The drama within social media circles never ceases to play out and this time round, the stage was set on Face book as a social media network that is quite popular with very many individuals all over the world. The drama began with an application (facebook social suicide) that was supposed to allow facebook users gamble with the existence of their personal profile, the application was however eventually blocked from the social network as apparently facebook would have none of it. It has however not been established whether any accounts were deleted using the application, since there was no one that returned to talk about it.
The advertisement for the application reads something like this “A game of chance where identity is the grand prize.’’ The advertisement for the application was authored by a Douglas Rushkoff who indicated in the advertisement that he was a former Facebook user. Douglas Rushkoff also indicated on the advertisement that the application was a social Roulette that had 1 in 6 chances of deleting one’s account and he thus went ahead to pose the question to Facebook users “what are you afraid of?’’ The Russian roulette, for a brief background about it, was a Russian Myth about a bullet inside a pistol and soldiers used to play a risky game where there was a 1 to 6 chance for one to lose his life.
Coming back to the Russian roulette on Facebook, it was an application that was designed to make the Facebook users get a 1:6 chance to lose their Facebook accounts, which sarcastically meant one getting back their life back. However the joke by Douglas Rushkoff did not go down well or rather was not taken kindly by Facebook and they blocked the application within 4 hours. The application’s information said, “Everyone is thinking about deleting their Facebook account at some point. This is a normal reaction to the sense depriving character of the digital world you want to start over or just expand your excitement on the social website?”
The app’s information went on to conclude with quite an enticing line. “Maybe this is a good time for you to start playing the Facebook social suicide application”. The reason behind Facebook deleting the application that they considered offensive was simply because they did not want the people to delete their Facebook accounts. Another of the application’s developer a professor Kyle McDonald from NYU told the Tech Crunch that the application was by Facebook’s automatic system as a negative user experience. The application developers received a note from Facebook indicating that they did not like their logo that had a gun in it.
McDonald was quoted as saying “we tried following their rules, but we seemed not to understand them.” In a rather skeptical conclusion to the social media drama that was played out on the stage of the popular social media network of Face book, it is equally worth noting in conclusion that Facebook never responded to questions that arose as a result of their having blocked the application but instead referred the questions to the developers of the application.
(image source: citizentv.co.ke)