Backstalking: Introducing the hilarious new craze of digging for gold in your friends’ Facebook past

Is your snotty mate winding you up? Fancy taking them down a peg?

Why not step back in time to an age when they were socially awkward and a bit of a dork?

‘Backstalking’ has been plaguing news feeds nationwide over the past few weeks. The concept is simple: go back through your Facebook friends’ timeline, find something incriminating from when they were like 15, and like it or comment on it to bring it back to haunt them.

These include statuses, photos and videos that at the time, your friend probably thought would propel them into popularity.

Living life to the full

Thanks for the heads up mate

Who remembers ‘notes’?

Facebook is the most popular platform for this, providing a helpful side-feed notifying all your friends when a gem from the past has been discovered.

Nobody is safe, with all mutual friends able to witness the ‘like’ or ‘comment’ from 2008 in action.

Heck, Zuckerberg is so keen for everyone to bear witness to your embarrassing past, sometimes the action will appear on your friend’s home page as well. How great is that!?

Cheers pal

Ryan felt that everyone should see this

Doubt Tom finds it as funny as Ryan does…

But why do we feel the need to do this to ourselves? Maybe we are sick of friends posting photos of themselves in order to gain meaningless ‘likes’? Or maybe we are looking to bring them back to reality?

Bristol student Edmund Wise argues ”It is a great form of socio-sexual revenge as well, because the people who are deemed popular, charming and stupidly handsome must succumb to the disgusting, greasy, spotty haired remnants of their youth.

“Not that I’m bitter.”

Reckless

Mental. Hate to think what they do in Topshop

Meanwhile Birmingham student Harry Walker deems this social trend as just plain ”weird” and ”doesn’t understand why people would devote their time to doing this”.

Is it not just as embarrassing that your life is that uninteresting you devote your time to this endeavor?

Looks like you’re on your own mate

Who didn’t play FarmVille!? (I didn’t…)

The phenomenon is the latest in the series of nostalgic social media trends. Earlier this year, Twitter introduced its ‘Discover‘ function, allowing users to look back at their first tweets. Thankfully this unearthed gems such as this:

Seen any cracking backstalks? Screenshot them and email them in to [email protected]