goes by Emlegs says she opened Facebook to a notification she’d never seen before. The app was telling her she’d earned something called a fan badge on someone else’s profile, and at first she had no clue what that meant.

In a video posted to her account, Emlegs said she turned to ChatGPT to figure it out, saying, “my heart fell out of my a** when I read that, cause I’m sure you can imagine who the f**k I’m stalking on Facebook.” According to Emlegs, checking someone’s profile too often, or “engaging with someone’s profile a little bit too often,” is enough for Facebook to decide you qualify as a fan.

What worries Emlegs is what happens if she accepts the badge. The notification gave her a choice to accept or deny the badge. She said accidentally accepting it “stays on your profile as a fan badge of them,” which she compared to a credential, saying it’s “basically exclaiming to the world, I stalk your Facebook account!” She’s worried the person she’s been checking on could see it too.

There’s more to Facebook’s fan badge

Facebook’s own Help Center frames the badge differently. The company describes top fan and rising fan badges as recognition for people who consistently like, comment on or share a page or profile’s posts. The feature also has to be switched on before anyone can receive one. So the badge isn’t about quietly looking at someone’s profile as much as it is about activity they can see — which is probably little comfort to anyone worried about being caught watching, like the woman who said her ex tracked her life for nearly a decade.

The comments section had plenty of people worried about the same thing, though some questioned whether the badge was even accurate. One person wrote, “baby I’m not a fan, I’m a private investigator.” Another pushed back on the badge’s accuracy entirely, writing, “I’ve literally gotten a fan badge for people’s pages I have NEVER been on.” Another commenter joked, “This is why we have burner accounts babe.” The idea of someone finding you across platforms has also featured in another viral story, after a woman said a Bumble match tracked her down across social media.

Emlegs never names the person she’s referring to, and the video doesn’t show the specific account where she received the badge. She closed things out by saying she’d like to invite whoever came up with the feature to her kitchen “to serve them a knuckle sandwich.” The video doesn’t say whether she ultimately accepted or denied the badge.