Glenn Dixon's Manual "Cat" Filter for Facebook

Glenn Dixon’s Manual “Cat” Filter for Facebook

by Joe Warminsky November 15th, 2011October 9th, 2020

Former City Paper Arts Editor Glenn Dixon will totally unfriend you with extreme prejudice:

An experiment to keep Facebook interesting, because lately, I dunno, it hasn’t been. I’m starting with 185 friends. And I’m unfriending anyone who posts a cute, humorous, or otherwise “entertaining” photo of a cat. I don’t care if you genuinely love your cat, and I don’t care if you’re vaulting your cat over the walls of my FB page as though laying siege to ancient Egyptians. Cat = Gone. Let the games begin.

Dixon, who now works for a museum in D.C., is blaming the situation partly on Facebook itself:

I show no mercy. About three years ago, I asked FB for a content filter. No response. I should be able to block any post containing “cat ” or “Cat.” (among other strings, most offensive among them “Caturday”). I should also be able to access face-recognition software, assuming you want to call what cats have “faces,” that blocks all cat-containing images. Surely we have the technology. And as for making FB a more interesting place, my announcement of a total cat embargo has generated overnight more of a response than anything I’ve posted in months, indicating that FB has degenerated into a refuge for people who enjoy nothing more than forcing cat-centric grannyspam on people they claim to be on friendly terms with. Despicable.

True outrage? Performance art? Or both? It’s hard to say.

Courtesy Flickr user tharendra, creative commons

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