You can’t block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook

You can’t block CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook.

Try it. You’ll get an error message that says, “General Block failed error: Block failed.”

A Facebook spokesperson who revealed:

This error isn’t specific to any one account. It’s generated when a person has been blocked a certain large number of times. In very rare instances, a viral campaign will develop instructing lots of people to all wrongly block the same person. The purpose of this system is to protect the experience for people targeted by these campaigns. We’re constantly working to improve our systems and are taking a closer look at this one.

Attention to Zuckerberg’s unblockable status was initially brought by the website Block Zuck, butGawker spoke with the website’s founder and learned that the site was originally the base of operations for a viral campaign to mass-block Zuckerberg in protest of the social network’s controversial user privacy policies.

This kind of thing is funny, and adds a little personality to the site. But Facebook is getting way too big and culturally important for things like this to continue. In 2005 it was cool for Zuckerberg to have a business card that said “I’m CEO…Bitch.” And we can forgive early Facebook engineers from perusing confidential user data in their leisure time. But it’s time for this company to go through puberty and start acting more like a teenager than a fifth grader. If you want to block Zuckerberg, you should be able to block Zuckerberg.