You Can’t Block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook

It so happens that if you wish to block Mark Zuckerberg from your Facebook account, you cant.

You may have felt angry at Facebook for various reasons like your fan page reach has diminished or your pages get unpublished and you may want to block the account of the creator of Facebook, Mark from your account, you’ll get an error saying

If you try to block him again after a few minutes, you will get the same message.

It seems that Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook and a man with around 31 million Facebook followers is also one of the most hated men on Facebook. The above error message pop ups because of Facebook algorithm which kick in when too many people try to block one user.

Facebook says, this is designed so as to protect the voice of the people who raise a campaign for a good cause, and people who are not happy with the campaign try to block the user. This is a general error which is same for everyone and is generated due to too many users trying to block one user.

This was first noticed by a website Block Zuck which seems to have been created with sole purpose of testing this service.  After Block Zuck reported this peculiar Facebook feature, Gizmodo spoke with the website’s founder and learned that the site was originally the base of operations for a viral campaign to mass-block Zuckerberg in protest of the social network’s controversial user privacy policies.

“This error isn’t specific to any one account. It’s generated when a person has been blocked a certain large number of times. In very rare instances, a viral campaign will develop instructing lots of people to all wrongly block the same person. The purpose of this system is to protect the experience for people targeted by these campaigns. We’re constantly working to improve our systems and are taking a closer look at this one."

This is actually a good feature in a situation in ererwhich an undeserving innocent could be the victim of unfair mass blockings.

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Facebook recently provides new application for its users known as "Year in Review". Facebook now admits that forcing people to revisit their most Liked and commented upon photos and statuses from the past year might not have been the best idea. As Facebook uses the tagline "It’s been a great year! Thanks for being a part of it." But though some people would not have a great year and would prefer not to be reminded of it. This week, the product manager for the social media company's "Year in Review" app apologized to Eric Meyer, whose six-year-old daughter died of brain cancer earlier this year. Eric didn’t want to relive his painful memories, but was forced to when Facebook automatically positioned the “Year In Review” banner at the top of his news feed. The algorithm for choosing which images appear in the banner depends on how many “likes” they’ve received.

From Meyer's posts:

And I know, of course, that this is not a deliberate assault. This inadvertent algorithmic cruelty is the result of code that works in the overwhelming majority of cases, reminding people of the awesomeness of their years, showing them selfies at a party or whale spouts from sailing boats or the marina outside their vacation house.

But for those of us who lived through the death of loved ones, or spent extended time in the hospital, or were hit by divorce or losing a job or any one of a hundred crises, we might not want another look at this past year.

To show me Rebecca's face and say "Here's what your year looked like!" is jarring. It feels wrong, and coming from an actual person, it would be wrong. Coming from code, it's just unfortunate. These are hard, hard problems. It isn't easy to programmatically figure out if a picture has a ton of Likes because it's hilarious, astounding, or heartbreaking.

Jonathan Gheller, Facebook’s project manager for “Year in Review,” apologized to Meyer and released a statement to the Post addressing the issue:

“[The app] was awesome for a lot of people, but clearly in this case we brought him grief rather than joy,” he said. “We can do better — I’m very grateful he took the time in his grief to write the blog post.”

Others have also complained about the feature.

 Did you use the Year In Review feature? What did you think? Let us know in the comments.

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