Elderly Facebooker accidentally posts birthday message to grandson in heated extremism chat


We all have a good laugh sometimes about our elderly relatives and their daily struggle to make sense of the sometimes overwhelming world of Facebook, but it’s great to see more and more ‘senior’ users nowadays who are putting their younger counterparts to shame.

However, there will always be some who still don’t ‘get’ the whole Facebook thing, and we noticed one lady called Maria who posted a beautiful and heartfelt ‘Happy Birthday’ message to her grandson Harry.

The only problem was that for reasons best known to her, she managed to post the message right in the middle of a heated and sometimes bad-tempered discussion about Facebook’s approach to dealing with extreme and hateful posts.

One minute you have users such as Tim blasting Facebook for their automated system, and the next you have a loving grandmother getting all excited about Harry’s big day.

ORIGINAL POST – Accurate as of 7pm BST on 8th August 2017

Happy Belated Birthday by the way, young man. Hope you had a good one!

The only possible explanation for Maria’s little mistake is that she saw the promoted Facebook post in her News Feed, saw the word ‘Facebook’ and decided that it must be the official Facebook place where everyone is required to Facebook with each other.

Before you accuse of ‘OAP bashing’ or some sort of ‘ageism,’ we should also point out that Maria posted with immaculate spelling and grammar as far as we can see.

Spend a few minutes looking at how the ‘youngsters’ treat social media these days, butchering the English language from all angles, and you will realise that Facebook users of Maria’s ilk are few and far between.

Simon Harris is the sort-of editor or whatever of Southend News Network and the equally puerile U OK hun?