Hi,

Just FYI - the Facebook "author by" data isn't new. It's been around a couple of years at least... it's the OG "article:author" tag. When used - properly - this adds a link to article posts that, when hovered, displays the original author's Facebook profile card. This is very useful for shares on facebook (especially shares that don't originate form the original author's page), because it makes it easy for users to get to the facebook profile page of the original author.

All the "Facebook Secret Meta" plugin does, besides adding a ton of developer promotional spam to it's option page, is add a custom meta name="author" content="foo" to the theme head. Hardly secret meta. If the meta article:author property isn't found, Facebook will pull the author meta instead, which just displays as plain text on the post and isn't very useful to facebook users. The plugin is more of a hack than an "exclusive new feature".

The developers also claim Yoast SEO doesn't offer this, which is inaccurate - Yoast has supported this for years. To enable the article:author property with Yoast SEO, fill in the "Facebook page URL" meta on the user's profile page. Yoast SEO will automatically add this URL to the article:author property meta in the theme's head.