Facebook has roughly 1.6 billion monthly active users worldwide. It’s pretty common for such a large and complex platform to have one or two bugs. But there is a weird Facebook bug that suspends your account for at least 72 hours if you message a photo of ‘a kid holding a fish’ to someone. It is still unclear what is causing the issue.
Ignore or delete messages with ‘a kid holding a fish’
If someone sends you a picture of ‘a kid holding a fish’ and requests you to inbox it back to them. Don’t do that; you’ll regret doing it later. It gets your account suspended for 72 hours. While some users had the patience to wait for 72 hours before getting back to Facebook, many others simply went ahead to create a new Facebook account. Boy, can’t they live without Facebook for just three days?
Sheeraz Raza of ValueWalk discovered and reported the bug to the Facebook Bug Reporting Center. We have reached out to the company’s PR department as well for a comment on the problem and will update this story accordingly.
When you message the image to someone on the social networking platform, you’ll get a popup reading: You’re Temporarily Blocked from Posting. It adds that you have posted a photo or a video that violates Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. It is illegal in several countries to share pictures of kids involved in sexually explicit acts or behavior.
Facebook expected to fix it soon
We do not know what in this image tells Facebook bots that it violates the site’s terms. The image is slightly blurred. If you look at the image closely, you’ll notice a censored spot near the tail of the fish and groin of the kid. Is it this censored part causing Facebook to suspend your account? We don’t know for sure. That’s just a guess.
Since we have already notified the company about the bug, we expect Facebook to fix it sometime soon. The Menlo Park-based company encourages the broader community to find and report bugs related to its platforms. Earlier this month, Facebook rewarded $10,000 to a 10-year old Finnish kid for discovering a bug in Instagram.