Liberal Trolls Helpfully Improve Southern Pride Facebook Page, With Old Gay Dicks

There is a terrible and wonderful thing about Facebook: Its security settings are supposed to give you lots of control over your account, but you have to be careful, especially if you're running a group, about who you give administrator access to. Like for instance if you're running a pro-Confederate flag group, and you are won over by a charming person who talks a lot about his southern heritage and how much the flag means to him, and he turns out to be a liberal with a wicked sense of humor who, once given admin privileges, kicks out all the other admins and renames the group "LGBT Southerners for Michelle Obama and Judaism." And what follows is a beautiful thing, possibly even better than the people who throw goats all over rightwing Facebook pages. Or at least as good -- we don't want to stir up discord, so we'll just say both are excellent.

[contextly_sidebar id="LGPBVZtLkofF6nD6k9w9BqGzV2BFoEvQ"]

Slate identifies the merry prankster as Virgil Texas, a "Brooklyn-based professional funny person" who got himself into a "Confederate Pride" group, messed around with its header pictures, and then volunteered to help the group's administrators "clean out all the trolls" if they'd just let him have access to all the site's settings. And then the real fun started. Here's a sample of screenshots ( there are more here ):

There were some unhappy and confused Dixie Derpies as well, wondering what had happened to their beautiful celebration of Southern Heritage:

A few of the images would not be allowed in Wonkette Comments, but hey, it's not OUR Facebook page ...

After a few hours, the original admins managed to revoke Virgil Texas's admin privileges. But before they kicked him, he'd approved some 50 other new administrators, who continued to wreak havoc. The page's subject kept changing -- from the " Christopher Dorner Memorial Page" to "General Sherman: Wonderful General" to "Islam is the Light," which left some of the original users even more puzzled, especially when the trolls started using Treason Flags as their own avatars:

Finally, someone brought back a good old flag with diagonal bars on it, at least:

Eventually, the original admins kicked out all the fakes. But until Friday, they still never quite managed to lock down their featured image controls. Here's what the page looked like a few hours ago (we've pixelated it so Google don't kill us dead forever, but the original is the classic Lemon Party in all its obscene glory):

That seems to have finally been removed. And thus was the Internet made wonderful for a brief while.

[ Slate / Storify ]