Facebook Talk

Blame it on the traveling guy I am at heart, but I really find foreign news and politics interesting. When I’m able to throw Facebook into the mix as well, all the better!

Fouad Mourtada was sentenced to three years in jail after being arrested on February 5 of this year (wow, I wish our court system moved that quickly) for “stealing the identity of Prince Moulay Rachid, younger brother of King Mohammed VI.” How exactly did he steal Prince Rachid’s identity? Did he set up an elaborate credit card scam using the Prince’s name? Did he go around town getting free favors from people while pretending to be the Prince? No. He made a fake Facebook page for the Prince, which lead to him being convicted of “villainous practices linked to the alleged theft of the [prince's] identity”.

Wow. Morocco is a great country, trust me. But now I’m wondering if I should reconsider deleting my fake Brett Favre page before traveling there again. I wonder if there’s any way to find out if the royal family is huge Packers fans or not…My lame jokes aside though, I find this and other stories like it immensely interesting. In a digital age where people have legally protected identities on-line, where many of our daily transactions and interactions are taking place, this case clearly shows the depth of Facebook. While this would never happen here in the states, the fact that elsewhere in the world a simple Facebook account is held in such high regard is astounding.

Obviously I think the Moroccan courts overreacted and I’m guessing Mr. Mourtada would really appreciate a Facebook representative publicly stating how easy it is to make a fake profile, but those are beside the point. I’m still sitting here amazed over the fact that a guy is now sitting in jail thanks to a fake Facebook account. Wow. That’s all I can say.

Morocco, Fouad Mourtada, Facebook

The title above should be read in a Doctor Evil type voice in order to further emphasize the absurdity of Mark Zuckerberg being worth 1.6 billion dollars. Look, I’m all for applauding Facebook and the massive amount of money that Zuckerberg is certain to soak up in the near future. But is he really worth that much money? Every day, there’s a new report saying Facebook is worth X amount now and tomorrow it’s up to Y amount. Until Facebook is sold or goes public (ie, ACTUAL MONEY IS PUT INTO ZUCKERBERG’S POCKET!), then I think it’s a bit premature to be saying he’s the youngest self-made US billionaire.

So what if he turns around, sells Facebook tomorrow, and once the dust settles it turns out he does have a billion dollars? Well, then I’ll gladly be the first to stand up, pat him on the back, and congratulate him. Then I’ll try and pick his pockets to see if I can’t find some extra cash rolling around in there, but don’t tell him or else he’ll be expecting it.

Chalk this story up to yet another person not understanding how “dangerous” a pissed off teenager and the Internet can be.

A few days ago, a Virginian high school senior in by the name of Dave Kori woke up to find that school wasn’t canceled. So he looked up the listed phone number of Dean Tistadt, the man in charge of making the decision, called up his house, and left a message asking why. I should say that there’s no recording of his initial phone call, which might have been very nasty to begin with, but we’ll never know. Why? Because the focus is being, um…focused…on the phone call he got in return!

Turns out Dean wasn’t home. But his wife was! She proceeded to leave him a scathing phone number demanding he never call their house again and to get over it and go to school. So what did he do? Naturally, he made a Facebook page, listing his phone number and work e-mail and posted a video of the recording to YouTube.

Did Kori “cross the line” in terms of etiquette and good manners by posting the recording to YouTube? Probably, but as others have pointed out, this is more of a generational gap than anything. Plus it’s hilarious when it’s not happening to you!

Below is video from the CNN news report, which talks about the story, has a recording of the angry message, and a screen shot of the Facebook page. I’ve yet to find a link to said Facebook page, but then again I only tried for about 8 seconds and then got distracted by a flashing banner ad asking me to throw a banana at a monkey.

For a copy of the entire message, read on.

Candy Tistadt, Dean Tistadt, Facebook, Dave Kori

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Mark Zuckerberg was apparently interviewed on CBS’ 60 Minutes news program last night, but there’s no way I saw it live since it was aired at the same time as the backend of an NFL playoff game. Seriously, who even schedules a TV program to go up against playoff baseball or football? If I was the head of a network that didn’t have the rights to either of those, I’d just show videos of monkeys throwing bananas at each other instead of wasting money on actual programming. Then again, it shouldn’t take a genius to see why I’m not the head of a network television station. Who in their right mind would watch Zuckerberg yap about Facebook instead of playoff football? It’s not only un-American, it pretty much means you’re a Communist and that you hate puppies and rainbows.

Besides, this is why YouTube is such a Godsend. Not only can you watch sports, but the next morning you can watch the much talked about and even bigger disappointing interview. Honestly, it’s not a bad interview, but we don’t learn much more than the fact that Zuckerberg sleeps on a mattress on his floor, started programming computer code when he was in the 6th grade, and that the music at Facebook company parties is some very bad crap. But if you’re a fan of Facebook, it’s an enjoyable watch, so have it.

Oh, and the diamond ring tidbit in the second video was pretty hilarious and new to me. Gotta love Beacon!

facebook, mark zuckerberg, 60 minutes, interview

I’d like to update and clarify a few points that I made earlier today in a post about some students being suspended in Minnesota after being “caught” drinking on Facebook. To begin with, I never once congratulated or applauded the students for drinking alcohol. Never did I say, “yeah, woooo, way to go guys for breaking the law!” If they were drinking, then they were breaking the law. That is crystal clear. But again, anybody who has had a little life experience knows that people love to brag about and pretend to do things that they won’t actually go through with. Yet I digress, as that’s something you’ll only understand if you’ve been around the block a few times and not still a youngin’. No, instead, we’re dealing with this: Some kids got “caught” drinking by administrators of their school

And here is where the story gets murkier than a Louisiana swamp.

It’s a school’s job to educate a child. That’s it. A school is not a substitute for teaching morals or enforcing the law outside of the property. It’s a parent’s job and responsibility to teach a kid about safe sex or underage drinking or religious beliefs or anything else that doesn’t have to do with knowledge. It’s also their responsibility to enforce it. It’s great that schools teach sex ed and that some teachers are still engaged enough and not yet jaded to try and teach morals to students. But leaving it up to the schools to fulfill this duty is not just silly, it’s irresponsible.

In fact, a lot has been made in the news recently about the mom in Iowa who sold her son’s car after finding alcohol under the seat of his car. THAT’S how a kid should be punished. Let the parents deal with the non-school problems: nowhere in that story did you hear about that kid’s school stepping in and slapping him with a suspension because they have nothing to do with this equation.

Some commenters on the previous post liked to point out that the kids were breaking a law by drinking and thus warranted the suspensions. Chances are they probably were breaking the law. But does every student that gets a speeding ticket get suspended? How about every kid that gets caught trespassing or spray-painting an overpass? What about when a parent finds marijuana in a kid’s sock drawer? All of these actions are illegal and yet I highly doubt anybody caught doing any of this would be suspended.

They also pointed out that it wasn’t nearly 100 students, but instead only 13. And that they were suspended from extracurricular activities and not school itself. If that’s the truth, my bad, but I was only quoting the article that was posted in the Minnesota Star Tribune newspaper. If a major newspaper can’t get the story correct, what the hell do you expect from bloggers?

Furthermore, this argument isn’t over whether or not the kids should have put the pictures on the Internet. Anybody with half a brain can tell you that’s a retarded move to make, as I’ve argued here on Facebook Talk many times before. To put them on Facebook and not expect anybody to find them wasn’t just stupid, it was moronic and they deserved to be caught. But they should have been grounded for a few months by their parents, not suspended by the school. Why?

Because the point here is that the school officials suspended the kids with no real proof that they’d broken any rules and that even if the pictures were enough proof for some, they had nothing to do with the school. The kids weren’t caught being actually drunk. They weren’t on school grounds. They weren’t at a school function off-campus. They weren’t even bragging about drinking while on-campus and thus overheard by a teacher. How this involves the school isn’t just unclear, it’s downright absurd.

In a disturbing story coming out of Minnesota, over 100 kids have been suspended or punished by their school. Why? Was it because they were caught cheating in school? Misbehaving? Fighting? Smoking pot behind the bleachers

Nope, none of that. In fact, they didn’t break any rules while on school property. Instead, school officials of Eden Prairie High School found photos on Facebook of the students drinking at a party. Then, somehow they thought it was their job to punish the kids.

Eden Prairie High School administrators have reprimanded more than 100 students and suspended some from sports and other extracurricular activities after obtaining Facebook photos of students partying, several students said Tuesday.

Danny O’Leary, a senior who plays lacrosse, said his dean displayed four Facebook photos of O’Leary holding drinks and told him he was in “a bit of trouble.” One photo shows him holding a can of Coors beer, another a shot of rum, he said. In yet another, O’Leary is pictured holding his friend’s 40-ounce container of beer.

“I wasn’t drinking that night,” O’Leary said. But that apparently doesn’t matter. “I was told each picture was equal to a two-game suspension,” he said.

Oh, well that makes sense then. Wait, no, no it doesn’t. In fact, this is beyond ludicrous. The fact that few people are standing up for the students baffles me even more. Even the ACLU won’t come to their defense! How is this the school’s business? Underage drinking has absolutely nothing to do with school and instead should be left to the individual kid’s parents to decide how to deal with the photos. At best, the school officials should have notified the parents and left it at that.

Furthermore, how does the school know the kids were drinking? Who are they to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that water wasn’t in the beer cans. I had a friend who used to walk around drinking coke at parties while pretending to be getting drunk on mixed drinks. High school is full of peer pressure and kids will do anything to “fit in,” even if that means making it look like they’re drinking at a party and getting drunk. Were these idiots in the school administration office ever in high school or were they simply hatched from an egg as stuck up twats? Because frankly they’re acting like morons here. Call the parents, tell the kids if they’re caught drinking on school grounds that they’ll be suspended, and move on.

If this had been a message board where the kids plotted to create a cheating ring or talked about beating up another student on school grounds, then I could easily see the administrators stepping in. But these were photos taken at an off campus party, some of which were taken over two years ago, where an off campus violation occurred. God help the students at Eden Prairie if their deans find any photos of their messy rooms at home or of them getting a speeding ticket! Who cares if neither of those have anything to do with school?!

To make this story even better, many of the students are protesting the suspensions and are even organizing the protest on Facebook. God, I love irony!

Facebook, eden prairie, suspended, students, drinking

Now HERE is the kind of Facebook story that I like writing about!

Let’s say you’re a member of the press and you live somewhere in Europe. How about France, because we all know they have great wine and beautiful women. So you’re a member of the French press and your editor tells you something about this American website called Facebook and how you should do a story on it. You look around the site, see that there’s an application called ePresident, and that the recent global winner was a local Frenchman. Cool! That would be a nice little interview and read, seeing as how your own country just held President elections recently.

So you call up the winner, interview him, and during the process he jokes that now he is “President of Facebook,” he has access to every Facebook member’s profile and information, which is more than the entire French press combined. And you believe him and thus file it in your story. And then other news outlets pick up on your story and don’t bother to fact-check as well, and then more and more pundits and anchors and newscasters are talking about how powerful people on Facebook can become and before you know it, you have an entire country’s media thinking you’re more powerful than them. When all along a simple freaking Google search would show them that you’re simply messing with around with everybody!

Honestly, anybody who doesn’t love this story has no sense of humor.

Basically, what happened was a young man by the name of Arash Derambarsh “won” a contest held by ePresident and was crowned the Facebook President. In reality, he only garnered about 9,000+ votes, but that was enough to net him first place. Then he had his image and a little message posted on Facebook President and simply ran with the story that he was now the President of Facebook.

This story is all over the net now and is huge in France. I read about it on TechCrunch, but the guy already has his own Wikipedia page (I can’t read any of it though), and a Facebook group dedicated to pointing out to anybody who’ll listen that it’s a hoax. People, and particularly the news media, are just now starting to realize they’ve been duped. But honestly, they have nobody to blame but themselves. It’s not Arash’s fault nobody in his country decided to Google his story or make a few phone calls to make sure he was telling the truth.

Um, in fact, I’m the King of England folks! If anybody needs a comment from me, I’ll be busy sitting on my throne and rebuilding my empire.

France, Facebook, hoax, Arash Derambarsh, President