This very distressed purple bird is derailing conversations across Facebook

Seemingly out of nowhere, every post on The Verge’s Facebook page (and several other Facebook pages, including Vox, Polygon, Business Insider, and I Fucking Love Science) has been flooded with GIFs of a purple bird who is not happy about what is going on. One New York Times article has a comment thread in which one person posted the purple bird GIF and then replied to his own comment with the same GIF 92 times. It’s sort of hard to have a conversation about the news through all these