Hopefully the staff will be better trained next time on how to handle a kid who “shits the train.”
Quite possibly one of the funniest Facebook status updates I’ve ever read.
Via reddit
Marc Campbell in 1977 B.F. (before Facebook).
Dangerous Minds has just surpassed 50,000 “likes” on Facebook which got me feeling a little sentimental. I searched our archives to find my first appearance on this site and came up with this entry by R. Metzger from 07/14/2010 about my song and video 88 Lines About 44 Women. I’m sharing it as one would share photos of one’s wedding, past birthdays or first mugshot. I’m probably feeling quite a bit more warm and fuzzy than you are about all of this.
My experience with DM is one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done in my six decades of bobbing on the high seas of pop culture. I knew that watching all those movies and collecting all those records and books would eventually be put to good use.
Our new blogger Marc Campbell writes: I made the 88 Lines About 44 Women video using rare, and mostly forgotten, footage from some obscure Italian Mondo movies. Of the dozens of 88 Lines videos on youtube, mine is the only one made by someone actually associated with The Nails. RCA (idiots) never released the song as a single, so, as a result, no video was made…until now. This video has been banned countless times by YouTube, but the current upload has somehow averted banishment.
Well, this video did not survive on Youtube. But it has found a nice home on Vimeo.
As Redditor kterr101 points out, “Ah the days before the “Like” button.”
Via reddit
Pleated Jeans created this mock Facebook event invite which made me chuckle. Sums it up pretty nicely, eh?
I wonder how the Dr. Pepper Facebook page would have responded?
(via reddit)
At least The Lord, Our Savior isn’t making “duckface.”
(via Cynical-C)
Here’s a blog dedicated to people who are not racist, but… Well, you get the picture. Good grief.
I’m Not Racist, But…
(via Cynical-C)
Literally Unbelievable collects stories from The Onion as interpreted on Facebook by people, who, as source of all things interesting, Laughton Sebastian Melmoth points out, “think ‘satire’ means ‘not sat there’”.
The site is curated by Hudson Hongo, who is a contributor to McSweeney’s, The Morning News and The Bygone Bureau.
Check Literally Unbelievable here.
With thanks to Laughton Sebastian Melmoth
For those of you who know you’re going to be left behind, Ben Conner and Carl W. Franke have organized a post Rapture looting event on Facebook.
When everyone is gone and God’s not looking, we need to pick up some sweet stereo equipment and maybe some new furniture for the mansion we’re going to squat in.
Sinners can join here.
I’m not entirely sure what the lesson is supposed to be here, but as a child I would have been horrified to see an adult doing something this idiotic. What does killing some fish for no reason whatsoever have to do with ANYTHING?
(via reddit)
Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes is community page on Facebook, which re-unites individuals with personal items lost during the recent tornadoes that devastated the southern states of Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Georgia, Virginia and Louisiana. Created by Patty Bullion, after hundreds of photographs and documents fell from the sky into her yard, last Wednesday, as the New York Times reports:
One document, lying face down on the wet pavement, was a sonogram, just like those she had saved from her own pregnancies. “I would want that back,” she said.
Ms. Bullion already had her own Facebook page with a few hundred friends, but the chances of any of them knowing the people whose items she had found were slim, she thought. So she created a new page with a title that described precisely what she hoped it would contain: “Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes.” She asked her friends to post a link to it on their own pages.
“I feel like I know these people,” Ms. Bullion said. “They could so easily have been us.”
The first of the images that Ms. Bullion had posted was identified a few hours later by the sister of two children shown in a black-and-white photograph. They were from Hackleburg, Ala., the sister wrote in the comments section, a town almost 100 miles away: Ms. Bullion’s husband, a forest ranger, looked it up on a map.
By Friday evening, more than 52,000 people had clicked the “like” button on the page, and more than 600 pictures had been posted: an unopened letter, a death certificate and scores of photographs. Some of the items were unscathed. Some were carefully pieced together by their finder. Some, like mortgage statements and canceled checks, evoked calls to be sure to block out account numbers and personal financial information.
One water-damaged picture of a chubby-cheeked toddler elicited over two dozen comments, its rips and smudges an unavoidable metaphor for what people feared had happened to the child. “This breaks my heart,” wrote one commenter. A digitally restored version someone posted yielded approving comments, almost as though saving the picture could ensure the child’s safety.
If you can help identify any of the people in the pictures, or have photos and documents to post, please check Patty Bullion’s page here.
Previously on DM
Richard Devine’s eerie recordings of tornado tonight in sirens in Atlanta
More lost photographs and documents, after the jump…
Regular readers of this blog know what happened to us a few weeks back (update here) with one of our posts getting dinged for being “abusive” on Facebook. Yesterday mega-blog, Ars Technica had their corporate Facebook page, where they are able to reach over 40,000 readers in their news feeds, locked out for supposed copyright infringement. Clearly, Ars Techina is no fly-by night organization, and yet they were subject to the same dumb rules as everyone else. The story is really blowing up today, with prominent blogs like Gawker and the Atlantic Wire weighing in. It’s about time the media holds Facebook’s feet to the fire on this issue until they FINALLY change their policies favoring whiners, complainers, blue-noses, trolls and cyber-bullies.
Ars Technica editor Ken Fisher writes:
Prior to the account lockout, we had received no notices of infringement or warnings. Truly, we awoke to find that Facebook had summoned a judge, jury, and executioner and carried out its swift brand of McJustice all without bothering to let us know that there was even a problem.
Further investigation has revealed just how flawed Facebook’s infringement reporting system is. To begin with, someone making a complaint can provide any third-party e-mail address they choose. So it is rather easy to spoof the origin of a complaint, while giving Facebook and the accused no chance for a direct rejoinder.
Everyone who uses Facebook is on some level a Facebook partner. A thoroughgoing social site, it is nothing without its users. That Facebook would so harshly judge and move against its most valuable assets without any semblance of fairness or evenhandedness is disappointing.
I whole-heartedly agree. First and foremost, the backasswards way they handle complaints is simply unintelligent, counterproductive and can have extrremely negative consequences for the businesses which are unfairly targeted, often by their own competitors using a fake email address that can’t be traced back!
As Sarah Perez revealed at Read Write Web on the Ars Technica fiasco found out that just about anybody can take down even million dollar companies on Facebook, because the company doesn’t even bother to verify the identity of the complainer:
However, what Facebook does not do is verify whether or not any of that contact information is accurate. While doing so may be an administrative burden the network could not afford, it does not even take the simple step of verifying the reporter’s email address is valid.
Scam artists, as you may have guessed, have discovered this loophole. In one case, with Hamard Dar’s Rewriting Technology site, the page went down for over a month. Dar says he was targeted for money. “He wanted me to pay him…to get the page back,” he told us. Dar didn’t go for that option, however, because there was no guarantee the scammer would return the page once paid. Instead, Dar ran his own personal investigation until he discovered the person involved and threatened him to withdraw the complaint, saying he would report him to U.S. cyber crime enforcement (the scam artist lives in Chicago). The page was then returned.
Sarah’s entire article Anyone Can Take Down Facebook Pages with a Fake Email Address is well-worth reading if you are interested in the matter, and Jacqui Cheng has been updating the original Ars Technica post with some sobering examples of things that have happened to other groups, businesses and individuals: Facebook shoots first, ignores questions later; account lock-out attack works.
Facebook has really got to get their shit together on this issue. Just today, dozens of political activists in the UK—including folks related to mainstream group UK Uncut—had their Facebook pages purged. With what we all know will be an absolutely insane election season coming up, their indefensible censorship policies (who are their lawyers anyway???) will undoubtedly have a chilling effect on free speech, no matter what side of the political divide you’re on.
Even idiots have a right to free speech…
If you have been following the story about the “gay kiss” scandal that erupted from the pissed off blog post that I posted here on Saturday and went international within… um, minutes, then you have probably also heard that Facebook subsequently apologized.
This is wildly inaccurate, to say the least…
The so-called “apology” touted by the likes of Perez Hilton, Pink News, The Advocate and even mainstream news sources like AOL, Huffington Post and Gawker, as if some kind of “victory” had been won by the LGBT community was nothing more than generic “Oopsie! We goofed” text left by a low level Facebook employee six pages in on the comments to the original Dangerous Minds post. Here is the screen shot:
THIS two sentence squib is what is being described as “an apology” and repeated over and over again by SHITLOADS of extremely lazy reporters as an “official” statement from Facebook!
Is it? Doesn’t look that way to me. I mean, at least say it like you mean it!
Prove this to yourself by googling the exact words that appear here and you will see exactly what I mean. This supposed “apology” was nothing more than a “comment.” That’s it. I used to work at the Los Angeles Times and believe me when I tell you that 99% of the articles I have read about this matter would never have gotten past the copy desk there. This was ONLY shoddy reporting and nothing but shoddy reporting. Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper was the very worst of all. That “reporter” got almost every single major fact WRONG. And then that article got rewritten by even lesser news sources all over the Internet.
Furthermore, it’s not saying anything specifically about a gay kiss. This generic text could also refer, for example, to a photo of a breastfeeding woman that someone reported as “abusive” (their word not mine) to Facebook’s censors. Don’t break out the champagne so fast, folks.
Read what John Hudson had to say, writing at The Atlantic Wire today:
This week, with some satisfaction, a number of gay and lesbian news sites reported that Facebook had “apologized” for removing a photo of two men kissing on its site. The initial censorship had sparked a week-long protest and attracted coverage from The Huffington Post, MSNBC and other news outlets. But now, the man who started the controversy says he’s not satisfied with Facebook’s response. “This is being presented as some kind of victory or that there’s a reason to go do a conga line down Christopher Street,” says Richard Metzger, who posted the photo of two fully-clothed men kissing that was removed from Facebook on Saturday for containing “nudity, or any kind of graphic or sexually suggestive content” according to a notice from the social network.
On Monday, after many gay men and women protested the decision by putting up pictures of themselves kissing on Facebook, the company issued a statement to a handful of media outlets [RM note: I disagree w/ John here, I don’t think it was sent to anyone, I think The Advocate got it from DM’s comments section and that it got repeated over and over again from that report until it became “true”]: “The photo in question does not violate our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and was removed in error. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
But Metzger doesn’t see why anyone’s celebrating that acknowledgement. “It’s just generic PR speak that doesn’t even refer to a gay kiss,” he says. “The real problem here is certainly not that Facebook is a homophobic company. It’s that their terrible corporate policy on censorship needs to stop siding with the idiots, the complainers and the least-enlightened and evolved amongst us.”
According to Facebook’s FAQ page, a “Facebook administrator looks into each report thoroughly” when deciding whether to remove an item. “There shouldn’t be a human being making that determination,” says Metzger. He would prefer a censorship system that removes flagged photographs based on an automatic, crowdsourced method similar to the one used by the comedy site Funny or Die. Essentially, he’s promoting a “wisdom of the crowd” system that would work like this: One user flags an item and a second alert pops up asking other users if the material is offensive or not. That way, no single person could get a photograph banned.
But would a “majority rules” system make for a more tolerant Facebook? We’re not sure. Asked if he thought his proposed system could result in more homophobic behavior, Metzger responded as such:
“That’s possible, but in our ecosystem that kind of behavior would be expelled. On Free Republic-type groups, behavior like that might get voted up but it wouldn’t affect the whole Facebook ecosystem. These groups stay with their own kind.”
Still confused? Here’s the back story, just in case:
Richard Metzger: How I, a married, middle-aged man, became an accidental spokesperson for gay rights (Boing Boing)
UPDATE: 4/19/2001 Read Richard Metzger: How I, a married, middle-aged man, became an accidental spokesperson for gay rights overnight on Boing Boing
It’s time to clarify a few details about the controversial “Hey Facebook what’s SO wrong with a pic of two men kissing?” story, as it now beginning to be reported in the mainstream media, and not always correctly.
First of all, with regards to the picture:
The photo which was used to illustrate my first post about the John Snow Kiss-In is a promotional still from the British soap opera “Eastenders.” It features one of the main characters from the show (Christian Clarke, played by the actor John Partridge- left) and someone else who I don’t know. I am not a regular viewer so I can’t say if the man on the right is an extra or an actual character.
This picture has itself caused scandal in the UK, as it was a gay kiss that was broadcast before the watershed, and as such led to a number of complaints to the BBC. However, since this episode aired (October 2008) Christian now has a boyfriend and a few more gay kisses have taken place.
In relation to the John Snow Kiss-In event, I used this particular photo because I considered it to be quite mild (no groping, no tongues). The photos I had considered using before I chose that one are much more racy. Oh the irony!
Secondly, the removal of the Facebook John Snow Kiss-In event:
It turns out that the Facebook event for the John Snow Kiss-In was not blocked by Facebook, but made private by the creator of the event itself. Paul Shetler, the organizer, left this comment on the previous thread:
“Hey I just saw this. Before it goes too far, I just want people to know that FB have NOT removed the kiss-in event page; it’s still there, but _I made the event private after the event_ was over and only visible to those who had been invited as there were starting to be trolls posting abusive nonsense on it.”
Thanks for clearing that up, Paul. Now if Facebook will only reply to Richard’s query about why they removed my original post and photo when he put it up on his wall…
It has been erroneously reported in the media that our own Richard Metzger (who lives in Los Angeles) organized the London “Kiss-In” event, which is untrue, and also unfair to Paul Shetler and the actual organizers. Also, Richard did not state in his post that Facebook HAD taken the event page down, he just questioned IF this was the case and IF there was a connection with MY post about the event being removed from his own wall. This seems to have confused some people.
Here is a report on the John Snow Kiss-In from the Guardian, featuring an interview with Mr Shetler:
