1,500 Crash Birthday Party After Facebook Slip Up
German teenager accidently invites entire Internet to her sweet sixteen.
| Posted Monday, Jun. 6, 2011, at 11:41 AM EDT
A teenage girl in Germany went into hiding after she forgot to set her Facebook birthday invitation to private and accidentally invited the entire Internet.
The 16-year-old girl, identified only as Thessa in news reports, posted a birthday invitation to Facebook that was viewable by anyone with an Internet connection. After 15,000 people confirmed they were coming, Thessa’s parents canceled the party. They also notified police and hired private security to guard their home.
But that wasn’t enough to stop 1,500 people from showing up and having a good time. About 100 police were dispatched to control the crowd, who chanted “Thessa, celebrating a birthday is not a crime” and held up signs reading “Where is Thessa?”
(For the record, she was celebrating her birthday with her grandparents at “an undisclosed location,” according to the Associated Press.)
When the smoke cleared – seriously: firefighters extinguished two small fires – police spokesman Mirko Streiber declared the party “a hit.”
Perhaps you should think twice before inviting Streiber to your next get-together, if his idea of a hit includes 11 detained party-goers, one injured police officer, and “dozens of girls wearing flip-flops cut[ting] their feet on broken glass.”
As the New York Daily News points out, Thessa isn’t the first teen to have a party spin out of control after a Facebook slip-up. In 2010, more than 21,000 people confirmed they were attending a 14-year-old British girl’s birthday. Some of the confirmed attendees included fake accounts for Justin Bieber and Stephen Hawking.
This would have never happened if she'd made the same mistake on Myspace.
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This is actually pretty funny. It points out all the negatives to posting your life on a social media website. I do feel bad for this girl because it does suck that we can't trust others to not be ridiculous and show up at a birthday party for someone they've never met in their life. I just feel like that's why you don't post your information all over because you never know who might stumble upon it.
ReplyDeleteHahaha I have heard of this before. In one of those TV shows were they make fun of people they were making fun of this girls. I think the show was Tosh-O, but I am not super sure. This is one of the reasons I don't like to put eeeverything on facebook. Especially now that they are constantly changing it and changing the privacy setting and who can see your stuff. Suddenly it is not as private as it could have been before.
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