The naval officer stepped onto the beach yesterday, his white uniform immaculate, his expression one of profound disappointment. Before him stood the remnants of what had once been a group of British schoolboys—now painted, bloodied, and clutching makeshift spears. "I should have thought," he said, surveying the carnage, "that a pack of British boys would have been able to put up a better show than that." He then returned to his warship, which was actively engaged in hunting enemy vessels, and filed a report using passive voice.
The officer, who sources confirm is employed by a platform currently facilitating tribal conflict across 194 countries, expressed dismay that children left unsupervised had descended into precisely the behavior his organization monetizes at scale. "It's the savagery that gets me," he told reporters, adjusting his medals. "The painted faces. The fear-based social organization. The murder of the boy who told the truth. We simply don't do things that way." He declined to comment on his platform's content moderation policies.
According to internal documents, the boys' descent began when they established a democratic system based on a conch shell—whoever held the shell could speak, and all were obligated to listen. The system collapsed when a faction led by a boy named Jack realized that controlling the narrative around an imaginary "beast" was more effective than rational discourse. "Basically they invented social media," said Dr. Helena Vance, professor of Digital Anthropology at Stanford. "Give it forty years and Jack would be on a Forbes list."
The beast, which drove the boys' increasingly violent behavior, turned out to be a dead pilot—the corpse of their own technology, hanging in the trees by parachute strings. "They literally organized their entire society around fearing something they built and then forgot they built," noted Dr. Vance. "They killed the one boy who figured it out. That boy's name was Simon. His post-mortem engagement metrics were zero."
Platform representatives declined to comment on whether Simon's murder violated community guidelines, noting that the incident was "currently under review by automated systems." A spokesperson added that the mob's behavior fell within the "heated debate" exception and that the content had performed well with the 18-34 demographic.
The officer's warship, visible offshore throughout the rescue, is currently valued at $847 billion and employs over 40,000 content moderators in the Philippines. When asked about the parallels between the boys' behavior and his own organization's practices, the officer smiled tightly. "The difference," he said, "is scale. And uniforms. The uniforms make it civilized."