After more than a year of being stuck indoors, it’s understandable that any excuse to be in a room with living creatures who aren’t your cats would be tempting. But if that weird uncle or kid who ate his boogers in kindergarten invites you to a dance party via Facebook, do yourself (and the world) a favor and just say no. On Thursday, The Late Show host Stephen Colbert revealed a truly idiotic new trend among anti-vaxxers who desperately want to keep spreading their dirty lies about COVID, but are having trouble getting around the social media network’s misinformation triggers: dance parties!
“The only thing spreading faster than COVID variants is COVID misinformation, especially on social media. In response, Facebook has been hunting down and removing groups that present misleading or sensationalized information about vaccines… Facebook finds the groups using keywords, but they’re having trouble because some anti-vaccination groups are changing their names to euphemisms like ‘dance party’ in order to skirt bans from Facebook. So get ready for new dance crazes like Actual Saturday Night Fever, The Harlem Ache, and The Floss (of Taste and Smell).”
Of course, it won’t take long for Mark Zuckerberg and his merry band of tech goons to come up with an algorithm that shuts down these virus-fueled dance parties, so these same people who don’t believe in science have begun creating their own online language to further evade detection from Facebook’s powers-that-be. As seen here:
Antivaxxers are calling themselves something, anything else on Facebook.
Once they change their group name, the adapt their whole vocabulary to fit it.
Here’s a list of codewords for the group of people who don’t “go dancing” — or won’t get the vaxx.
Pizza. Beer. Moana. pic.twitter.com/DhEsBvE9vL
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) July 22, 2021
“For example, instead of ‘got the vaccine’ they say ‘danced’ or ‘drank beer,’” Colbert explained. “References to Pfizer generally use the term ‘pizza’ and Moderna is referred to as ‘Moana.’ Dancing? Beer? Pizza? Moana? If you’re going to describe you think is killing everybody, maybe don’t use code words that are things that everybody universally loves. You might as well just say: My sister ‘danced’ with a ‘laundry basket full of puppies’ and now I’m afraid she’s given me ‘rock-hard abs.’ In fact, she’s pressuring the whole family to ‘drink a chocolate milkshake’ with ‘Jason Sudeikis.’”
You can watch the full segment above; it begins around the 3:20 mark.