Facebook news ban kills ‘wanky’ trick

We all have at least one mate who does this. And with the Facebook news ban, they’re no longer able to backdoor brag.

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The year is 2021.

A hot new movie called Mr and Mrs Smith about two married assassins secretly assigned to kill each other is in production. Channel 7 is gearing up for their hit new show Dancing With The Stars. And you log on to Facebook for the sole purpose of connecting with friends – or, more specifically, to stalk and judge people you went to high school with – because that’s the only thing you can do on the social media platform.

Facebook’s shock ban preventing Aussies from being able to share or view news on the platform has plunged us back about 15 years in time and it seems everything else in the world is coming along for the ride.

The remake of 2005’s Mr and Mrs Smith – the film that united Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and sparked “Brangelina” – is actually happening which just seems unnecessary, mainly because it makes us all feel really old.

Same with Seven’s reboot of Dancing With The Star s, a show that first premiered on the network around the same time.

We’re living in the past. What’s next? Netflix cancels its Australian service and we have to go to Blockbuster again like in the olden days?

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We may as well submit and commit like it’s 2005. When you see changes like this coming, you’ve got to adapt or die.

Start wearing body glitter again! Buy a Guess handbag and a Von Dutch trucker cap ASAP! Strap on a studded, white pleather belt! Wear Etnies even if you’ve never owned a skateboard! Butterfly hair clips! ALL OF THE BUTTERFLY HAIR CLIPS!

Facebook without the news means it’s basically MySpace – only the latter was better because you could choose a funky background and select a theme song to play on your profile.

Who the hell wants to connect with friends?

Topical updates and watching fights unfold in the comments sections are the only reasons any of us kept using Facebook for so long.

Without news, Facebook is literally now just a platform where Kmart mums post photos of their crappy DIY efforts and racist relatives vent the inappropriate opinions that got them kicked out of Christmas lunch. And every few years you’ll get an invite to a high school reunion that you then have to pretend you haven’t seen. Facebook is the stuff of nightmares.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has basically told news-loving Aussies to “get Zucked”.

The real victims in this ban are those very angry people who spend their entire days writing “THIS ISN’T NEWS” in the comments section under news updates. With no news articles to troll on Facebook, how will they fill their time now? Somebody please think of the trolls!

Perhaps the only upside of this ban is it will kill off one wanky trick that has really flourished on Facebook more than any other social media platform.

Let’s invent a hypothetical Facebook user to illustrate this trick. We’ll call him Brandon.

Brandon, like most of us, reads all the delicious, fun, “guilty pleasure” news that glides into his Facebook feed, but he never “likes” or “shares” it because he doesn’t want people to think he’s mainstream.

And then he goes and finds boring stories from The New York Times and The Atlantic and shares those articles to his feed so we can all see how smart he is.

Boo, Brandon! We know you’re only pretending to read those boring articles from The Atlantic!

This Facebook news ban means Brandons everywhere will no longer be able to backdoor-brag about how smart they are by posting about all the medical journal articles they’ve been fake-reading.

And really, that’s a monumental win for us dummies.

Twitter, Facebook: @hellojamesweir

Originally published as Facebook news ban kills ‘wanky’ trick