Facebook loads ‘Likes’ and comments on external websites. The surveillance tool par excellence is no longer necessary
Meta announced this week that Starting in February 2026, the “like” and “comment” buttons will be removed of Facebook on external websites. The official explanation is so polite it almost hurts: its use “has naturally declined with the evolution of the digital landscape.” But that phrase hides two implicit admissions: The first is known: we barely leave the platforms anymore. The second, more subtle, is devastating: Meta no longer needs to follow us to know us. Let’s think about what that button really was. like external. It was not an innocent social accessory. It was distributed surveillance: Every time you gave like to an article about vintage guitars in a lost blog, Facebook took note: this guy likes guitar playing. Every comment on a recipe website, every interaction outside your garden, fed your profile. Meta built the perfect panopticon: millions of websites working for free as sensors, reporting your interests, your obsessions, your clicks. And in exchange, those websites received crumbs of viral traffic that It stopped coming a long time ago. But today, almost in 2026, that spy system is obsolete. Why track yourself on the Internet when you spend three hours a day on Instagram? Why deduce your tastes when Instagram knows which videos make you stay to watch them until the end, and which videos you send away after two seconds? AI has made extensive surveillance unnecessary. Now it is enough to observe you in its territory. It is more efficient, more precise and cheaper. He like external was Big Brother. AI is a confessor that listens to you voluntarily, interprets and codifies your tastes (the declared and the inferred) and with that it has more than enough to know who you really are, above who you say you are on social networks. And there is something else. These buttons not only gave data to Meta: they also gave certain power to external websites. An item with 50,000 likes Facebook had authority, reach, and negotiating capacity. It was validation. Small media could go viral, specialized blogs found audiences, there were cracks to slip through. Meta is closing those cracks. And not out of malice, but out of business logic: why fertilize a foreign ecosystem when you can focus all your attention—and all your money—on your own land? The “natural evolution of the digital landscape” that Meta mentions is real. Only it has not happened in a vacuum or in a foreign way: they were the ones who designed it, they were the ones who executed it and they are the ones who now certify it. First they locked us in there. Now they know us so well that they no longer need to look at what we do outside their domains. The button like He dies because he has already won everything he could win. And there is nothing left to watch beyond the walls. In Xataka | The new Ray-Bans from Meta will allow you to cross a line: seem present while you are completely absent Featured image | Mariia Shalabaieva
