Suicide, bullying, bad things: The bleak hell of Facebook

Many teenagers are addicted to social networking. Harmless fun? Not a major issue when put in perspective? There are worse things in the world right now? To find out why there really aren’t, read on. As an Archbishop condemns the craze, we take a turd-tinted microscope to the dangers of the social networking underground network.

'It had become like an obsession - logging on to her pages on the social networking sites Stardoll [the fuck is that? – ed.] and Bebo was the first thing she did in the morning and the last thing she did at night'. So sayeth'd one concerned mother.

'And the worst thing about it was that it didn't seem to be making her at all happy. She went from being bright and chatty and excited to listless and constantly bored. Her eyes would glaze over, her concentration span diminished and she seemed uninterested in everything except how many messages she'd got.'

Perhaps she wasn’t doing it right.

But this reporter has reason to believe that suicide and cyber-bullying hide behind the facade of ‘harmless fun’. Unlike some newspapers, we won't attempt to cynically exploit the tragic death of a teenager by associating it with an entirely unrelated case which actually had no negative consequences at all, but we do recommend you become extremely worried, now.

This week, Archdaemon Vincent Nichols of the Roman Catholic Church of England theatrically flung himself uninvited into the debate. He warned that the trend towards harbouring machina and creating fragile virtual relationships leaves teenagers desolate and inconsolable when these relationships break down, or when their computers do.

With a bizarre disease metaphor, Nichols claimed it was an 'all-or-nothing syndrome that you [catch] in an attempt to shore up an identity. Friendship is not a commodity, it is hard work and enduring when it is right.'

The apparently Amish archbishop of Westminster also expressed concern that an over-reliance on cyber friendships is impeding our ability to defend against the cataclysmic inevitable conclusion of total subservience to sentient machine overlords. Though these were not technically his exact thoughts, the sentiment was strongly inferred by the Quail.

'The reality is that the popularity such sites confer is a mirage,' confirms online agony witch Hilary Freeman. 'One of the results of the social networking phenomenon is that quantity has replaced quality as the marker of friendship.

'It's not uncommon for members to list more than 500 "friends". Clearly, no more than a handful of these are true friends. Some of the rest, if they're lucky, are acquaintances, but some will be rivals [and some Russian spies], who wish them harm.'

By Joel Sport.
To submit a Quail, click here.

Twitter breaks your brain, say experts

Twitter is breeding a generation of emotionless sociopaths hell bent on nothing less than the total annihilation of humankind, a study hasn't shown.

According to hypnotherapist and BBC 3 psychologist Felix Economakis, the machine gun quick stream of 24-hour news, email, social networking sites, microwave ovens and colour TVs are overloading our brains with microscopic digital germs of doom.

Emitted by many common household appliances and absolutely everything on the internet, the so-called 'Gigagerms' wreak havoc with the easily corrupted empathy cells and compassion enzymes that make up the brain's squishy 'moral compass'.

Dr Economakis believes that web surfers have been at risk of losing their morals since the birth of broadband, but the problem has been amplified by the surge in popularity of evil social networking video game Twitter.

He said: 'Our poor brains are definitely suffering information overload...Our brains' attention levels are finite. When everything is screaming at us, we start withdrawing so that normally nice people become unempathetic. Brains brains brains.'

Twitter, originally known as Skynet when it was founded by parent company Cyberdyne in the late eighties, poses the most significant risk because updates are presented too quickly for the sluggish human mind to process correctly, the studies show.

Such an 'information overload can trigger the brain's 'fight or flight' response - and sideline more compassionate, thoughtful responses to news and information', Daily Mail science editor David Derbyshire added nonsensically.

Preliminary findings from similar research have indicated that Facebook and Twitter usage is also associated with reduced Midi-Chlorian counts, and may even reverse evolution when used with third party applications such as Tweetdeck which speed up the stream of information crashing into users' faces.

An expert said: 'These studies are irrefutable, and are based on rock-solid science. Everyone should stop using these silly internet things and buy more newspapers before something awful happens.'

Facebook and Twitter Bully Your Children, Says Newspaper

Facebook and Twitter - but not MySpace - are encouraging online 'cyberbullying', a newspaper claimed today.

According to CyberMentors, a new social networking site set up to allow young victims of bullying to talk to peers about their problems, 50% of 11-18 year olds have been subject to some form of cyberbullying, but 29% had never told anyone about it. As many as 70% of all young people have experienced some form of bullying more generally.

The CyberMentors site, run by support organisation Beatbullying, has won praise from Gordon Brown and Education Secretary Ed Balls, and counts Mozilla, The National Union of Students and The Department for Children, Schools and Families amongst its partners.

But The Daily Mail took issue with Beatbullying's statistics, claiming that the number of young victims of online bullying was actually 17% lower, at one in three.

Describing as-yet undisclosed research, reporter Mark Prigg named Facebook and Twitter as the two biggest progenitors of cyberbullying, despite the fact that neither were named in the CyberMentors press release, other than to highlight Facebook's commitment 'to find new ways of preventing cyberbullying'.

Prigg went on to imagine a terrifying case that may or may not have happened once but might happen in the future maybe, where: 'bullies have even set up Facebook groups allowing dozens of people to band together to abuse schoolmates or colleagues.'

It is thought that Facebook actively encourages normal children to become bullies with competitions to 'Find the meanest jerk' and rewards for those voted 'Most efficient tormentor of Year 7 kids'. Twitter probably does the same somehow.

Readers reacted with world-weary incredulity at the short-sighted attempts to protect children from trivialities like intimidation and torment:

Helen from Cheshire recommended that those misguided enough to believe that bullying was hurtful or in some way unpleasant should grow up:

While warm-hearted J from Sheffield agreed that it's a dog-eat-dog world out there and bullying was an inevitable, and enjoyable, part of Darwinian evolution:


But it was Skitter Brown from Scotland who really hit the nail on the head, suggesting a simple, quick and effective way of remedying all of the modern evils caused by Facebook and Twitter in one fell swoop:

Sources from the internet said: 'I can't quite believe that we'd never thought of that. Let's just turn the whole godless thing off!'

Facebook Gives You Cancer

For millions, logging on to the social networking website Facebook has become an integral part of daily routine, allowing them to keep track of friends they never speak to and stalk attractive co-workers.

But few are aware that every second spent mindlessly pouring over pictures from Sharon's hen night or reading Nathan's 25 truths increases the chance of catching cancer by up to 100%. Joining 'groups' - pages which multiple Facebook users can join to express either their hatred or love of common interests - is thought to cause strokes and elephantitis of the scrotum.

A study carried out by psychologist Dr Aric Sigman found that social isolation 'could alter the way genes work and upset immune responses, hormone levels and the function of arteries' - just like AIDS does.

Sigman's research, published in Biologist, described how social interaction has plummeted since 1987 while the average person's use of electronic media has doubled, resulting in a dark and lonely world where people no longer speak to each other in person or buy newspapers, but instead spend all of their time virtually 'poking' each other and sharing pictures of cats.

Although social networking sites such as Facebook were originally thought to help people connect with others and make them think they have more friends than they really do, Dr Sigman said the reality was frighteningly different: 'Social networking sites should allow us to embellish our social lives, but what we find is very different', he said, adding that 'These are not tools that enhance, they are tools that displace.’

Sigman - who also believes that TV kills people - warned that people are becoming increasingly deprived of real face-to-face personal contact, which encourages 'cuddle chemicals' that make people feel warm and fuzzy and help prevent cancer, strokes, heart disease and dementia. Such cuddley molecules are absent in the type of bleak electronic communications found on Facebook. But not MySpace.

MySpace Bans Paedos; Your Children At Risk

Web based internet hyper-site 'MySpace' has banned 90,000 paedophiles from its pages, leading to fears that the displaced sex offenders will now pose an even greater risk by transferring their accounts to a social networking site that people actually still use.

According to internet security firm Sentinel, which is owned by MySpace, child abusers have already begun flocking to rival world wide net page 'The Facebook' in the hope of luring children as young as three - including yours - into their gnarled, yellowing talons.

John Cardillo, head of Sentinel, revealed that a staggering 0.0056% of The Facebook's 150m users are dangerous child sex offenders: 'We found 8,487 registered sex offenders on Facebook in just a few days by doing a basic search that any user can access' he said.

Cardillo added that it could prove extremely difficult to weed out the vast number of peadophiles that managed to slip past Sentinel's advanced peadophile hunting methods by using advanced evasion tactics like registering 'fake names and details'. Experts warned that up to 100% of Facebook users could in fact be paedophiles masquerading as normal people.

A spokesman for Facebook, which encourages supermarket employees to insult customers, allows teachers to denigrate parents, causes teenagers to shoot each other, has helped gatecrashers ruin peoples' homes, grooms youngsters for a life of crime, bans teddy bears, and has led to the amoral rise of 'generation SEX', said that the site had already removed 4,679 suspected paedophiles' accounts 'as a precaution'.

The remainder of those flagged up by Sentinel consisted of name-only matches for very common names that had a high probablity of not actually being paedophiles at all, meaning that the 8,487 figure is utterly misleading and basically meaningless.

However, sources recommended that the made-up number be taken as representative of just how scary and dangerous Facebook, and indeed, the internet is and that it would be best to remain suspicious of everything invented within the last 40 years.

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Newspaper Exposes Vicious Customer Hate Gang

Only days after global fury erupted at the existence of a Facebook group set up by hate-filled Tesco employees to mock innocent tax-paying customers, another furore has been triggered by revelations that staff at Waitrose have formed their own group on the social notworking site to hurl abuse and obscene language at patrons of the high end supermarket.

Vile terms were thrown around with abandon by members of the group, including one employee shockingly branding a female customer 'a dirty old loon' and accusing her of smelling bad. It remains unclear whether or not the lady in question is indeed old or how bad her odour really is.

One member of staff from the Manchester branch of the supermarket, which is part of the communist-esque John Lewis group, described people who rummage through bargain bins as 'pikey skanks'.

Reassurance that the actions of the staff in question would not go unpunished thankfully came earlier today when The Daily Mail fearlessly published the name of the Facebook group alongside a picture displaying the unobscured names and photgraphs of a number of group members, ensuring their imminent dismissal and bravely ignoring British privacy laws.

An altered version of the image currently accompanying the story can be seen below, as inside sources suggested that it may be removed as soon as The Mail's legal team realises it's a gross invasion of privacy because of 'Human Rights' EU stasi censorship gone mad.