Facebook bans ‘Everyone will know’ phrase by mistake

According to Facebook’s Melanie Ensign, a member of its security communications team, the phrase was being blocked as part of a glitch with the company’s spam filter. So, why would Facebook ban this seemingly innocent phrase? She went on to explain that the spam-fighting engine is being constantly updated, which sometimes can lead to particular phrases like this to get caught in the mix.

Reddit users were speculating that initial claims the phrase was blocked were a hoax, but when a large number of Facebook users started testing it out, the phrase started showing up so much that the site marked it as spam. Although initially it seemed there were errors only in comments, notifications of blocked content could pop up when posting in both public statuses, comments and private messages.

To this, a few other user replied by saying that they were also not being allowed to post the phrase. “One more message being prompted with the aid of the ‘everyone will know indicated that the action could have violated the fb TOS, and it states that”, Failed to like post the action attempted has been deemed abusive or is otherwise disallowed.

Another user described an nearly identical issue, posting this screenshot. This user said they had liked a picture five minutes earlier, but only received the error about “liking” the picture when they posted a comment.

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. It suggests that the social network has a master record of banned words and phrases.