GettyFacebook isn’t having the best time at the moment. Their plans for a ‘dislike’ button pretty much died on their arse, the page keeps going down, and now the social media site appears to be blocking seemingly innocuous phrases.
Who knows, maybe this is all part of an early Mark Zuckerberg midlife crisis?
For a brief period last week, Facebook blocked the phrase “Everyone will know” and nobody seemed to know why.
Whenever anyone tried to type out the entire phrase as part of a public status or in a comment, an error message would appear.
ABACA USA/Empics EntertainmentUser Lau05k was so intrigued by the situation, he asked about the bug on Question.com and the intrigue soon became widespread.
On the site, user AsyluM226 added:
So my friend posted a status about this on Facebook about an hour ago and I thought he was full of shit until I tried it myself lol I don’t know what the hell is going on maybe its something for Halloween? But it’s scary as shit. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg is hiding something?
Indeed, the whole thing seemed pretty apt considering the upcoming Halloween season and the spooky connotations of the phrase – kind of like an “I know what you did last summer” for the Internet generation.
BloombergHowever, it looks like the whole thing was just a weird glitch and not a holiday themed gimmick from the minds behind Facebook, which is a shame.
Speaking to the Huffington Post, Melanie Ensign, part of Facebook’s security communications team, said:
This was a mistake with our spam filter and our engineers have resolved the issue. We’re constantly updating the rules used by our spam-fighting engine and this particular phrase erroneously got caught in the mix.
Unfortunately for anyone wanting to try out the glitch for themselves, Facebook have now fixed the bug. Spoilsports.
