Let’s say that someone—maybe Jack Donaghy, or Steve Jobs, or God—appeared in a dream and asked you to come up with the worst idea in the history of the internet. What would you tell them?
It’s harder than you think. Kozmo already tried “delivery service for below-cost DVDs and food.” Swatch tried to replace the hour and minute system man has used for centuries with a global, decimal-based mode of “internet time.” There have been wearable face computers designed to help women with breastfeeding and a plastic cat used to scan bar codes in magazines, and even—I hope this doesn’t trigger you—Windows Vista.
In other words: The internet is so terrible that it’s hard to come up with a Worst Idea Ever. But Facebook may have done it.
Surely you know what “revenge porn” is, yes? In case not, revenge porn is what we call it when a jilted lover publishes intimate (not a particularly apt euphemism, to be honest) photos of an ex-paramour on the web. This is mortifying, evidently, because people who take naked pictures of themselves digitally are always shocked when those pictures get out into the wild.
(A brief aside: Modern society has disambiguated sexual mores to a ludicrous, hilarious, degree. You can say that you identify as a dragon and go on to make whoopee in exotic configurations, while drunk, with a series of strangers you’ve never met before, and no one in polite society will say boo about your life choices. But if you post a Girls Gone Wild-style picture of your ex-girlfriend on social media, you’re history’s greatest monster. It’s charming the way our louche culture feels the need to retain at least some aspects of Puritanism.)
Anyway, even if revenge porn is not literally Hitler, then it is, at the very least, not something nice people should do to one another. So Facebook has helpfully come up with a simple way to stop it.
The procedure goes like this:
Let’s say you meet a nice guy at the Gothic Castle. You sext him a couple of pictures. The two of you “break up” the next morning. And now you’re wondering if he’s going do something awful with those pics, like post them on Facebook. So you take the naked pictures of yourself and you send them to Facebook first! And then someone sitting in a cube at the Facebook mothership reviews them, makes sure they really are naked pictures of you, and then uses some fancy machine-learning algorithm to prevent anyone from posting those photos on the Facebook platform, ever.
Problem solved.
Except for the part where Facebook becomes the world’s largest repository of amateur porn. At which point it’s like Fort Knox, practically begging hackers to take it down. Or until some Facebook version of Chelsea Manning makes off with the stash and uploads them to bittorrent. Or . . . well, I’m sure it’s fine.
