The Donna who wasn't Donna
Last Tuesday at 4:47 in the afternoon, I got a Facebook friend request from Donna Wieczorek — my closest friend from teaching, the woman in the room next to mine for twelve years at New Trier, the woman I talk to every Sunday morning. The thumbnail looked like her. The name was spelled correctly. My thumb actually moved toward the green button.
Then I noticed: three mutual friends. The real Donna and I have been on each other's friend lists since 2009 and we share something like a hundred and forty mutuals. The account had been on Facebook since March. The profile photo was Donna at fifty, which she has not been in a while. And I am already friends with Donna.
I closed the app. I called Tom in Denver, because Tom is the insurance adjuster son and the one I call when I think I've been scammed. Tom walked me through the report-and-block dance in about ninety seconds, then texted the real Donna in Madison so she could tell her actual friends list to expect more nonsense.
Donna texted back: "Third one this year. Welcome to Tuesday."
Here's the thing. I have been on Facebook since 2009. I survived the streaming-service multiplication, I survived Emma teaching me what tabs were, I have thoughts about timeline algorithms that nobody asked for. I have opinions. I've earned them. And I still almost let a stranger in the front door wearing my best friend's face. The version of Facebook I learned on isn't the version that exists in May 2026. What follows is the refresher I needed at 4:48 last Tuesday.
What Facebook even is in 2026
It's no longer a friends-and-family newsfeed. It hasn't been for years. It's four different products glued together, and once you see them as four products instead of one feed, the whole thing starts to make sense.
News Feed. Roughly eighty percent Reels (those short looping videos that didn't exist a few years ago) and "Suggested for You" posts from people you don't know. The actual posts from your actual friends are about twenty percent of what you'll see. You can mostly disable the Reels in Settings if they make you motion-sick — I do.
The Groups are still the best part of the platform — more on that later.
Marketplace. Genuinely useful. The second-most-used part of Facebook for people over sixty. I bought my patio side table here for nineteen dollars.
Messenger. The part your adult kids and grandkids actually open. Encrypted by default since the end of 2023. This is where the family lives now.
If you treat the four parts as four different tools, the platform stops feeling like a flood and starts feeling like a toolkit. (Don't judge me — I know that sounded like a brochure. It won't happen again.)
The privacy settings I'd actually change today
Pour your coffee. This will take twenty minutes and it is genuinely worth doing. Menu paths are accurate as of May 2026 — Meta moves them around quarterly, so if a name has shifted slightly, look for the closest match.
- Open Settings & Privacy → Settings. On the phone, tap your profile photo top-left, scroll down, tap "Settings & Privacy," then "Settings."
- Audience & Visibility → Profile and Tagging. Set "Who can see your future posts" to Friends. Set "Who can post on your profile" to Friends. Set "Review tags people add to your posts before the tags appear" to On. This is the one that prevents the "Hi everyone, follow my new account!" cousin-spam from landing on your wall.
- Audience & Visibility → How People Find and Contact You. Set "Who can send you friend requests" to Friends of Friends. This is the single biggest change for spam reduction — it cuts off ninety percent of the cold-stranger requests overnight. Also set "Who can look you up using the email address you provided" to Friends. Same for phone number.
- Audience & Visibility → Reels. Set Reels visibility to Friends only, or off entirely if you don't post them. (I don't. I am 72. I don't need to do a dance.)
- Settings → Permissions → Location. Turn off Background Location and Location History. Facebook does not need to know which Trader Joe's I'm in. Nothing does. (If you're worried about location data more broadly, our piece on whether seniors actually need a VPN is the next thing to read.)
- Settings → Account Center → Personal Details → Identity Confirmation. Turn on the new flag for suspicious friend requests that Meta rolled out globally in March 2026. It uses Meta's AI tools to warn you when an incoming request comes from an account with a mismatched country, no mutuals, and no real activity. It would have caught fake-Donna in about a tenth of a second.
- Settings → Account Center → Password and Security → Two-Factor Authentication. Turn this on. If you have not yet, our explainer on why two-step verification is non-negotiable walks through it. Do this before you do anything else on this list, honestly.
- Settings → Activity Log. Skim it once a year. Delete the old likes that no longer represent you. (I had liked an Air Supply tribute band in 2014. I am sorry.)
The five fake-account warning signs
Before you accept any friend request, run this checklist. It takes ten seconds.
- No profile photo, or a photo that looks like a stock model. Press and hold the photo, copy it, paste it into Google Images on your phone. If it shows up on twelve other profiles, it's stolen.
- Account created within the last 30 days. Tap the profile, scroll down, look at "Joined Facebook." If it says March 2026 and the request hits in May 2026, that's a flag the size of a tablecloth.
- Three or fewer mutual friends, all of whom are also recent additions. Scammers chain — they friend each other to look legitimate. Look at the mutuals. If they all joined in the last two months, the whole bouquet is fake.
- A friend request from someone you're already friends with. This is the Donna scenario. Always a clone account. Always. Report it, block it, and text the real person so they can warn their friends list.
- Bio is blank or generic. "Lives life to the fullest." "Loves family and travel." Real people's bios are weirder than this. (Mine says "former English teacher, current opinion-haver." It is not subtle.)
The deepfake friend, and the grandkid-in-jail call
The 2026 version of the scam is no longer a stranger calling. It's a video call. From a face that looks like your grandson. With a voice that sounds like your grandson. Saying he's been arrested in Phoenix and please don't tell his parents.
The technology to do this is now free, fast, and frighteningly good. Equifax has a clear walkthrough of how AI deepfake scams actually work, and it is worth ten minutes of your time. Our own piece on how AI voice cloning scams target families goes deeper on the family-level defense.
The defense is so simple it sounds like a children's book: the safe word.
You set one with each grandchild, today, on the next phone call you have with them. Three syllables. Easy to remember. Impossible to guess. Something specific to your family — a pet's name no stranger would know, an inside joke, the made-up word from when they were four. Tell the kid: if you ever call me asking for money, you say the safe word. If you don't say it, I am hanging up and calling your mother.
When fake-Jack calls in tears next year, the deepfake will not have the safe word. The deepfake cannot have the safe word, because the safe word lives in your kitchen, between you and the actual eleven-year-old. Every senior I know who has set one up has had the conversation in under ninety seconds and the grandchildren — even the teenagers — find it kind of fun. Emma, who is sixteen now and very tired of being my tech tutor, picked ours. She picked something so specifically embarrassing that I won't print it here, and she is delighted with herself.
Marketplace, useful but mind these scams
Facebook Marketplace is the second-best part of the whole site, after Groups. I furnished a guest room for around three hundred dollars. The patio side table I mentioned. A barely-used air fryer for twelve bucks from a woman in a subdivision two miles away who handed it to me in her driveway and gave me her zucchini-bread recipe.
The rules: never wire money, for any reason, ever. Never accept a check that's "too much, just send the difference back" — that's the oldest one in the book. Never meet at a stranger's house if you can avoid it; most police departments now have a "safe exchange zone" in the parking lot, and that's where you go. Cash only for under two hundred dollars. PayPal Goods & Services for over (the Goods & Services part matters — Friends and Family doesn't refund). And if a buyer or seller switches the conversation off Facebook to text early — that's a flag. Our field guide to spotting scam texts is good background here.
Groups, the actual reason to be here
Here's the thing nobody tells seniors signing up: the magic of Facebook in 2026 is not the feed. It's the Groups.
Walking groups. Mahjong groups. Mystery-novel-readers-over-60. Your-town Buy Nothing. The Backyard Birds of Maricopa County. Genealogy-for-the-perplexed. Quilting. Pickleball. Gardening in zone 9b. Mackinac Island day-tripper logistics. Each is its own little world with its own rules and rhythms. They are local, specific, lightly moderated, and largely uninfested by the algorithm.
My recommendation, and I have arrived at it the hard way: leave the News Feed mostly alone, and live in two to four Groups you actually like. That is the modern version of "being on Facebook." The Groups are where the actual humans are.
Messenger vs. SMS — and why your grandkids prefer the first
The real reason to keep Facebook in 2026 is Messenger. End-to-end encrypted by default since the end of 2023, free internationally, and it is the app your grandchildren actually open. SMS is for your dentist's reminder and your pharmacy's refill text. Messenger is for the photo Lily sent me last week of a cricket she found in a flowerpot, holding it up to the camera with the focused concentration of a small queen.
My grandchildren do not call. Emma is sixteen and texts me in fragments. Jack is twelve and sends me three baseball memes a week, none of which I understand. Lily is eight and sends me voice memos that are mostly her breathing. Oliver is three and has stolen Carrie's phone twice to send me a string of fire-truck emojis that I keep on my home screen.
Erma Bombeck once wrote that motherhood is a series of small partings: out of the womb, off to kindergarten, off to college. Grandmothering, it turns out, is the same shape, only the small reunions arrive through Messenger. The heart-emoji from Emma instead of the phone calls Emma's mother used to make. I have made peace with this, mostly. Some days I miss the phone. Most days, I'd rather have the cricket.
What about Nextdoor, GroupMe, the alternatives
A short tour, since people ask.
- Nextdoor. Neighborhood-only, useful for lost dogs, suspicious helicopters, and people complaining about leaf blowers. Exhausting for politics. Worth having for the lost-dog function alone. Free.
- iMessage and WhatsApp groups. This is where most family group chats now live. Pick whichever platform has the most relatives already on it and surrender to it. (Carrie runs ours. I am tagged in approximately four hundred photos a week. I have stopped trying to keep up.)
- TikTok and Twitter/X. Skip both for connection purposes. TikTok is fine for entertainment if you like that sort of thing. X is a battlefield, not a community. Your friendships will not live there.
The adult-children-worry section
This is for the conversation Tom keeps trying to have with me, gently, every six weeks: "Mom, just be careful." Yes, Tom. Lisa, also yes.
For any adult reader with a parent on Facebook: send them this article — the privacy list and the safe-word section — and then stop calling every six weeks to check. The relationship works better when the parent isn't the project. (Our gentler take on tech support helps.)
For the senior reader: tell your kids the safe word is set. You raised them. You can handle a friend request.
A small Tuesday win
I went back to the laptop after Tom and I got off the phone. Frank looked up from his golf magazine and said, "Everything all right?" I said, "Donna got cloned again." He said, "Tell her I said hi to the real one." Forty-seven years.
I texted the real Donna. She wrote back: "Three of them this year. Welcome to Tuesday." Then I went outside to water the lemon tree on the patio, because some Tuesdays you take a small win where you find it — a fake account reported, a friend warned, a safe word set with a sixteen-year-old who is tired of you and loves you anyway.
Three names you'd text on a Tuesday. A safe word per grandchild. A friends-of-friends setting on incoming requests. That's most of it. The rest you'll figure out the way I did — slowly, occasionally embarrassed, occasionally delighted, and never once at the speed Emma would prefer.
