This is getting awfully meta, even for Facebook:

Trend this, pal.

It went, I am told, something like this:

"So, there's a button you use to poke someone?"

"It wasn't a literal poke."

"So it was a euphemism? For what?"

"It doesn't exist anymore."

"Is that what children call it these days? Poking?"

"With respect, Senator, we—"

"And you did it with a, with—it was a button?"

— Peter Suderman (@petersuderman) April 10, 2018

This went on and on and on, because of course it does.

And yes, the Poke function is still there, though it doesn’t enjoy the prominence it used to.

Facebook offered me this last night:

It was my understanding that one must be aesthetically pleasing before becoming a K-pop girl in the first place.

This showed up in Facebook Messenger, and it’s so badly written that I have to assume there may be a grain of truth buried under all the horse puckey:

Hi, I’m Mark Zuckerberg The Director of facebook.
Hello everyone, it seems that all the warnings were real, facebook use will cost money
If you send this string to 18 different from your list, your icon will be blue and it will be free for you.
If you do not believe me tomorrow at 6 pm that facebook will be closed and to open it you will have to pay, this is all by law.
This message is to inform all our users, that our servers have recently been very congested, so we are asking for your help to solve this problem. We require that our active users forward this message to each of the people in your contact list in order to confirm our active facebook users if you do not send this message to all your facebook contacts then your account will remain inactive with the consequence of Lose all your cont the transmission of this message. Your SmartPhone will be updated within the next 24 hours, will have a new design and a new color for the chat. Dear Facebook users, we are going to do an update for facebook from 23:00 p.m. until 05:00 a.m. on this day. If you do not send this to all your contacts the update will be canceled and you will not have the possibility to chat with your facebook messages
Will go to pay rate unless you are a frequent user. If you have at least 10 contacts
Send this sms and the logo will turn red to indicate that you are a user
Confirmed … We finish it for free Tomorrow they start to collect the messages for facebook at 0.37 cents Forward this message to more than 9 people of your contacts and it will be free of life for you to watch and it will turn green the ball of above do it and you will see.

Now if you ask me, nothing will improve social media more than charging for it. But this is most assuredly not the way it’s going to happen.

This happens about a thousand times a moment, and as Roger notes, it’s scarcely worth the bother to engage the wrongster:

Someone writes a piece on the platform that you know for sure is 100% wrong. You comment on the page perhaps with a link to collaborating evidence. He — it’s more often a he — says you’re stupid, and probably don’t even love your country.

You warily try one more time, but it is met with a buzz saw of further resistance. So you walk away. You WALK AWAY. Well, that’s what I do because it just isn’t worth the effort.

You learned this in Econ 101, of course:

I’ve discovered that the law of diminishing returns applies to lots of situations. It sure beats having a Twitter war over insignificant stuff.

Yea, verily.

But you knew that, right?

This ad appeared in my Facebook feed yesterday evening.

Same day that the sysadmin installed exactly that new lock on my office door.

Why, yes, we do get our bandwidth from Cox. Why do you ask?

“Henry1989” had a little problem:

Help. I am the victim of the post

https://m.facebook.com/groups/1472136323…

I have repeated many many many many times that the post GOES AGAINST the Facebook Community Standards and reported to the Facebook Team over HUNDRED times but the Facebook Team commented that the post did not violate any Community Standards.

I am very frustrated, annoyed and unhappy with the post as many Facebook users have expressed extremely abusive and offensive languages against me.

Can the Yahoo users make an abuse report to the Facebook Team after reading this post.

I order that at least 100,000 Yahoo users report the abuse to the Facebook Team within 24 hours from now on and 1 million reports are made within 3 days. (I suggest each Yahoo user repeats the report at ten times)

“I order“? Who died and made you King of Anything?

A user named Dave gave this reasoned response:

reported for spam.

If they say it doesn’t violate the community standards, then it doesn’t. If you don’t like it, remove yourself from the group.

Which is a proper report, since “Henry” has posted variations on this whine several times before.

And “Henry” promptly went psycho:

F U C K YOUR MOTHER Dave. Many users express extremely abusive and offensive languages against me. Why do you still say it doesn’t violate community standards?

You must STOP making inaccurate answers and you must make an apology for saying anything inaccurate and irrelevant to me immediately.

Dave, you MUST make an apology for saying anything irrelevant and inaccurate answers to me. If I RECEIVE no apology from you within 24 hours, I will take legal actions against you to your local law court and even report to your local police.

Yahoo, in a rare display of prescience, deleted “Henry’s” screed. I’m not persuaded he should get off quite so easily, so here’s a screenshot of the alleged offensive Facebook post:

He’s lucky I didn’t put it on Reddit.

And so he asks:

Well, he should, but not for the reason he thinks:

My Instagram pics have gained top post. I feel people are imitating me, taking ideas from me, and even stalking me. You see whenever I would tweet things of my interest on Twitter strange things would happen. I would go in public where I would hear conversations where it would sound like somebody referencing something I just tweeted not to long ago or the other day. Ok I would set trends on my Instagram wearing certain clothing and fashion and I would go to college or even other places seeing people I never met with a almost on point fashion since. Then I just bought I new car where afterwards I would see everybody in town suddenly driving the exact same cars. I would go to a store or a shop in my neighborhood where suddenly these people who would coincidentally have the same cars and fashion since would mysteriously appear whenever I would pull up to buy a soda, or go shopping or even just pump my gas it would seem like these clones where now everywhere from my neighborhood to my school and even when I cease my social media activity it continues but now it has gone too far. You see I live on a considerably quite block in my neighborHood and lately I have lately seen this same reoccurring people driving/walking by housing every now and then sometimes even when I step outside my front door sometimes when I step outside my car. I think I may be locally famous in my neighborhood and I have considered moving. Should I just put my social media on private cause this is just crazy.

Obviously this child is insane and should be confined at least until Twitter goes bankrupt.

And, well, that’s just intolerable:

i see many people getting away with posting stupid, untrue- ridiculous comments online and many of these idiotic people get away with it unchallenged and uncorrected.

if its a subject im passionate about like 80’s, 70’s or 60s music and someone posts an untrue,ridiculous comment about a song or singers from those eras , then i really lose my temper.

if many of these internet idiots were stood in front of me, woe betide they should say something false about subjects im passionate about, because something unpleasant would happen to them if they did.

ps im a man from the uk, in my late 30s.

By that age he should have learned that nobody gives a shit what he’s “passionate about,” and that nowhere has he been granted the authority to do anything about it other than answer back.

Mass murderers start out with “logic” very much like this, and escalate it beyond their ability to cope. The real tragedy is that they don’t kill themselves first, before taking it out on the rest of the world.

And the SCREAMING CAPITALIZATION doesn’t help:

I HAVE ASKED THIS QUESTION THREE TIMES AND NO ONE WANTS TO TELL ME WHY I AM NOT GETTING ANY LIKES ON MY RECENT POSTS ON FACEBOOK.

IT IS VERY IRRITATING WHEN I POST SOMETHING AND NO ONE RESPONDS BACK TO ME ON FACEBOOK OR GIVES ME ANY LIKES.

Why am I not getting any likes on my posts on Facebook? And, what am I doing wrong?

Short answer: you are an asshat.

Somewhat longer answer: You’re asserting that you’re entitled to the kind of response that validates your exaggerated sense of self, both on and off Facebook. This is more than sufficient cause to write you off as an asshat.

But just the same, he wants a free pass:

I kind of went on a drunken rant in a personal message to a friend (girl) on Facebook, I didn’t attack her but I insulted some other people. Then she replied, and I engaged more which means in the future, it’s not like I could claim someone hacked my account or anything, it was clearly me.

I’m now thinking that in the future, she could pull that out and really tarnish my reputation. I know deleting it on my end doesn’t delete it on hers so,

—Is there any law that would protect me from her publishing it in the future?

and

—If I start a new FB account with a separate email, and shut down my old account will her official record of the conversation go away with it?

I feel like there should be some way to demand FB erase something you put out there. But I’m sure you sign that all away in the TOS.

What do you think?

I think you should have thought of this before you went on this “drunken rant.”

And no, there should be no way to demand FB erase something you put out there. Stupidity, by design, is intended to be self-correcting; the putative trashing of your precious reputation is a part of that correction.

Actions have consequences. We all learn this in different ways. Welcome to yours.

We covered this on Friday. By Monday it was nearing Trending status on Facebook, and by Tuesday I was able to catch this as a screen grab:

Maybe it’ll be up to 700 percent by the end of the week.

And they mean that “or else,” too:

Some tenants at a Salt Lake City apartment complex are fuming over a new lease agreement that requires tenants to “like” the complex on Facebook.

Tenants of the City Park Apartments told KSL that a “Facebook addendum” showed up taped to their doors Thursday night.

The contract requires tenants to friend the City Park Apartments on Facebook within five days, or be found in breach of the rental agreement, though some of the tenants already signed a lease agreement months ago.

The document also includes a release allowing the apartment to post pictures of tenants and their visitors on the page.

I’m assuming Utah law requires tenants to send two rejections of the contractual change, the second to go to “the horse you rode in on.”

(Via Keaton Fox.)

Some people probably should stay the hell away from social media, and I suspect this is one of them:

Tedious exposition follows:

I used to work in a corporate office. During my 7 years there, one of my co-workers kept repeating everything I said about my taste in women and who at the office I think is pretty. Apparently since I am socially awkward, he treated me like a 4-year-old who said something adorable, as opposed to keeping it confidential, i.e. locker room talk. Eventually, it was implied by everyone that I was “in love” with the office manager, when in reality, I only said she was pretty and nothing more. So my co-worker obviously fabricated what I said. I felt so violated, and It really hurt me how not only betrayed my trust, but made me look like a desperate virgin who lives with mommy. Well, 4 years ago, I was laid off. Despite my dismay for my co-worker, we’ve been friends on Facebook since before I was fired. I want to send a friend request to the office manager for the purpose of greasing the wheels in case I need a future job reference. She was fired 2 years before me, so there’s no hard feelings. But since we have many mutual friends, I don’t think it’s a good idea to send her a request, because then the rumors will continue. I know I shouldn’t care what they think, especially since I don’t work there anymore. But I don’t like the idea of ex-co-workers possibly snickering behind my back if they see I’m friends on Facebook with the office manager. Perhaps if she and I remained NOT friends on Facebook, then those rumors about me being in love with her will stop. Suggestions?

Truth be told, nothing makes someone look more like a “desperate virgin who lives with mommy” than a sob story like this. I will be really surprised if this bozo doesn’t already have a Tumblr.

Big Girl Pants are apparently unknown in Australian governance:

A woman in Australia who unfriended a colleague on Facebook after a dispute at work was found by a tribunal to have committed workplace bullying.

The Fair Work Commission, a workplace tribunal, said the decision by Lisa Bird, a real estate agent sales administrator, to unfriend her colleague Rachel Roberts showed a “lack of emotional maturity” and was “indicative of unreasonable behaviour.”

The incident occurred after Ms Roberts, a property agent, complained to the agency principal that her properties were not being adequately displayed in the store window.

Mrs Bird, the wife of the principal, then accused Ms Roberts of being a “naughty little school girl running to the teacher.”

Ms Roberts left the office crying and then checked to see if Mrs Bird had commented on the incident on Facebook, only to discover that Mrs Bird had instead unfriended her.

Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ! What the hell kind of world is this when there are legal repercussions for trivial social-media actions?

That said, I have no Facebook friends at work, and will not approve any applications. I know better.

(Via @SwiftOnSecurity.)

I was forwarded a copy of this bit of blither, sent to God knows how many addresses of people who were alleged to be poking around Ashley Madison’s place:

I now have your information. I have also used your user profile to find your Facebook page, using this I can now message all of your friends and family members.

If you would like to prevent me from sharing this dirt info with all of your friends and family members (and perhaps even your employers too?) then you need to send 1 bitcoin to the following BTC address.

Bitcoin Address:
1AEJiZFnELwRZVjmVSvDSwUaXNZy4X9bQN

You may be wondering why should you and what will prevent other people from doing the same, in short you now know to change your privacy settings in Facebook so no one can view your friends/family list. So go ahead and update that now (I have a copy if you dont pay) to stop any future emails like this.

You can buy bitcoin using online exchanges easily. If the bitcoin is not paid within 3 days of 23 Sep 2015 then my system will automatically message all of your friends and family members. The bitcoin address is unique to you.

Consider how expensive a divorce lawyer is. If you are no longer in a committed relationship then think about how this will affect your social standing amongst family and friends. What will your friends and family think about you?

Sincerely,
Paul

Well, at least he’s sincere.

Inasmuch as a copy I found on the Web contains exactly the same Bitcoin address, we know the “unique to you” claim is BS, although it was probably necessary for credibility, since actually reusing addresses is highly discouraged.

Reports one woman who received the same mailing:

For some it is perhaps more of a problem than for others, but for me it is merely an amusement now. Even so, there are people out there, in cyberspace, who have taken the time to sift through the Ashley Madison hack files and find mail addresses, and those who are counting on hitting someone whether they go through the files or not.

And this is very pertinent:

That any real woman signed up is something I find hard to believe, especially since we already know that all the profiles for females were either faked, covered by bots, or paid for. So someone — whether called Paul or whatever — writing me a mail and trying to blackmail me is just amusing.

The least we can do is laugh at him.

Ian Betteridge was available for comment.

Facebook demands Real Names, and Facebook thinks itself the only judge of what names are Real:

A young married couple from Arizona are feeling blue, having been banned from Facebook for trying to use their otherworldly last name, Avatar.

Balizar Orion Avatar and his wife of four years, Audry, of Prescott, say the popular social media site has deleted the husband’s Facebook account after having deemed his family name fake.

Balizar, who goes by Boa for short, says his father told him that when translated from Sanskrit, his full name, which he was born with, means: “May the Lord protect the king, son of light in deity human form.”

In order to prove that they have not made up their last name, Balizar and Audry say Facebook has required them to provide copies of their driver’s licenses and other paperwork.

Why, they don’t even have blue skin!

Patrick Phillips observes:

I did a quick search of Anywho.com for anyone with the last name “Avatar.” It turns out that in about a half-millisecond, the site returned pages of results, from people living from California to New York and plenty of points in between.

While I’ve never known anyone with the last name Avatar, it is definitely a valid surname. Facebook could have come to that conclusion at least as quickly as I did, but it’s likely they set some code to watch for suspicious names to automatically flag, and, as anyone who’s had a problem with Facebook knows, once the giant makes a decision, even an automated one, getting to an actual human being to rectify the situation is about as easy as winning the Powerball lottery twice in the same month.

Hmmm. I wonder if they have a Pandora account.

Facebook’s Lord Zuckerberg will know who you are if it kills him. No, wait, not him. You:

Jemma Rogers, 30, a holistic therapist, from Lewisham, south-east London, set up a profile on the social network in 2008.

Wanting to avoid annoying friend requests from old friends and strangers, she created the profile under the pseudonym Jemmaroid Von Laalaa.

But last month she got a message from Facebook asking her to send identification to prove it was a genuine name and account.

It’s that “Von.” Makes her look like one of the nobility.

Confused but worried she’d be locked out, Jemma admits she desperately tried to photoshop her bank cards to prove that was her real name.

One day later, Jemma’s account was suspended and she couldn’t get in. She emailed Facebook explaining what she’d done and sent over her real ID — begging them to let her back in. But she was told they could not confirm her identity and her account was suspended.

In a desperate bid to get the profile back, she changed her name by deed poll and is now officially Ms Von Laalaa.

“Desperate” doesn’t even approach this level of, well, whatever the hell it is.

Von Laalaa has now obtained new credentials — driver’s license, credit cards — and Facebook subsequently relented. Since she’s, you know, all real and stuff.

Bayou Renaissance Man is suitably unimpressed:

Remind me never, ever to engage Ms. von Laalaa’s services as a “holistic therapist”. With so much stupid in the air, I might never recover!

I’d hate to have that much emotional webbing tying me to a social network. Especially that social network.

There is this so-called Rule of Social Media which says: “Don’t use all 140 characters. Give people room to retweet with a reply.” This rule was obviously conceived before the current version of the Twitter quote function, but it’s not something I’ve ever worried about, and neither did Lynn:

Ridiculous! Sometimes 140 characters is barely enough and you expect me to limit myself to even fewer?

I have written an amazing number — amazing to me, anyway — of 141- or 142-character tweets, necessitating on-the-fly editing, preferably without lapsing into txtspk. I get perhaps more than my share of interaction, and I have yet to hear anyone complain that my tweets are too long.

While we’re at it, this Facebook “rule” and Lynn’s reply:

Don’t Like your own post. — Do people do that? Actually, I wouldn’t do it but I don’t see how it could hurt or inconvenience anyone. So someone’s post has 4 likes instead of 3, or 1 instead of none. Is this really a problem? Sure it says something about you if [you] Like your own posts but other than that…

If FB ever gets a proper Dislike function, I plan to downthumb as many of my own posts as I can.

File this under “Unclear on the concept”:

A Montana man was arrested last month after he apparently “liked” his most wanted poster on a Crimestoppers Facebook page.

Levi Charles Reardon was arrested April 24 after he liked his photo on the Cascade County Crimestoppers Facebook page, according to the Great Falls Tribune. The newspaper reportedly captured a screenshot of it before Reardon revoked the like.

Something like this, in fact:

Reardon, 23, who is accused of felony forgery after he allegedly stole a wallet and cashed forged checks, was then apprehended by police without incident, the newspaper reported.

I’m just trying to imagine the facepalm he did after realizing he’d just Liked his own mug shot.

You remember Tiffany, the singer, right?

This is a perfectly serviceable cover of the Tommy James hit, if maybe a tick or two behind the 2007 version by the Birthday Massacre. I bring this up because I wandered onto Tiff’s Facebook page, Tiffany (The Singer). (Extra amusement value: I got the link from Debbie Gibson.)

And I bring that up because if you start looking for Wikipedia hints and you type “Tiffany (singer)” thinking that well, it’s Tiffany (The Singer), you may well end up here:

Stephanie Young Hwang (born August 1, 1989), better known by the stage name Tiffany or by her Korean name Hwang Mi-young, is an American singer-songwriter and actress. She is a member of both the South Korean girl group, Girls’ Generation and its subgroup, TTS.

Of course, I went looking for some of her stuff, and found this solo track:

Our Tiffany, if I may be presumptuous for a moment, could sing that.

The story here is very likely hilarious, in a contempt-for-the-deluded sort of way:

Not enough backstory:

I need to get back on to Facebook. I either need a fake name change certificate, fake number, or fake marriage certificate. I only need it because I have no ID.

If at any time you thought you had the worst life ever, here’s the only counterexample you’ll ever need.

I found this floating around a Facebook page I am alleged to have liked:

Regular readers will know that something like this has already happened, though it happened some place other than eBay.

And is embiggenment truly an enhancement? (I suspect all the guys, and perhaps some of the girls, are nodding Yes.)

One can only hope:

[Thursday] during a Facebook Q&A with Mark Zuckerberg, the head of the social network said the company is mulling over the addition of a “dislike” button — a thumbs down to go with that ever-present thumbs up, reports Business Insider.

“We’re thinking about it,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s an interesting question.”

The problem with a dislike button could be bullying or shaming other users, Zuckerberg notes, though it would work for when people wanted to express themselves but didn’t want to comment or use the like button. For example, when someone posts about losing a beloved pet — you want to show support without typing a message, but “liking” the death of a pet can feel just … weird.

Still, I’m keen to see this button put to use, if only because I know I will put it to use with great vigor.

The best satire is sufficiently plausible to persuade all but the most cynical of us. Some of us, I fear, are insufficiently cynical:

[T]he rumour that Facebook will be charging users to use the service is NOT a hoax according to the National Report. It is reported that their will be a fee of $2.99 per month for users to use Facebook. However, there is an option to keep your Facebook account and use it for free for 1 hour per week. If the person exceeds that time limit, they will be charged .49 cents per minute. This is ridiculous!

Says the National Report:

Jack Phillips from DeQuincy, Louisiana told reporters that he is not happy with Facebook’s decision to implement a new monthly fee.

“I can barely pay for my girly subscriptions as it is, now this Zuckerberg character wants another $3 a month out of me? Well I don’t think so bud,” Phillips said. “There’s free news out there that I get all my learning from, like The Epoch Times. I know their stories are not real, some fancy word called ‘satirical’, but they makes me laugh. Sure, their grammar and spelling is just God-awful, but I like that; it makes me feel smarter.”

That passage, about halfway down the article, should have given it away. And if it didn’t:

To order your monthly subscription please call the 24-hour Facebook hotline at (785) 273-0325. Discounts are available to those who pay for an entire year at once.

Trust me, Zuckerberg can afford a toll-free number, and even if he couldn’t, he wouldn’t use a local line in Topeka, Kansas, especially one that’s billed to the Westboro Baptist Church.

Much is made of Facebook’s iron grip on all our personal data. Will Truman suspects the presence of oxidation, if not necessarily metal fatigue:

You’d think that the algorithm would say “Hey, he’s commented on this guy’s statuses repeatedly, so this is probably someone whose feed he’s interested in.” But not really. It thinks I really need to know what’s going on with a high school acquaintance who now lives in Connecticut, but not the person who has tagged me in posts twice in the last month.

This is one of the reasons I get less paranoid about their collecting information on me. They seem to be utterly incompetent on what to do with even the obvious parts.

If Zuckerberg offers to buy NSA, then I’ll worry.

The canonical Explanation of Social Media, up until now, has involved donuts: on Twitter, you’d see “I’m eating a #donut,” while on LinkedIn, it’s more likely to be “My skills include donut eating.”

Now I like donuts as much as the next guy, maybe more if the next guy has an impacted sweet tooth, but I don’t write about them very much. By comparison:

Here is what to post on which social media platform: http://t.co/4ZTtdmocJy pic.twitter.com/5PNtC7AeHX

— Zindigo (@Zindigo) September 18, 2014

The shoes, incidentally, are by Gianvito Rossi, stand 4.3 inches high, and run $1135; they’re from the ’14 Cruise collection.

Ms Mallet came to Zindigo from Neiman Marcus, where she was the senior fashion director.

(Via @PatriotsOfMars, whom you may know under another name or two.)

And the first two, at that:

They’ve changed the page style slightly since then, but rules are rules.

(Dodd Harris saw this before I did.)

I’m sure this situation has come up rather a lot:

Social networking added an entirely new morass for employers to navigate.

Should you permit employees to friend one another? (You don’t really have a choice.)

Can you prevent it if they elect to? (Unlikely.)

Can social media policies limit what they say about their workplace on social media sites like Facebook? (Not without potentially infringing employees’ right to discuss working conditions.)

Can you use their social media activity as the basis for firing an employee? (Probably not a good idea.)

My own Facebook policies, to the extent that I can have any policies down here at the bottom of the org chart, are simple: I do not friend anyone I work with, and I turn down requests if I get them.

On the other hand, I have no such rule on Twitter; I figure that none of these folks have time to wade through my tweetstream. I have exactly two followers from the shop, both in my department. And I’m pretty sure I haven’t tweeted anything relevant to work that they haven’t already heard in person, perhaps several times.