Besides featuring attire that might be worn by a lawyer, is there anything offensive about the above cat picture?
Because posting that sucker on Facebook was getting people banned faster than you can say “Save us: somebody posted an image of a naked breast showing a nipple!!!”
Facebook fixed whatever glitch was going on, but as RT reports, before it did, it had pulled this sourpuss swat-your-account move on an unknown number of people.
Techzei confirmed the bug, which it said was getting people in trouble when they sent the cat meme via private messaging.
Techzei also said that it had confirmed the shutdowns of 7 other accounts.
One of those punished for publishing the nattily dressed cat was Varun Krish, who wrote about it on FoneArena.
Krish’s account of how the internet momentarily went from cat saturation to scratching off its cyber kitty fleas:
What was turning out to be a peaceful Saturday night dinner for me turned into a digital nightmare when Facebook suddenly disabled my account after I sent a photo of a cat on messenger to a friend after receiving it on WhatsApp.
That sounds really ridiculous right? Cat photos are really 90% of the internet and why on earth was my Facebook account disabled for sending this over Messenger, not even posting it on my timeline.
Krish was chatting with friends over Facebook Messenger. After sending the image of a cat attorney, Messenger “automatically” logged him out.
He went into his Facebook app, which gave him a message about his session having timed out and asked Krish to log in again.
He went online with his computer, where he found that his complete Facebook account had been swallowed up: Messenger, Facebook, Facebook Ads and “what else I don’t know.”
It all happened in a matter of seconds. His Facebook profile, along with a list of friends containing more than 3,000 profiles, pulled a disappearing act like a little wisp of a mouse tail disappearing into a hole in the wall.
Krish and others were left to puzzle it out. From whence came this sudden cat allergy?
Perhaps it was an offensive message hidden in a watermark?
The letters on the right shoulder seem to say sucheesh kk vallithode. Mean anything? @srivatsa224 @rajupp @varunkrish @_Ant1_
— Paul Hirsh (@jazzpanflute) October 3, 2016
Well, of course it means something! Vallithode is a Federal Bank of India branch, as can attest anybody who’s read the mesmerizing (PDF) PMRY Subsidy list of beneficiaries.
And it’s probably not “sucheesh,” as a Google search suggests: more likely it’s “sudheesh,” which of course is probably a variant spelling of “Sudhish,” a boy’s name meaning “Lord of excellent intellect.”
In other words, Facebook probably didn’t want to hurt Mr. and Mrs. Vallithode’s feelings by telling them that their son, Sudhish, was dressing up like a cat, thereby displaying tendencies of the Lord of feeble intellect.
Or then again, maybe some errant code in the image’s metadata was causing it to be interpreted as offensive.
Whatever caused the glitch, it was fixed sometime over the weekend.
Techzei reports that as of Monday, the bug had been around for over 2 weeks. All of the accounts have since been reinstated.
Facebook didn’t explain what happened.
I guess the cat’s got its tongue.
Follow @LisaVaas
So facebook is ready to cancel accounts automatically if they don’t like an image. Great, maybe I should tell them to go f themselves before they get me first…..
(I post a lot of anti trump/hilldog jabs, the cat looks much more dignified)
Is the bigger issue here not the clutch causing the account closure but the ability of facebook to see the contents of the message. I thought all messages now had end-to-end encryption!
I imagine there might have been an errant hash that mistakenly identified the image as something verboten, such as child porn or images of terrorist acts/propaganda. i’m not familiar with how or whether that type of flagging works with encryption, but if it does, it would account for how fast it got people’s accounts shut down in this case. At any rate, without Facebook’s input, all we can do is speculate.
End-to-end encryption is turned off by default in Messenger
End to end encryption is most likely to be only between customers, facebook staff will be excluded just in case the FBI or the NSA come calling despite what they say publicly about no back doors.
In any case I seriously wander what everyone did before facebook, if shutting someone’s account means the end of the world for them – get a grip people, for those friends and family you haven’t got phone numbers for maybe try and get one and for those who don’t have phones, i dunno there is always good old snail mail.
The fact that snafu’s like this are becoming more common I suspect is down to more and more staffers being laid off who do the day to day grunt admin work in favour of automated systems to do the same thing.
If you are not happy let your fingers do the walking.
Srivatsa’s image (but not yours) also has pale yellow writing in the white space – could have been that too.
Is that all it takes to delete a facebook account? I’m going to put a cat in suit pic on mine. So I don’t have to wait 14 days to have my account deleted.