The Death of Facebook

It began auspiciously at Harvard University in February 2004; it died inauspiciously in November 2011, its global network groaning under a smorgasbord of squashed pets and hard dicks.  The blood and semen may have shown up in separate shots, but for the outraged proletariat, it was as if Mark Zuckerberg himself had fellated a spaniel and then tagged every member of Facebook in the accompanying snap.

 Thefacebook.com was supposed to be a refined bulletin board where students could keep in touch and check coursework results.  It was never meant to be a dumping ground for live porn and dead dogs.  Then again, it was never meant to be a dumping ground for daily horoscopes and inane status updates either.  The truth is, Facebook died long before its 800 million users found themselves up in arms over a bit of skin appearing in their news feed.  The site has been in terminal decline for over two years now, insidiously haemorrhaging content and replacing it with ads, spam and pictures of cute kittens.

In fairness to its creators, the dumbing down of Facebook is largely the fault of its dumb community; it doesn’t matter how nicely the interface is designed or how easy it is to access on your mobile – if you populate it with shit-heads, shit’s all you’re going to get out in return.  Not all Facebook users are droolingly retarded of course – some are intelligent, articulate and hilarious.  These days however, you’ve got to shovel through a lot of shit in your news feed to unearth these gems.

Once the over-40s signed up and began clogging Facebook with the sort of cringeworthy cut & paste statuses that define a large portion of this achingly uncool demographic, the writing was on the wall and indeed plastered across every news feed. A quick scan through the Edinburgh Uncovered Facebook feed reveals, amidst all the porn and dead dogs, something less savoury: the cloying older generation, who think they ‘know a bit about computers’ cos they’ve learned the shortcuts ‘ctrl+c’ and ‘ctrl+v’.  Some of the rent-a-posts they churn out are so awful as to make the Holocaust seem like a misdemeanour.  Take a deep breath, control your gag reflex and prepare to grimace at the following examples that were lifted from Facebook just moments ago:

“I aint horrible to my mum but i still have to say this; i love her to pieces My mum carried me in her womb for nine months… then she watched her feet swell & her skin stretch & tear; she struggled to climb stairs, she got breathless quick; she suffered many sleepless nights. She then went through excruciating pain to bring me into this world. Then, she became my nurse, my chef, my maid, my chauffeur, my biggest fan, my teacher, & my best friend. She’s struggled for me, cried over me, hoped the best for me, & prayed for me. Most of us take our mum for granted. What would you do if she wasn’t there one day? re-post if you love your mum more than anything in this world ♥”

Wait, it gets worse, a couple of posts further down the news feed:

 “No one can go back and make a brand new start. Anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending….Disappointments are like road bumps, they slow you down a bit but you enjoy the smooth road afterwards. Don’t stay on the bumps too long. Move on! ….You can’t make someone love you, all you can do is be someone who can be loved, and the rest is up to the person to realize your worth….Friendship is like wine, it gets better as it grows older.”

 If that doesn’t make you vomit carrot and sweetcorn chunks all over your computer screen, you clearly haven’t ingested solid food in the last 24 hours.  There ought to be a competency test administered before old people are allowed near a Facebook account.  Amidst all the nauseous barfathons being regurgitated by Facebook’s baby boomers, there are also panicked updates such as the following:

WARNING !!! DO NOT ACCEPT FRIEND REQUEST FROM>>>BOBBY ROBERTS<<< profile picture is four colored picture>>>A hacker and fake name !!! the name will DESTROY EVERYTHING !!! please…COPY THIS TEXT ON YOUR STATUS SO THAT YOUR FRIENDS ARE WARNED xxxxxxx PASS ON ALONG

That’s right, Bobby Roberts will destroy everything – including the known universe and all unknown anti-matter affiliated with it – should you accept his friend request.

Facebook is but a mirror of the people we see in the world around us.  That many of its users should prove to be insipid clones of one another is not the fault of the social media giant.  What is Facebook’s fault however is permitting their once-proud domain to be clogged with such bile.  Facebook has turned a blind eye to this vomit-fest for too long instead of formulating intelligent software to filter it out. Innovators who stop innovating become obsolete.  It happened with Bebo.  It happened with MySpace.  And now it’s happened to Facebook.  In years to come, we’ll laugh at the notion that we ever used to waste so much time on this vacuous site.  Sadly, most Facebook users have yet to notice the insidious decline of their beloved social media hub, having been more preoccupied with spaffing pre-cum over the novelty of using Facebook Places to check into the bathroom for a shit.

By March 2010, Facebook was attracting more hits than Google.  In June 2011, it reached one trillion page views.  Their stock was thriving and Mark Zuckerberg had become one rich-ass jew – even by the standards of rich-ass jews.  His company had garnered a reputation for having fun and bringing people together, and that’s what they did, with great success, for the latter half of the noughties.  For the last five years, Facebook has served as an inner sanctum to many; it’s the place where office workers go to skive without alerting the boss.  It’s where shoppers kill time on smartphones while queueing at checkouts.  It’s the site where loved-up girlfriends can post mushy images on boyfriends’ walls and boyfriends can unashamedly reciprocate.  And, of course, it’s where dirties can plaster mirror shots snapped on BlackBerries with boobs pushed out, stomachs tucked in and inviting expressions of doe-eyed innocence.

In spite of the abundance of such lascivious galleries, they’re widely perceived as harmless fun; there’s no nudity involved and they allow ugly girls to pick up horny boys, armed with nothing more than a push-up bra and a smartphone.  It’s not as if anyone ever beats off to these mildly provocative pictures, is it?  What’s that…they do?  Oh.  Well at least I’m not alone then.  Anyway, the point is this: Facebook’s always been clean – squeaky clean in fact.  You want filth, you go to RedTube or SpankWire or scavenge through F**kbook; you want to discuss cupcakes, you go to Facebook.  That’s always how it’s operated.

Until now.

Today, everything changed.  After this moon landing moment has passed into history, Facebook will never be the same again, for today was the day that Facebook and F**kbook merged into one to became the human centipede-like entity that is FaceF**kbook, or FFB.  The unthinkable has just happened: cupcakes and cocks have become inexorably tangled up in the same news feed.

Within the last 36 hours, graphic images that appear to be getting organically ‘liked’ and shared at an alarming rate have sprung up all over Facebook.  Users need only click on the image to view it and instantly it is shared to their profile, a process which normally only happens if you click to ‘like’ or comment on an image.  This bug is believed to be unheard of in Facebook history.  One image, depicting a woman ‘getting the granny smashed clean ‘aff her’, as they never taught us to say in sex education, was generating 500 ‘likes’ a minute.  This meant that it was also appearing on 500 Facebook feeds simultaneously, most of which would have fed through to the pages of friends, close family and work colleagues.

If an image kept multiplying at that rate, it would have been shared five million times within a week – and that’s just highlighting one picture; there are whole galleries of these f**kers doing the rounds on Facebook as you read this.  Potentially, this shit could have seeped into 100 million feeds by the time it’s through.  Ultimately, the virus may even prove to be deadlier than the Black Plague.  Sure, back then it maybe was a bitch to die coughing your lungs out in a rancid sewer with rats gnawing at your toes, but that doesn’t even begin to compare to the anguish of not being able to check Facebook at work for fear of a hard cock in your news feed catching the boss’s eye, so to speak.  Some of the naked pics on Facebook make Janet Jackson’s outrageous Super Bowl nipple slip seem like nothing more than a slight wardrobe malfunction.

In the last 24 hours, as manipulated images of Justin Bieber with a cock in his face have begun appearing on Facebook, people have been going understandably apoplectic.  Justin Bieber?  On their Facebook wall?  That shit’s embarrassing.  Sooner or later, it was bound to happen though.  Facebook is just a microcosm of the wider world; you keep polluting it until eventually, Mother Nature can’t take it no more.  Now the seas are full of plastic, the clouds with acid rain and social media with spread fanjitas and other antisocial images.  Since when did accessing Facebook turn into a game of Chat Roulette, with floppy cocks and dead foetuses to navigate in order to find out what your friends have been getting up to?

In years to come, 9/11 will be just another date on the calendar – 11/15 is the one they’ll all be talking about.  You can bet your life they won’t be talking about it on Facebook though, because FB will be dead.  In its place comes FaceF**kbook, the dystopian universe where hardcore porn merges with wedding snaps and christening pics to form a singular news feed.

Some will be questioning why the government didn’t have a contingency plan in place.  It’s all very well planning for a terrorist attack during the Olympics or the impending zombie apocalypse, but no one thought to warn us of the evil presented by FaceF**kbook.  Graphic Facebook images may seem fairly trivial in comparison, but think of it this way: when the zombie apocalypse does arrive, what if we can’t check our feeds for survivors because they’re all clogged up with porn?  Bin Laden will be chuckling from the bottom of the sea or the afterlife with 72 virgins, depending on which religion you ascribe to; this is exactly the sort of shit he warned the West would succumb to if they continued in their immoral ways.  The kuffirs got what the kuffirs wanted and now their Zionist invention is about to eat them alive.

So who is to blame for this tirade of smut that has washed up on our beloved Facebook – scammers? Hackers? Sick f**ks? ‘Broken Britain’?  Some people have pointed the finger of suspicion in the direction of Anonymous, the loose-knit hacktivist collective whom it is illegal to refer to without invoking the adjective ‘shadowy’.  In August 2011, a video purporting to be from Anonymous was posted on YouTube.  In their doom-laden manifesto, dictated in a computerised monotone, Anonymous warned:

‘The medium of communication you all so dearly adore will be destroyed.  If you are a hactivist or just a guy who wants to protect the freedom of information then join the cause and kill Facebook for the sake of your own privacy.  Facebook has been selling information to government agencies and giving clandestine access to information security firms so that they can spy on people… Facebook knows more about you than your family…One day you will look back on this and realise what we have done here is right.  Prepare for a day that will go down in history – November 5th 2011.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXLxiMemYc0]

As a riposte to the Anonymous video, web security experts Sophos blogged:

“Firstly, Facebook only “knows” what you choose to tell it. If you want to tell Facebook more than you tell your parents, or your spouse, or your third cousin twice removed, then that should be your choice. And it should be your right. At least, your choice and right in any jurisdiction in which there is at least some personal freedom.”

Today, that personal freedom was swept away in a tirade of blood-soaked roadkill and semi-fappable porn.  By the evening of 15th November, huge swathes of Facebook had been lain waste by the scam, with irate users updating statuses to apologise for the porn that had been posted on their behalf.  Countless others expressed their horror and outrage, both at those promulgating the filth and at Facebook for allowing it to happen on their turf.  Within hours of the scam unfolding, some Facebook feeds resembled the sort of gruesome detritus you’d expect to find on a 4Chan image board – the very site that reputedly spawned Anonymous back in 2003.

Of course, if there’s one thing worse than human suffering, in the eyes of humanity, it’s animal suffering.  Upload footage of a girl having her genitals mutilated and no one will bat an eye-lid.  Bosh up a YouTube clip of a dog being raised off the ground by its collar and the matter gets raised at Parliamentary Questions.  As one Facebook user commented:

“For me animal abuse is the worst thing. Amazing isn’t it how some humans will try and wreck all the good stuff that Facebook can bring. I kept waking up last night with images of that puppy and those two guys – that’s just evil. Karma will catch up with them one day.”

Incensed animal-lovers aside, there are two tranches of Facebook that have legitimate cause to be alarmed by its recent degeneration into SitOnMyFacebook: kids and companies.  Although Facebook is officially for over-14s, there are 7.5 million children under 13 who also use the social networking site.  In spite of their apparent outrage, most Facebook users aren’t going to be traumatised by a gaping clunge they didn’t ‘like’ showing up in their news feed; indeed, some would see it as an unsolicited bonus.  Having to explain the birds and the bees to a wide-eyed eight-year-old who’s just witnessed a monster dong in their news feed however is more troubling.  Will parents ever feel safe about letting their kids browse Facebook again?

There’s also all the companies that are indirectly affected by this scandal: which organisation will want to affiliate itself with a service provider that has been forever tainted by images of gay porn, Justin Bieber and Alsatians drowning in their own ketchup?  The prospect of such content making its way onto a Facebook business page is the stuff that PR nightmares are made off.  In the backlash that will inevitably follow, some companies may elect to disassociate themselves from Facebook altogether and delete their accounts.  Not that those accounts will be truly deleted of course: apparently Facebook doesn’t actually delete your personal data at your request – instead it retains it on its servers, long after you thought it had been disposed of.  You can’t help getting the impression that when it comes to handling data, Facebook is like a lazy postman, ditching it all in a skip cos it can’t be arsed doing the job properly (and because it’s more lucrative to sell that data on to government agencies and security companies, according to Anonymous).  That’s the trouble with Facebook: you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

Like cigarette smoking in developing countries, Facebook may still experience growth in the next few years.  As far as the developed world goes however, it’s over – soon FB will only be available from behind the counter.  It’s always been that way with civilisation, ever since the dawn of humanity; the Roman empire crumbled; the Persians had the rug pulled from under them and now Facebook has been royally facef**ked.

From this moment forward, Edinburgh Uncovered declares Facebook to be dead (even if we will continue to use it on a regular basis).  Don’t let our blatant hypocrisy detract from the message: this really is the end for FB.  You see, in the eight months it’s existed, this blog has developed an uncanny knack for predicting the end of the world for the establishments it has vilified – we’ve got form for this.  Stereo died the moment Edinburgh Uncovered decreed it to be devoid of a pulse; Le Monde was forced to close for a major refit after EU charitably observed: ‘‘Inhale life’ is Le Monde’s motto, and by ‘life’ they mean ‘large chunks of cocaine in our pristine toilets’.’ And Planking died the moment The Death of Planking blog went live on this very site.  As for Lava Ignite, its reputation has plummeted ever since being immortalised in Edinburgh Uncovered back in May, to the extent that Cav’s owners have now gone bust.  Even the Mosque Kitchen – which was reviewed favourably in EU – went a bit tits up shortly after featuring here.  Swatting away Facebook, in comparison, will be a piece of piss.

So as we prepare to pat the spade down upon Facebook’s grave, it seems pertinent to reflect on how this whole sorry mess came about. While this attack bears all the hallmarks of Anonymous, the truth is, this is one defacing they can’t take the credit for.  But what about the video – didn’t Anonymous claim they were going to try and take down Facebook?  Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t.

Cos here’s the twist: who’s to say the computerised voice in the ‘Facebook Will Fall’ video even was Anonymous?  After all, it could just as easily have been Larry Page with a vocoder, trying to convince everyone to migrate to Google+.  If that’s the case, he’s a marketing genius.

Either way, Facebook just got pwned.