Facebook, apparently blocked the phrase “everyone will know” for more than a day, but users are now once again able to post the seemingly innocuous three words. HuffPost also independently confirmed that the phrase is no longer blacklisted from Facebook and now it can be posted.
Some Facebook users have experienced a weird phenomenon: errors typing the phrase “Everyone will know” into status, comments, messages or anywhere on Facebook. An innocuous comment like ‘Everyone will know’ seems to trigger some serious security issues with Facebook.
“This was a mistake with our spam filter and our engineers have resolved the issue,” Melanie Ensign of Facebook’s cyber security communications and advocacy, told The Huffington Post. “We’re constantly updating the rules used by our spam-fighting engine and this particular phrase erroneously got caught in the mix,” she explained. Ensign, however, couldn’t pinpoint exactly for how long had the phrase been banned.
The “Everyone will know” glitch came to light on Friday when a user asked, on the popular question-and-answer site Question.com, “Why can’t you post ‘everyone will know’ on Facebook?” “A lot of my friends have been trying to post it and no one has been able to do so. If you try to post it multiple times it will block you from posting any status.”
By Sunday, an entire Reddit thread had been filled with more and more people reporting the same problem of posting the phrase, be it in a public status, comment, or private message. Apparently, users attempting the feat received an “Action blocked” warning.
Before Facebook corrected the problem, Huffington Post tried posting “Everyone will know” by themselves. They mentioned that the first time they sent the phrase – it went through; subsequent tries, however, returned the error, leading to the removal of the initial message.
Some Reddit users also reported that error messages also appeared if they tried to “like” a post that contained the phrase, such as “The action attempted has been deemed abusive or is otherwise disallowed.”
However, there’s no way of knowing for sure, for the apparent “everyone will know ban” because Facebook keeps its cards close to its vest when it comes to this sort of thing. We wonder whether such a super list of banned words actually exists.