Facebook: just when you thought it couldn't get worse...

Yesterday I posted about the proliferation of cartoon pictures on Facebook. Today when I logged on I saw this:

!!ATTENTION: the group asking everyone to change their profile picture to their favourite cartoon character is actually a group of paedophiles. They doing it because kid's will accept their friend request faster if they see a cartoon picture. It has nothing to do with supporting child ...violence, ITS ON TONIGHT'S NEWS copy and paste this to your status! Let every one know !!

I probably should have guessed that someone would scream the p-word at some point. And the problem with a warning about paedophiles is that you must MUST MUST!!! pass it on. Except that this looks like nonsense to me. Let's see... there are multiple punctuation mistakes. There are capital letters to call attention to the REALLY IMPORTANT part - which is not about the group of paedophiles, it's about "tonight's news". Oh well, if it's on tonight's news, it must be real, right? But what news? Where? If this is so important that it needs exclamation marks at the beginning, why not include a link to the news item?

But most nonsensical of all is this: if a group of paedophiles believe that children will accept a friend request faster (by which I assume they mean "are more likely to accept a friend request" - surely the speed with which they accept is immaterial), then it is to that group's benefit to be the only ones with cartoon profile pictures. If everyone has a cartoon picture, then any advantage those cunning paedophiles might have had will be lost. It would be utterly self-defeating.

The genius of this is that if I didn't change my picture to a cartoon I was clearly in favour of violence against children, but now if I do I could easily be one of those devious paedophiles.