“My app probably crashed from the weight of occurrences of the word ‘moral’ alone.”
Natanya, July 3 – The Facebook profile of an area resident became crushed today after sustaining too many posts about the passing of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, who died this weekend.
Immediately after Wiesel’s death at age 87, the Facebook feed of Lital Dwek, 30, of Moshav Olesh outside this coastal city, grew overloaded with obituaries, tributes, think pieces, and diatribes against Holocaust deniers and other manifestations of antisemitism sparked by the famous Holocaust survivor’s passing. At about midday on Sunday, Dwek’s Facebook app ceased to function, having collapsed under the weight of the Wiesel-related content.
“It was definitely a lot of posts,” recalled Dwek, who would have been happy with only four or five links from friends on the subject. “But even though I only have a couple of hundred Facebook friends, my feed was choked by these things. Everyone and his uncle seemed to have a need to say something and share it with me.” Dwek read a number of Wiesel’s books, including Night several times.
By mid-morning, the volume of Wiesel links and statuses on her timeline had slowed Dwek’s mobile device to a crawl. “I wanted to ask my friends to stop, but I couldn’t send any messages or use my iPhone as a phone because it was so unresponsive under the weight of all those posts. There are only so many millions of times a machine can handle the same essay praising someone for moral clarity, eloquence, compassion, and wisdom before it collapses.”
Dwek stressed that Wiesel’s stature certainly warranted an outpouring of mourning and admiration, and that he towered over his generation with his dignity, ethos, and talent for capturing the poignant contradictions of faith in a benevolent God and his own experience at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. “At the same time, I don’t need to see the same thing over and over again in my feed because each person who sees it thinks no one else has yet, so they hit Share. My app probably crashed from the weight of occurrences of the word ‘moral’ alone.”
Facebook software developers admitted they were caught off guard by the phenomenon. “Even after we received a detailed description of events we couldn’t quite wrap our heads around it,” reported software engineer Will Fuldiss-Regaard. “Our code is configured to handle torrents of hateful rhetoric against Jews quite smoothly, but at this stage we’re still playing catch-up on how to process a large volume of this other kind of content, which is so alien to us that I don’t even have a concise term by which to refer to it.”
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