Facebook hates babies. I found this out last night when I logged on as Laszlo Stein, my three-month old son who has been faithfully posting adorable photos and angry commentary since his second-trimester sonogram, back when his listed interests were just kicking and drinking his own urine. In his time on Facebook, he threatened to pee on some, cut others and once posted — next to a photo of him gummily smiling and wearing a kimono — this response to my wife’s friend Nancy’s comment that she met another baby named Laszlo: “OMG! That’s so awesome! We should form a Facebook group! Just kidding. I don’t give a crap, you loser. Get a life.” More than once, he commented on the photo of another baby with “I’d hit that.”
But last night when I logged in, all I got was a page that said, “Account disabled.” Now, I know Facebook has a rule that you have to be over 13, and I guess some loser at Facebook is paid to look around for accounts with photos of people under 13. I’m sure Facebook does this to protect kids from pedophiles, and yet the surest way for a pedophile to find a kid would be to get a job at Facebook looking for kids’ accounts.
All I wanted was to avoid being one of those annoying parents who post photos of their kids on their own page. I wanted a place for the few family and friends who want to see his baby pictures. And now all the photos other people posted of Laszlo are gone, and I have to e-mail every damn photo to our parents and siblings. I wish Facebook had given me some kind of warning so I could have archived all this stuff or transferred it to the Facebook application Baby Book, which I found out about too late and is oddly O.K. with Facebook even though it’s exactly the same as Laszlo having his own page.
You can still do right, Facebook, by giving me back his page for a day so I can transfer it, and no longer be known as a baby hater. You know how to contact me. On Facebook.
Read “What Happens When Parents Join Facebook.”
