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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