Facebook page unpublished with no warning
We have been a band for over 25 years now, and have used our Facebook page to promote our band, spending thousands on paid adds regularly to direct fans to our concerts, and to engage with our audience since 2009 or longer. Our Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/WeAreWB5/ although I can still login and see the page, no one on the other side of Facebook can see it. Thus being unpublished. After about a week there was a notice on the front page that read, "Wonder Bread 5 goes against Facebook's community standards". Under this was a question asking if I agreed or disagreed with this decision. I disagreed with this decision as I don't understand why the Facebook page was unpublished or what we have done to go against Facebook's community standards.
After a few weeks of logging in, a new message popped up. I still get "Wonder Bread 5 goes against our community standards". When I try to post, it says "Your account is restricted right now. You have been temporarily blocked from performing this action." So I wonder if this is a short temporary thing, or a long temporary thing that will be drawn out over months? My thought maybe, was to go in and try to delete most everything in hopes whatever I delete is what is being flagged. Does anyone have any insight into that, or thoughts as to what may be being flagged?
To my knowledge, we have been in compliance with the rules and regulations of Facebook. The page has never been banned or put in "Facebook jail". When I go into the violations section of our page, Facebook says "you have no violations, thank you for keeping Facebook a safe place". If it is a copyright problem, we have been in touch with The Wonder Bread company lawyers and have been given permission to use the name "Wonder Bread 5" as long as we don't use the logo
Our business is really hurting because of this. We can't pay for ads to promote our concerts. We have 13k followers, losing them would be horrible
Any help would be very appreciated.
75 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadYour page will return, and nothing else will change. Tomorrow this'll happen to someone else.
I just wanted to point out it’s another stark reminder of (one of) the problems with these walled gardens in tech.
Something needs to be done to make the individual the customer again.
Yet after reading all the scary stories people keep flocking to all the FAANG-y platforms expecting some mercy.
You're on a mercy of some glitchy AI and some random, lousy, unreachable fact checker.
Act with that knowledge.
tl;dr there's a system that brings third parties and pays them for this. They're not actually Facebook employees but are generally expected to be journalists of some kind. Still, they get it really quite wrong occasionally:
https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/facebook-urged-to-act-o...
> Still, they get it really quite wrong occasionally:
Don't worry that'll never happen with super-duper science-based expert fact checkers.
Social is a great discovery tool, but you want to offboard these folks to contact and publishing systems you control (mailing lists, sms lists, Wordpress, etc) for the day that your page or other social page gets nuked.
It's not hard, or expensive. Simply get consent. (Of course, you won't get much personal information on people that way, but that's how it be sometimes.)
Here's an example of how you could do it:
> Hello! I'm setting up a mailing list. If you're interested in receiving occasional updates about what's happening in this part of the community, please put your email address in this form: https://thecommunity.example.eu.org./subscribe
> I'll send you a verification email so nobody else can sign you up. There's also a link there to remove yourself from the list, and you can email unsubscribe@thecommunity.example.eu.org. any time to remove yourself from the list. (I'll send you a confirmation email to let you know you've been removed from the list.)
> If you want to unsubscribe, please just unsubscribe. If you mark the emails as spam, it might send other people's copies to their spam, too, and it might be months before anybody notices. And if you have any feedback, do let me know.
" Example: An online magazine using a mailing list to send a generic daily digest to its subscribers.
Possible Relevant criteria: Data processed on a large scale.
DPIA likely to be required?: No "
GDPR is also harming European scientific research:
https://sciencebusiness.net/news/data-protections-rules-harm...
If central planning worked at making society function better, the Soviet Bloc would have flourished and leapfrogged the West. It doesn't.
Only because the laws grew up around giants like Facebook. Prior to social media, it wouldn't have been a problem at all. You'd have no trouble setting up a small forum, blog, or mailing list.
We're in the predicament we're in precisely because of Facebook.
There might still be a cheap way to accomplish GDPR compliance as a small band, artist, company, etc. It doesn't seem hard to manually implement right to forget / data portability on the small scale. It's bolting onto big, existing businesses with lots of processes already in place that is expensive.
- ask for permission
- do not collect more than you have
- store securely
- allow users to change or remove their data
- have a dedicated officer if you collect a lot
Is that really THAT hard? (If yes, then really you shouldn't be collecting any data.)
If it requires employing someone you wouldn't be otherwise, then, yes, I do think it is unreasonable to require that I hire someone if I am letting people give me an email address for the purpose of sending them an email in the event that <x> (assuming that I am verifying at the time they give me the email address that they have control of the email address in question), no matter how many people request to be added to the list of people to send an email in the event that <x> .
And I think that if you manage a mailing list of million of people then having someone who understand security implications of it and how much they can lose (even to a simple phishing at this scale) if you get that list accessed by scammers is necessary.
A few hours of training is reasonable enough, I suppose?
Seems like it might be simpler to just have whoever is responsible be liable for any problems that could arise from not keeping the list secure? I guess maybe an issue issue with that is that it would be hard to track down all the harms that actually occurred as a result of letting the list fall into the wrong hands, and also hard to even get a good estimate.
Now you have to coordinate ALL of it to support right to forget and data export.
You need an expert in each system to drop what they're doing for one to two quarters to figure out how not to break everything and support this new use case.
You need to synchronize the plan of action throughout all of the various orgs. Some party receives GDPR requests, and that now needs to trickle down to every service to handle and report back.
This is hugely expensive.
Millions of dollars.
You vastly underestimate the toll on existing legacy businesses.
You could simply put up a web page with a RSS feed.
I think it had like 300,000 likes roughly. I believe I was one of the few to also manage to monetise a Facebook page way back then using a new startup nobody had ever heard of (at the time) - Teespring! (now Spring, and a YC company to boot). Fun times, but teeth-clenching when Facebook decides to do whatever Facebook decides to do.
Not a lot of Facebook people on HN these days. Or at least they don't reveal it.
Apple people were notorious for being on HN, and never revealing who they were. After a while, the Facebook people all went silent. Then most of the Google people, though there are still a few here and there that will let you know.
It's like the FAANG employees all got the same memo about not revealing who they are. Or they got tired of trying to be helpful to only receive hundreds of off-topic replies from people grinding axes.
Additionally, FAANG already gets a bad rep on multiple fronts; preventing employees from releasing their dirty laundry (and it can safely be assumed to be exceptionally dirty) is in their interests.
Have you tried obtaining phone support for a Facebook support issue of this nature?
LOL. If someone could just call Facebook there would be no need for the constant stream of public support requests on HN, Twitter, etc...
Calling them would only make sense if you were a customer. If you are the product you don't get tech support.
Channels allow unlimited members. Groups can accommodate 200,000 users. There's a lot of negative press around "far-right" and the "hate-speech" and even "encryption". Those arguments can be spun either way for any social media platform.
I'll be happy to help you find your feet. I am not sure I am allowed to share my contact details, but you can scan the QR code here: https://imgur.com/gallery/iQ7AFir
It's simple.
- Telegram is non-profit.
- Telegram did not originate in the U.S., it originated in Eastern Europe.
- Telegram is not really a social media platform but more like a chat/conferencing platform--e.g. more like Discord. There isn't much in the way of "pages" or a profile. No one is going to know about your group unless you tell people outside of Telegram and provide the link.
- The only thing I know of that Telegram does to groups/channels contentwise is set a flag that they host pornographic content, and the only consequence is that the iOS app blocks the group. The PC desktop and web version are unaffected. Easy fix is to use Nicegram instead, and following the instructions to update a setting to allow all content.
Nicegram is also on Android (yay!!) and I hope they are able to innovate more in that space.
I know it is not really helpful at the moment but maybe for future.
I think people who value their social communities should be actively looking for platforms that see their users as something other that raw clicks and engagement profiles to sell in bulk to the advertisers.
The only thing I found that works is to add/follow employees on Linkedin and DM them. Sometimes that would work. I would offer to help but my contacts have since left. You can try their chat support but again I wouldn't hold my breath. https://www.facebook.com/business/news/new-online-chat-suppo...
Sorry about your troubles. As others have said collect emails and SMS numbers and always keep a local copy of them (Mailchimp and other tools have similarly been known to have such nonsense happening).
You should definitively be able to get at least an actual answer of some sort, if you spend any money - as I've said before[1], this should be a legal requirement any time money is exchanged.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29885389
Perhaps multiple versions to appeal to people of different tastes, while still spreading the message.
And part of the problem is the existence of spam: people rightfully think that they'll probably get more email spam if they plaster their email address all over their site.
Personally speaking, I'd rather have to quickly deal with some extra spam than miss out on a customer.
Here's another similar music/band FB page complaint thread from earlier in the week
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30122572
Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30102240
If you depend on other site to have your own business working without paying them, then you are their product. Make your own business page and get customers here. If they are truly interest in what you are doing, they'll come.
Surprise, you never had control in the first place dummy!
Federate, own your own stuff, screw big tech. They are not required.