Some Facebook users have noticed a bizarre glitch in the system and are making something of a game out of it. The popular social media’s algorithm is, for some reason, blocking the seemingly innocuous phrase “Everyone will know,” Huffington Post is reporting .
The “Everyone will know” glitch came to light on Friday when a user asked, on the popular question-and-answer site Question.com , “Why can’t you post ‘everyone will know’ on Facebook?”
“A lot of my friends have been trying to post it and no one has been able to do so. If you try to post it multiple times it will block you from posting any status.”
Another user reported – rather colorfully, we might add – having the same problem.
“So my friend posted a status about this on Facebook about an hour ago and I thought he was full of s**t until I tried it myself lol I don’t know what the h**l is going on maybe its something for Halloween? But its scary as s**t. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg is hiding something? -shrugs-“
On Sunday, the topic made its way to Reddit , where a thread detailing users’ problems posting the phrase has since generated over 220 comments.
The Huffington Post writer Hilary Hanson then tried giving “Everyone will know” a go, and she got some rather interesting results.
Hilary also tried typing “Everyone will know” into a chat window, and got a similar message.
Being the thorough investigative journalist that I am, I had to try out the “Everyone will know” glitch for myself. The results were… disappointing. At around 3:00 p.m. Central Time, I made my status “Everyone will know” from my laptop. Here’s what I got.
As you can see, it posted just fine. Although, to be fair, I only left that status up for a couple of minutes – otherwise, my mother would have started blowing up my phone wanting to know what I was going on about.
I posted “Everyone will know” from my iPhone, and got similarly disappointing results (ignore the status from my friend below – I have no idea what he’s going on about).
Once again, I didn’t leave it up very long.
So either I didn’t give Facebook long enough to notice my shenanigans; or the “Everyone will know” glitch has been fixed, as of this post; or it isn’t affecting everybody.
So what is/was going on? One Reddit user, YearOfTheChipmunk, has a pretty reasonable idea.
“So you can’t post it, because too many people are trying to post it? Which means it gets more popular and everyone tries to post it, which in turn means no one can post it. Damn vicious cycle.”
Another Reddit user, LowDecay, agrees.
“so someone created the fact that you can´t post ‘Everyone will know’ just by stating that you can´t post it. That’s genius”
TechWorm writer Vijay Prabhu is of the belief that Facebook maintains a list of banned words and phrases , and for some reason, the phrase “Everyone will know” triggers a hit. Unfortunately, there’s no way of knowing for sure, because Facebook keeps its cards close to its vest when it comes to this sort of thing.
“[‘Everyone will know’] seems to be a part of certain words and sentences that are banned from used on Facebook. However nobody knows whether such a super list of banned words actually exists.”
If you want to have a bit of fun with Facebook, try typing the phrase “Everyone will know,” either as a status or in a chat, and report your results in the comments below.
[Image courtesy of: Shutterstock/ Gil C ]
