October 7, 2009 | lists
Before Facebook, if you wanted to be updated on the status of someone you had last spoken to 10 years ago, you would consult the local newspaper’s announcements section. There you would be clued into the only updates worth knowing about a person: when someone’s been married, had a kid, won the lottery/gone to jail/starred in a Harry Potter film/become a bride of Jesus and, of course, the full stop of status updates – the notice that lets you know which charity will be accepting donations in lieu of flowers when somebody kicks it.
Facebook is a way to ensure that you don’t miss the long, boring stretches between those events, and most updates on it are no more than random thoughts that enter a user’s head or a mood: “Monday, blah.” Until the day that HowMyBowelsAreFunctioning.com launches, the internet doesn’t get any more solipsistic than Facebook.
As annoying, tedious and time-wasting as Facebook may seem to some (not us, of course, we both have active Facebook accounts and just wrote something pithy on your wall) it is hugely popular, with some 300 million users.
Still Facebook has been controversial from its inception when critics called it a cheap gimmick to attain personal consumer information for advertising purposes (Editor’s Note: This is true). And just in the past week, a Facebook poll asking whether President Obama should be killed was taken down, and a Florida attorney and prominent anti-video game crusader filed suit against the company for another, funnier, Facebook group that offered $50 to anybody who would smack him in the face. Also, a woman was arrested for violating a protection order by ‘poking’ another—one of the more useless and soon to be removed functions on the popular social media site.
The website has also made headlines for banning people. Should you stray from Facebook’s holy mission by violating its terms of use, you will be shit-canned from the website before you have the chance to change your status to “socially ostracized”. Here we cover the Top 10 Facebook Bans. Almost all of the banned users covered here wanted back in the ‘book. For those who want out of Facebook without having to enroll in a witness protection program, the following can be instructional:
10) Facebook kills bunnies (err bunny’s account) and censors the media: The inspiration for this blog came from roving Toronto Sun reporter Brett Clarkson’s coverage of Playboy model Anissa Holmes’ brave campaign to have her Facebook account reactivated after it was unjustifiably torn from the digital book like a particularly toothsome recipe ripped from a library cookbook. As we’ll show before we’re done here, Facebook seems to have an aversion to breasts of all shapes, sizes and creeds (except for those found on men who haven’t been to the gym in a while). The website disabled Holmes’ account, telling her: “Photos containing nudity or other graphic or sexually suggestive content are not allowed.” Holmes said she hadn’t posted any nudity or sexually explicit content on her page (most that we’ve seen weren’t even as racy as the pictured mousepad — available here — and believe us, we did not skimp on research when it came to this point). And as for sexually suggestive content, couldn’t that mean anything from the ‘o’s in Facebook to the oh so playful nudges the interface allows users to give others?
The embattled bombshell went on the Ryan Doyle show on CFRB (who was also the gracious host of our first radio appearance to promote The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death) to publicize her plight. Doyle joked on the air that if promoting one’s commercial interests on Facebook is a sin, then he’d surely be the next one ex-communicated by the social media overlord. And he was. Facebook sent Doyle an email a few days later to let him know that his account had been disabled. Possibly the work of a fink listener, Doyle’s banning must have been the kind of free publicity manna from heaven talk show hosts dream about. Facebook, presumably waking up to the fact that they had just messed with someone who could channel the anger of a major city’s commuters to his cause, reinstated Doyle with an apology. Holmes was also reinstated, but with no apology. Facebook hates breasts. Stay tuned for more on that.
Facebook, stop this man!
9) Scoblegate: Far less sexy is the story of “ego-blogger” (apparently someone “whose writing tends to have a self-aggrandizing or narcissistic tone” as opposed to an eco-blogger, who has the same traits and drives a hybrid) Robert Scoble and his Facebook ban. We don’t want to ruin any of the buzz you might have going thinking about a Playboy model in a damsel in distress type situation against faceless Facebook, so we’ll keep this brief. Scoble, who is also a “technology evangelist” (and must somewhere be recognized as the person with the oddest titles attached to his name in Wikipedia), wanted to export his list of Facebook contacts to another program. Since he is a Data-Inputting Imperial Grand Poobah Who Knows How to Walk the Relish Online (that one’s ours), he had something like 5,000 contacts, and copying over those contacts according to Facebook rules could have only been done manually – writing each and every one out and then inputting in them directly into the other program.
We guess he didn’t have any interns around at the time because Scoble instead devised a script that would do the job. Facebook could see it’s adamantine-like grip on users’ personal business slipping ever so slightly and banned Scoble. A couple of, mostly French, newspapers made this the lamest “gate” of all, and Scoble was later reinstated.
Lohan in happier days.
8) Facebook Calls Lindsay Lohan a Fake (and they’re wrong in this case): And now, Lindsay Lohan, more than one paparazzi’s reason to get up in the morning, put on a camouflage outfit, hide in a bush and pee in a water bottle (number 2s are blamed on wondering dogs). Ms. Lohan, who has the kind of resume of intoxicant-fueled incidents it takes your average rock star at least a decade of hits to compile, was banned last year from Facebook. She had been using a different name for her Facebook account and failed one day to login, saying her account had been disabled. She was in shock. “Wow! I was in shock. [We told you so.] Once I got to that it gave a note saying why it was disabled which stated the note saying that it was disabled because they believe that I was a fake of myself. Genius.” Lohan voiced her opinion on MySpace.com, which is like a digital halfway house for people banned from Facebook. “All I can think is, WHO is running this site? And how can they just “disable” my account without first, sending me a warning notice, or AT LEAST asking me some account verification questions. Here they are re-designing the look on the site when they should be setting up a more secure way of allowing people to set up an account.” Aside from her odd use of quotation marks around disable, there’s little we can argue with there. Facebook thereby did the unthinkable and made Lindsay Lohan appear the voice of right and reason.
7) No Longer A Member — Honorable or Otherwise — of Facebook: Back when Facebook first launched, an optimist might have thought “Screw those paranoid buzzkills with their complicated privacy arguments. Just think of all the good Facebook can do! We can use it to mobilize political action, form groups around causes close to our hearts. We’ll change the world! And also think of all the tits we’ll get to see! Pair after pair of glorious unsheathed female beauty!” Well, this list will be enough to extinguish any hint of a twinkle in the starry eyes of such optimistic thinkers. In Britain an MP was trying to use the power of social media to advance democracy — or perhaps just pander to geeks. MP Steve Webb amassed a list of 2,500 friends on the site — mostly constituents — when he received a notice upon attempting to log in saying that his account had been disabled following complaints that he didn’t exist. The news of his non-existence shocked Webb — though perhaps not his less enthusiastic constituents — and the existential dilemma led him to use his contacts to get reinstated. He later said: “It’s actually hard for a genuine person to prove they exist.” True, and politicians too.
Reaction to Facebook ban in Korean Parliament.
6) Don’t Rouse the Rabble on Facebook: It seems your average British MP puts college students about to be put on academic probation and teenage girls to shame when it comes to Facebook usage. Yet another MP, Tom Brake, was also banned this year, again for the crime of trying to use his Facebook profile for democratic ends, and not participating in social polls to find out which of his friends is the most outgoing or the cutest and who has the IQ of a melon-potato hybrid. A late night bus route was about to stopped, and the MP wanted to protest the move — not exactly woman’s suffrage, but probably good news for barflies with a DUI record and no cabfare. Brake sent out an email to his constituents to invite them to the protest — the volume apparently identifying him as a spammer to that Johnny-Five robot pressing the delete button on users account at Facebook headquarters. “Much of my casework now comes through Facebook,” the MP said. “The bizarre and heavy-handed decision to disable my account severely disadvantages my constituents who rely on the net to contact me.” Speaking on behalf of the MP’s elderly population shut-in Ellsberry Crappleberry is still waiting to be friended.
CLICK HERE FOR THE TOP FIVE FACEBOOK BANS!
Nice, I can finally see your page again
This is where Facebook interaction with society has gone too far. I have blogged about this before and am constantly amused by the turds that float to the surface.
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Lindsay Lohan????? Who exactly is she? Some bimbo or and actress with real talent? Does she sing or do just idiot stuff that gets her in the media?