Don’t bother trying to block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook — because you can’t

Anyone who uses social media knows that sometimes you want to get an obnoxious person out of your newsfeed at all costs.

But hopefully that person isn’t Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg—because if it is, you might be out of luck, according to Quartz.

While it’s entirely possible to “unfollow” Zuckerberg on the social network he started, if you try to block him altogether you’ll get a message that says: “This profile can’t be blocked for now.”

Facebook says the error message shows up when users try to block someone who is getting a flood of “block” requests.

“People trying to block a profile or Page may see an error message if it has been blocked many times within a short period,” a Facebook spokesperson told Quartz. In other words, Quartz says, Facebook is suggesting that users might not be able to block Zuckerberg because so many other Facebook users are trying to do the exact same thing.

But Quartz tried to block other well-known figures who it thought might face a similar blocking problem—most notably, President Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. However, none of the others, Trump and Clinton included, were unblockable—with the exception of Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan.

And Quartz isn’t the first to notice the quirk.

Earlier this year, a reporter for Gizmodo tried to block Zuckerberg after noticing this Tweet:

He, too, was unsuccessful.

“I could block Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, and Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan,” wrote Gizmodo’s William Turton. “But not Zuck. He is invulnerable to blockage. I had no problem blocking Obama or Oprah, but I cannot block Zuck.”

The oddity also drew Facebook users’ attention in 2010, according to Mashable, which reports that there was once a viral campaign to block Zuckerberg en masse as a way to draw attention to Facebook’s then-controversial user privacy rules.

“This error isn't specific to any one account,” a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable at the time, echoing what Facebook said this week. “It's generated when a person has been blocked a certain large number of times. In very rare instances, a viral campaign will develop instructing lots of people to all wrongly block the same person.”

This story was originally published August 31, 2017 at 4:19 PM with the headline "Don’t bother trying to block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook — because you can’t."