It’s Not Facebook’s Fault You’re Stupid

I’ve just been sent the rather hilarious image above in an email (it seems to have started here). By now, you’ve probably been sent it too. The reason I’m posting it, other than so that those who haven’t been sent it can have a laugh at the sheer idiocy of the actions depicted, is because I would imagine that by tomorrow it will be all across the mainstream TV & newspapers with headlines along the lines of “Girl Gets Fired Because Of Facebook”.

No, she got fired because she’s a numbskull, not because of Facebook. Facebook just allowed her idiocy to come out sooner than it would have done otherwise. In fact Facebook probably saved her employer from throwing good money after bad as I’m guessing she would have failed her probation anyway.

Facebook isn’t the reason that she got fired, or that people get bullied, or that people get cancer/fat/anything else social networks have been blamed for over the last few years. Not unless we’re blaming British Telecom for prank calls.

It’s just a communication tool and, like all such tools, is open to people regardless of their IQ – what they do with it after that is entirely down to them.

4 comments

  1. Some kids on my swim team added me on Facebook and proceeded, after leaving the team, to trash certain members of the team in various public areas on Facebook. We took screencasts the videos they posted (yup) and screencapped their rather libellous comments. However, as you may see from a comment thread on my profile today, we’ve all now had to remove them as ‘friends’ because their level of dumb was literally taking over the home page news feed.

    Second story: a photo one of my friends put up on Facebook last month ended up on the news yesterday. We don’t know how they got it.

    Anyway, suffice to say: very few people appear to understand that putting things on the Internet is as good as hanging them on a banner off of Tower Bridge.

  2. I’ve often wondered how journalists get photos of people from the social profiles when those profiles are in locked environments.

    The one above was obviously screen-grabbed and emailed round, but what of the much more ‘normal’ photos that always accompany stories about teen murders/suicides/etc… Are people selling photos of their mates to journos?

    I’m intrigued.

  3. The picture that made the news wasn’t actually related to the screencapping we did: it just ended up in a news story and it came from a profile some of my friends and I created in order to share photos. The profile only has about six people as friends to begin with. It was tagged with the names of the two people in it, however, so technically all of their friends had access to it. That’s going to literally number in the thousands.

    I assume someone said to someone, “Do you have a photo of this guy?” and that someone said, “No but I think I know someone who’s friends with him… let me email them.” So the photo you uploaded to six of your buddies within a relatively private account ends up on national TV. Worth thinking about, I guess.

  4. Thanks for sharing this, I hadn’t seen it before. I agree with you about Facebook (or other social networks for that matter) being the reason behind everything and that it’s the people.

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