Why Does Facebook Hate Babies?
A Lego sign sits on a desk at Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.
Facebook hates babies. I found this out last night when I tried to log on as Laszlo Stein, my 3-month-old son, who has been faithfully posting adorable photos and angry commentary since his second-trimester sonogram, back when his listed interests were just kicking and drinking his own urine. In his time on Facebook, he has threatened to pee on some and cut others. He once posted next to a photo of him gummily smiling and wearing a kimono this response to my wife's friend Nancy's comment that she met another baby named Laszlo: "OMG! That's so awesome! We should form a Facebook group! Just kidding. I don't give a crap, you loser. Get a life." More than once, he has commented on the photo of another baby with "I'd hit that." (See the best social-networking applications.)
But last night when I tried to log on, all I got was a page that said, "Account disabled." Now, I know Facebook has a rule that you have to be over age 13 to have an account, and I guess some loser at Facebook is paid to look for accounts with photos of people under age 13. I'm sure Facebook does this to protect kids from pedophiles, and yet the surest way for a pedophile to find a kid would be to get a job at Facebook looking for kids' accounts. (Read "Does Facebook Replace Face Time or Enhance It?")
All I wanted was to avoid being one of those annoying parents who post photos of their kids on their own page. I wanted to have a place for the few family members and friends who want to see Laszlo's baby pictures. And now all the photos other people posted of Laszlo are gone, and I have to e-mail every damn photo to our parents and siblings. I wish Facebook had given me some kind of warning so I could have archived all this stuff or transferred it to the Facebook application Baby Book, which I found out about too late and is oddly O.K. with Facebook, even though it's exactly the same as Laszlo's having his own page.
You can still do right, Facebook, by giving me back his page for a day so I can transfer it and no longer be known as a baby hater. You know how to contact me. On Facebook.
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