Sean-Ward.com

That Facebook group I mentioned at the end of last week has apparently been deleted within the last half hour or so. I’m curious as to what guideline or part of the terms of service they violated, or if this was just something that the Facebook admins decided that they had to do to prevent the posting of images and video of the event on the website. I’m sure that would cause the deletion of the group. I also doubt it was because of the counter groups, which are varied, as they don’t appear to be as many.

Prior to this, Brody Ruckus, the creator of the group, had his account suspended.

I sent an e-mail to the Facebook team, but I doubt I’ll get a response. As someone who finds how people use the Internet interesting, I’d like to know what the group did to get banned. Much like on any social networking site, I’m sure there’s all sorts of groups that a few people would deem inappropriate, and some groups that a lot of people would deem inappropriate. However, without the Facebook team offering any information about what happened, except maybe to the group admins, it’s hard to know why exactly.

And why not: voting is open in regards to this event, which can be found here. However, the site appears to be down.

23:12 Update:
According to a comment on digg, the site/event was a front for www.ruckus.com. I also got the following reply from Facebook:

The group was removed not because of the content but because the
creator was using the group to acquire e-mail addresses as a marketing scheme.

Ok, so those comments are interesting to consider. Now, the Wikipedia article is protected/locked, but the talk page has plenty to say. So, it should prove interesting to see if this was really something someone wanted to do to actually have a threesome (not that we may ever truly know), if it was a publicity stunt by the Rukus music service (though I’m not exactly sure how that works), or, much like Lonelygirl15 at YouTube, it is all just an elaborate look into how people react and what not.

I also figure I should pull some information from the wiki talk page, just because it could disappear. The below is from the Hoax section:

There doesn’t seem to be a Brody Ruckus in the Georgia Tech directory.

* The Brody Ruckus in question is Facebook member number 12822071. It says he is part of the Atlanta, GA network, but his member number begins with 128, which is Georgia Tech’s school prefix. (least significant 5 digits are the user number unique to the school, most significicant 2-4 digits are the school ID). Not sure why he isn’t part of the Georgia Tech’s network. Cheesy
o He WAS part of the Georgia Tech network, until people noticed that there was no such person at Georgia Tech. This is all a big scam, a publicity stunt for a new college music downloading company called Ruckus Music, which has a partnership with Georgia Tech. 159.178.251.46 11:02, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
o 128 means he registered under Georgia Tech, and 22071 means he was the 22070th person to register a facebook account at Tech. Though Brody deleted this information from his feed, the person before him (Matt Fogel registering under the pseudonym Rockefeller Q. Einstein) registered at 11:39am on September 5th, 2006. I can’t see the person after him, but the person after that (Dr. Phillip Thompson) registered at 3:39pm on that same day. That day was also the day that Brody created the facebook group (at 2:45pm). This means that “Brody” created his facebook account less than three hours before the creation of the group. This leads to the conclusion that he either never had a facebook account to begin with and decided finally to join facebook after making this bet with his girlfriend, or he created a new (fake) account to pull this hoax. Given his familiarity with facebook it would seem that the latter is more likely. This also explains the complete lack of information on his profile and why nobody at Tech has ever seen or heard of this guy. Whether or not this is a hoax, however, clearly the phenomenon alone is worthy of a wikipedia article. Jaardon 12:52, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

This has been discussed on facebook. Not only does is Brody not a member of the network, Georgia Tech is a partner with Ruckus Network, an online music service that is free to all students at partner schools. Several facebook members have done fairly extensive searches of Georgia Tech’s records, as well as local phone listings and listings for various large cities and internet sites, and can find not only no Brody Ruckus whom is a student of that school, but no evidence of Ruckus being used as a surname. Moreover, as of…7:00 AM…Brody Ruckus now has a link requesting people spam our talk page to try and get an article of him on wikipedia. Hewhorulestheworld

* Also, Brody’s domain name is registered anonymously. Why someone would plaster their name all over a website, a Facebook group, and tons of merchandise, and then feel the need to be an anonymous domain registrant is inexplicable–unless they wanted to hide the fact that “Brody Ruckus” is not the his real name. 159.178.251.46 11:08, 13 September 2006 (UTC)