The Atlantic

You Are Not Connected

Facebook Messenger's automated notification for new friends could use some help.
Source: Navistock / Shutterstock / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

Recently, Facebook users have noticed that when you add a new friend, you also get a message that looks like the person wrote to you.

The red notification causes a surge of hope, or at least curiosity, that this new friend had something nice or meaningful to say. But it’s just an automated delivery that’s actually from Facebook, not

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic5 min readAmerican Government
What Nikki Haley Is Trying to Prove
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Nikki Haley faces terrible odds in her home state of
The Atlantic7 min readAmerican Government
The Americans Who Need Chaos
This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here. Several years ago, the political scientist Michael Bang Petersen, who is based in Denmark, wanted to understand why peop
The Atlantic3 min read
They Rode the Rails, Made Friends, and Fell Out of Love With America
The open road is the great American literary device. Whether the example is Jack Kerouac or Tracy Chapman, the national canon is full of travel tales that observe America’s idiosyncrasies and inequalities, its dark corners and lost wanderers, but ult

Related Books & Audiobooks