“It’s like a baby armadillo being born.” – Winston, from New Girl commenting on a photo of a micropenis which the characters Googled (link to a search here, NSFW. Seriously: Not. Safe. For. Work.). An ongoing joke with a small group of friends about micropenises, based on the New Girl episode, inspired me to drop in an image of the medical condition within a group Facebook Chat. In a second or two, Facebook logged me out on my laptop. Then my phone trilled that I was booted out of the mobile version of Facebook, and I couldn’t access my account at all. The message from my laptop:
So, it flagged the micropenis pic as being a nude photo of a child. I contacted my friends via text, and several thought it was hysterical. I did, too. Then it dawned on us that if the image may be mistakenly flagged as child porn, it would be good to purge it from our devices. That was done.
What was uncanny was how simultaneous my getting automatically logged-off Facebook happened on multiple devices at the same time. It was like a show when something seizes control of several computers at once. My phone forced me to log in as if I was using the phone for the first time. Within a few minutes, I could rejoin the Facebook Chat. But I could not comment on posts, create a post, post a photo, or even “Like” a post. When I tried to “Like” something, the following popped up on my smartphone:
So, no longer any implication about child porn. A welcome development. But how would Facebook know to back off from that accusation? Is some poor soul reviewing suspect photos and flagging or unflagging them? If so, is this person getting paid enough money? This morning, when trying to comment on a photo of a friend wearing a silly wig, even though my comment was innocuous, Facebook still blocked me with the following notice:
Then, Facebook relented a bit further, allowing me to comment in closed Facebook groups I’m a part of. To emphasize the point again, I’m not interested in child porn. Heck, even at this advanced age I struggle to see photos of women celebrities in their 20s to mid-30s without becoming preoccupied by how disappointing conversations would be (they wouldn’t know how painful it was when Kurt Cobain died, et cetera). Yet, even now, Facebook will not let me post as one of the Facebook Pages I manage. It won’t even let me comment on my personal posts, including the one featured here with a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr:
So, we may be switching to SnapChat in the future. And hey, Facebook, it was a funny joke even BEFORE you booted me entirely for a while and made it even funnier.
