(Notes from the big house)
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Last week, I went to prison. A little.

I became a virtual inmate, sentenced by facebook to seven days without social media. It’s not so bad, actually, but the food really sucks.

Here’s my crime: I posted a joke on facebook about America’s upcoming Presidential election between (yet another) two old white guys. As you might imagine, it’s something I do all the time, being, you know, the author of a humor column. But it’s still 2020 AD, so nothing is normal anymore.

Here’s the joke:

“That’s right, liberals! So be sure to get out and vote on November 4th!”

And for that vile, Kremlin-esque comment, facebook’s political correctness algorithms passed judgment, sounded the klaxon, charged me with voter suppression, and facebook blocked my account for a week.

Until now, I didn’t realize it was possible to tick off an algorithm.

But, come on. Voter suppression? I read somewhere that facebook employs over fifteen hundred software developers. You’d think management could task one or two of those guys with cobbling together a “sarcasm detection” algorithm.

On the other hand … to be fair to facebook, there are untold millions of members of the facebook nation who actually depend on facebook for their news. Imagine that. There are people running around the planet, unguided and unmedicated, who blindly believe that what they read on facebook is actually news.

I suppose facebook, from a liability perspective, has to be careful. After all, some say that one out of three people on the planet depend on facebook to find out what day they’re supposed to vote in America. And facebook’s chief of staff, Mark Zuckerberg, doesn’t need a bunch of legal issues, especially since he’s gonna be graduating from puberty sometime very soon. Mark, who is younger than most of my socks, is purportedly worth about a billion dollars, which means he could fund the US federal government for nearly ten minutes.

Wonder if facebook would censor that?

I also read that young Zuck pulls down a salary of one dollar a year. That would explain his haircut. But maybe he’s getting a subsidy from somewhere. Eh, Hunter Biden?

And speaking of … unless you’ve been distracted redacting Hunter Biden’s emails, you’ve probably heard by now that facebook, Twitter, and most cable & traditional TV news sources have been censoring, well, pretty much whatever they don’t want you to know – while preening and posturing as the saviors of information access. In fact, facebook has gotten so irritating at repeatedly reminding you to vote that they had to add a feature allowing you to turn off the reminder.

That probably explains why their hordes of coders and banks of algorithms decided my election day sarcasm was “fake news.” facebook thinks its one out of three humans are too stupid to know better.

Once upon a time, fake news was the domain of tabloid news in the print media. You remember: Oprah’s alien baby, woman dies twice from dieting, Bill Clinton accused of adultery (okay, bad example). But now it’s all available online for just a few facebook clicks … and you can even let other people know that you like it, or dislike it, or hate it, or are sad about it, all without ever having to actually type any words to the human involved.

For the benefit of any aliens who just landed on Earth, those tiny little “here’s how I feel” images are collectively known as emoji, possibly the most degrading thing to happen to civil human society since velour. Diminutive, jaundiced, bowl-faced emotion proxies, used by millions of facebook thumb-typers to empathize from a distance.

There’s an evil cousin of emoji that doesn’t (as far as I know) have a collective description, other than our old school terms, acronyms and initialisms. These are the literary (sic) abbreviations we all know and lo … well, we all know, anyway … like LOL, OMG, TMI, and IOU (you may have already heard that one). Some people use (and use and use and use) these things, thinking it identifies them as someone who’s fashionably au fait with the vocabulary of online media.

In case you were born in the last century and still read books made out of paper, let’s review a few:

• LOL stands for laughing out loud. Occasionally, the variation LOLing is used, which I suppose means laughing out louding, These are the same people who miss flights because they saw a highway sign that read AIRPORT LEFT, so they turned around and went home.
• OMG stands for oh my god. This is shallow, to be sure, but not really a problem unless you’re having sex and your partner types OMG, because now she’s shallow and using her laptop during sex.
• TMI stands for too much information. (see previous bullet point)
• IMHO stands for in my humble opinion, unless you misspell it, in which case it might refer to the International House of Pancakes.
• ROFL stands for rolling on the floor laughing. In other words, you were LOL so hard that you lost your balance, fell down, and weren’t discreet enough to keep such clumsy stupidity to yourself.
• It gets worse.
• ROFLMAO moves into the realm of the vulgar and the physically impossible, like suggesting that someone you don’t like should go have intercourse with themselves (GFY).
• BLT might refer to be like that,or to a deli sandwich, depending on if you’re moody or just hungry.
• IOU is the little strip of paper you’ll find in the federal government’s Social Security “lock box.”

As it turns out, according to the internet, the initialism OMG is actually not new at all. It was first noticed in a 1917 letter to Winston Churchill from a British admiral. I don’t have access to the letter’s contents, but I’m guessing it might have been something like, “OMG, sir. ALL the brandy? I am ROFLMAO.”

And finally, I’ll leave you with a little acronym anecdote. A friend told me his father used to think LOL meant “lots of love,” so when one of his neighbors lost a loved one, the father texted, “So sorry for your loss. LOL.”

Oops.