Lack of Sobriety while misusing Social Media can make for a rough morning.
Software company Webroot has come out with a Firefox plugin that doesn’t let you post on your social media pages late at night without passing a sobriety test first. With the Social Media Sobriety Test, you specify a window of time where you don’t think you’d be on the internet while sober — let’s say 2 AM to 4 AM — and anytime you try to access the internet during that timeframe, you’ll have to prove your sobriety. To your computer. Using your mouse…
The plugin tries to recreate the simple tests a police officer would conduct if you were pulled over to the side of the road — like seeing if you can make your cursor follow a moving finger for 30 seconds or trace a straight line — and if you fail, the program automatically posts a status for you that says, “[Your name here] is too intoxicated to post right now.”
While that’s all well and good, I’m not convinced that I can act sober on a laptop at 4 AM even if I haven’t been drinking. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for hearing from fewer college freshmen as they fumble their way across my newsfeed at all hours of the weekend, but I think I’d be annoyed if I needed to send an email late at night and somehow accidentally failed the dexterity test because I’m less-than-stellar with my laptop’s mouse.
