The Department of Justice announced today that they will begin investigating Facebook users who repeatedly fail to include any punctuation in their Happy Birthday posts.
“We want to be clear,” said one top Justice official. “We’re not saying everyone who doesn’t include punctuation in a Happy Birthday post is a criminal. We’re just saying there’s a much greater likelihood that they are a criminal. I mean why? Why would you say ‘Happy Birthday’ with no puncuation not even a period? It’s insane.”
“It’s just wrong,” said Kelsey Anderson, a Facebook user who recently celebrated her 26th birthday. “If I see a Facebook post with no punctuation, I immediately read it in Hannibal Lecter’s voice. I’m glad the government is finally intervening.”
And intervening they are: DOJ officials are now monitoring Facebook posts from all around the country, using state-of-the-art, lack-of-punctuation detection technology.
“When our computers detect a Happy Birthday post with no punctuation, that’s when the real work begins,” said one FBI agent. “We’ll reach out to the perpetrator with questions such as ‘Why, though?’ and ‘Are you trying to come across like a serial killer?’”
While no arrests have been reported yet, the DOJ has interrogated dozens of suspected Facebook users. While many have turned out to be harmless uncles, a few disturbing trends have emerged.
“We’ve gotten quite a few perpetrators, such as the weird guy from your Philosophy 101 class who you never really talked to,” said one official. “Also a lot of male coworkers from the Subway you worked at in high school as well as certain aunts.”
Time will tell if the new crackdown will result in more punctuation on your Facebook wall. A similar investigation was launched years ago against people who reply to a tweet without liking it first. While that campaign eventually failed to produce results, DOJ officials have higher hopes this time around.
“My daughter has a Facebook,” said one unnamed agent. “The thought of her receiving a “happy birthday” with no exclamation point…well, it gives me chills. And if you simply write ‘hbd’ with no puncuation? I’m not going to say a full federal investigation is off the table.”
If the campaign is successful, the Department of Justice has plans to move into other areas of technological communication, including investigating people who email “we need to talk” with no context, and people who call to say something they could have easily texted.
“There’s a lot of baddies out there,” said one agent. “And we’re going to find them.”
