Atlantic Canada — Shortly after cracking down on hate speech from far-right groups, ubiquitous social media network Facebook is now saying it will no longer allow users to post dumb memes about coffee or wine.
“It’s quite rare for Mr. Zuckerberg to take any stance at all — he personally prefers to avoid controversy even while his social network perpetuates it,” said a spokesperson for Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook. “But now he’s saying that he can’t in good conscience allow people to share and reshare tired, lame memes about coffee and wine that are not and have never been funny. It simply wouldn’t be right.”
When the news broke, outcry among senior citizens was especially severe.
“I post a coffee meme at least every day. It’s kind of my thing, and I think my Facebook friends expect it of me — I can’t just let them down!” said 76-year-old Ethel Alderman. “For instance, this one I put up earlier today, that says ‘Coffee: because anger management is too expensive.’ Now that’s just funny! Or what about this one? It says ‘First I drink the coffee, then I do the stuff,’ with a picture of a grumpy cat. Are they really banning humour from Facebook?!”
The wine-meme-posting demographic — middle-aged moms — is no less upset.
“I like to think of myself as a pretty edgy gal, and I haven’t lost any of my sass,” said Jessica Philips, 42-year-old mother of two. “I’m in quite a few ‘mommy wine’ groups on Facebook…are they just going to shut those down? How will I show the other moms how cool I am?”
Philips scrolled through her timeline to show our reporter what she meant. Every post was somehow about drinking wine and being a mom. The words “Wine = mommy juice” over a low-resolution image of a glass of wine appeared 14 times in the last week alone. Other favourites included the phrases “Tonight’s forecast: 99% chance of wine” and “The most expensive part of having kids is all the wine you have to drink,” also paired with crappy images culled from the dregs of the internet.
Zuckerberg’s spokesperson, though, says this move will help “clean up” Facebook, and get rid of some of the utter crap people deem share-worthy.
“These are the first baby steps toward making Facebook less shitty overall,” the rep explained. “Until we can ban things like entire albums full of nearly identical baby pictures, gym selfies, Ted Talks, MLM scheme invites, TV episode reviews, long sanctimonious rants about events that clearly didn’t happen, vaguely dramatic posts, bragging about something while saying ‘so…I did a thing,’ tropical vacation photos with annoying captions like ‘sucks to be here,’ we can at least get rid of the coffee and wine memes.”
Penalties for breaking the new rule will range from permanent bans from Facebook to criminal charges.