Do you like Facebook Messenger because you get messages and chats from people you actually know, and you don’t get a lot of ads or solicitations from brands or companies you’ve made purchases from in the past? Yeah, about that. Brands are about to start blasting out messages into Facebook users’ feeds, and the only way around it is to not contact them through Facebook.
How does this all work? We learned from Lifehacker that Facebook has added ad functionality to brands that use Messenger, letting companies start up conversations with you if you’ve contacted their account through Messenger before.

Or, as Facebook’s blog for developers explains it, the chats will be “a highly targeted, in-context ad type that allows businesses to re-engage people who have an open, existing conversation with their business.”

That means Messenger bots will contact you to remind you about promotions or other things going on with brands, or “1:1 conversations with the businesses [you] care about” where you can “consistently engage through customized experiences.” Or: chatting with bots.

Great. What we don’t yet know is how brands will let us opt out of these re-engagements, if they do at all.

Messenger Platform v1.3 Features [Facebook] (via Lifehacker)

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