Why does my Facebook post show as unavailable to some people?
Hi everyone, Leo Notenboom here for AskLeo.com. Here's the question.
Every so often when I post or share
something to Facebook, I get people telling me that they can't
see it or that it says something about being unavailable.
I can see it just fine.
What gives?
Well, Facebook is doing what it was told to do.
Specifically, it's doing what the original
poster of that item you're attempting to share told it to do.
And it's super easy to overlook.
If we take a look.
When you make a Facebook post,
there's a little icon down at the bottom that usually gives you an option
to control the visibility of what it is you're about to post.
In my case, I have everything marked
public because I don't want to be second guessing.
Is this safe to post on public "only to my friends?"
Because, of course, no.
Anything can be shared if you work at it hard enough.
But it's not uncommon for people to default to sharing only with their
friends, or maybe only with friends of friends.
That's an easy thing to change.
Like I said, down at the bottom of the post,
there should be perhaps a little globe icon, perhaps a little person icon.
And if you click on the little down arrow next to it, you'll get the option
to control who should be able to see this public.
Friends. Friends accept friends.
I mean, it can get really complicated.
Facebook does give you a lot of control
over exactly who should or should not see what it is you're about to post.
The problem that you're running into is all about what happens next.
If you are shown a post from one of your
friends and they've set the visibility to be only their friends,
then when you go to share it, which you may be able to do your visibility.
The visibility of what you share is
limited to still their friends, not yours, nobody else.
It's limited to only the people that that friend originally shared it
with everybody else who's on your feed will see content unavailable.
That's because the friend whose post
you're attempting to share said, I want this to be seen only by my friends.
Now, the solution there are two.
One is ask your friend to change the visibility.
You can change the visibility.
After you've posted something, you simply go back to the post,
click on the little icon, and change the drop down to be what it is you want.
That's why you often see the comment,
can you make this public or can you make this shareable?
That's really all it boils down to.
The other, of course, is to do things like save the picture or
save the post or take a screenshot of the post and share that.
That's why I say anything can be shared if you try hard enough.
But it does require really stepping out
of the Facebook way of doing things and basically working around the system.
Now, there's one other time that sharing of an existing post is by default limited
and that is if you're sharing a post that was made in a group you're a member of.
By default, group posts are visible only to members of the group.
Now it is a group setting.
Group posts can be public but for the most part, many groups make sure that what they
share within their group is supposed to stay within the group.
There's no way to change that on a per post level, you cannot share something
that you got in a group with people outside of that group.
Again, you may be able to share it,
but people outside of the group would get content unavailable.
And again, the only way to work around
that one is to either ask the person who shared that who posted that originally
to post it again on their own timeline instead of the group or take a screenshot,
save the image to your disk, whatever work around Facebook to make that happen.
And finally, yeah, content unavailable can
mean that the content doesn't exist anymore.
If I share something and then I delete the post anybody who had shared that post
could potentially be sharing content unavailable with their friends because
the content is quite literally unavailable for everybody because I deleted it.
But the bottom line here is that whenever you encounter this situation,
whenever you seem to think that gosh, I can see it but they can't take a quick
look at the sharing visibility for that post.
There's a very good chance it's set
to something other than public and that is what needs to change.
If it can't be changed, you can't share it.
That's kind of the point.
Hope that's helpful for updates
for comment, for related links and more, visit
askleo.com/80737
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.