Facebook user who clicked ‘share’ button saddled with $20M portfolio

A self-confessed social networking addict is twenty million US dollars in the red today, after repeated use of the Facebook ‘share’ function saw her accidently pledging to buy hundreds of thousands of shares in the company.

‘Facebook is the natural place to showcase my sunny nature and wacky sense of humour,’ said Bristol teaching assistant Brenda Stockton. ‘I love sharing funny videos and the like – have you seen that one with the slow loris being tickled yet? – but what I didn’t know was that by pressing the ‘share’ button you are actually beholden to buy stocks in Facebook when they’re floated later this year. Apparently it’s in the new terms and conditions.’

Stockton, 28, first unwittingly added to her stocks and shares portfolio on Monday, just seconds after the world’s largest social networking site announced plans for a stock market flotation. ‘I’d just put a link to an inspirational poem about friendship and sisterhood onto my wall when my husband suddenly noticed that Lloyds TSB Share Dealing had taken some money out of our online bank account. By the time I’d finished showing off my latest Bejewelled Blitz score we were practically bankrupt.’

The Financial Services Authority has today warned of the current dangers to Facebook users. ‘The ‘share button has recently been changed to a ‘shares’ button – that extra ‘s’ is very important. Distributing excess numbers of pointless tat: be it a youtube clip, personality quiz or overly saccharine verse is a sure-fire way of getting poked by your bank manager,’ warned an FSA spokesman, ‘and also of looking a bit of an annoying twat with too much time on your hands.’

However these words have come too late for Stockton, who is now facing the threat of repossession, fraud charges and divorce proceedings. ‘I’ve also had to put up with Mark Zuckerberg making creepy comments about the photos of me in a bikini during a hen-weekend in Malaga – I wish I’d never accepted his friend request now and I’ll be buggered if I can work out how to unfriend him.’

Outrage as new strain of Myxomatosis introduced into Meerkovo

Animal rights activists have reacted in horror today, after the exponential rise in Meekat numbers throughout Europe forced Russian authorities to introduce a genetically modified strain of the Myxomatosis virus into the village of Meerkovo.

Meerkat numbers have grown massively in the last couple of years, from a solitary ‘uber’ Meerkat to a ‘plague of biblical proportions’, explained Youlia Rochenko, head of the Moscow State Pest Control Authority. ‘What started off as one Meerkat on a TV advert has rapidly increased to a whole village full of them and they’re now spreading to other European countries – infiltrating nation states by being boxed up and sold with insurance policies. There is an urgent need to keep these vermin down in a humane way that does not invalidate our no-claims bonuses.’

The ramifications of the Myxomatosis outbreak are already affecting the marketing industry, with the makers of insurance commercials hastily rewriting their scripts. ‘Have you any idea how the 9pm watershed restricts sales?’ complained one advertising executive. ‘Our latest campaign was due to feature a Slavic Meerkat handing out cuddly toys to bemused members of the insurance-buying public, but we’ve now had to change that to footage of a near-blind Aleksandr Orlov crawling along the ground before being shot by a farmer to put him out of his misery.’

Critics have blasted the introduction of Myxomatosis into the Russian Meekat population as ‘barbaric’. ‘This action that the Russian government has taken is poorly thought out, hasty and cruel,’ said one activist. ‘We are still seeing the fallout from the original introduction of Myxomatosis in Australia in the 1950s, so the fact that they have gone ahead and repeated that tactic is reckless in the extreme. Plus my car insurance is due for renewal and my grandson’s birthday is coming up – do these people have any feelings?’

As international criticism mounts and negotiations begin to send an emergency RSPCA rescue mission to save the listless, shivering and starved citizens of Meekovo, the Russian government has defended its actions. ‘Would you rather us roam the streets, blasting away with rifles? This is a delicate operation, not a British badger cull!’ said Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who has personally taken charge of the project. ‘This isn’t a knee-jerk reaction; we have carried out painstaking research to find the most painless way possible to eliminate these creatures – at one point we nearly crashed the servers of comparethebiologicalweaponry.com.’

Born of an unholy alliance between Vertically Challenged Giant and jp1885