On the next episode of Creepy McCreepsville, Facebook users were momentarily stumped wondering why Facebook blocked typing "everyone will know" into messages with other users. For more than 24 hours over the weekend, any time a user tried to type that specific combination of words into the chat box, it would mysteriously fail to send. Like any social media savvy human would, they attempted to right the situation by typing other random nonsense into the chat box, and watched it get sent right away — but the moment they typed in "everyone will know" again, Facebook mysteriously #ByeFelicia'd them.
It's not exactly clear how long the message was banned, but it was this past Saturday when the issue came to light. After a few murmurings around the internet, a Reddit thread of users sharing similar experiences with getting blocked skyrocketed to the front page, bringing it to everyone else's attention. Ironically, it only took a few hours for "everyone will know" to become "everyone does know, and it fairly creeped out by this, no thank you please". Users took to other forms of social media to share the weirdness around, as well as their theories as to why Facebook would possibly ban the phrase.
Before we all call conspiracy theory, The Huffington Post spoke to Melanie Ensign of Facebook's security communications. "This was a mistake with our spam filter and our engineers have resolved the issue," said Ensign. I personally just messaged my unsuspecting little sister "everyone will know" several times this morning and can confirm that it does, indeed, work again. (Whether or not my sister will ever sleep again after that has yet to be resolved.)
What took it an extra step of weird further, though, was when people tried to share statuses about it. Users let people know that "everyone will know" was banned, but if other users tried to "like" the status, the like was blocked. A message would appear saying "The action attempted has been deemed abusive or otherwise disallowed".
In any case, we all have a sufficient level of heebie-jeebies to get us in the mood for Halloween.
