The Day Facebook Stole My Page
umcabango.wordpress.com
umcabango.wordpress.com
We also take down Pages that attack an individual or group or that are set up by an unauthorised individual.
He admits several times that he is unauthorized to set up the page. The page was also handed over to the official fan organization. I see no mystery.
(But like I say in another comment below -- Facebook wants to make Facebook like television. Consume, purchase, act. Creating and thinking is not good for their advertisers.)
Facebook requires affirmation that the page creator is "the official representative of this person, business, band or product and have permission to create this Page." He said himself he's just a fan.
I've been as annoyed as anyone with all of the recent privacy issues at Facebook, but it doesn't seem they did anything wrong here. Except maybe write up some Terms of Service that aren't fan-friendly.
Facebook can't possibly police every page, so they stick to policing those that are largest or fastest growing. Get popular enough and you'll enter the radar.
It's unfair in a way; but it does make sense.
Something I liked about the "old days" of the Internet is that the cost to create a community was low enough for one person to support. Hence, it didn't need to sell itself out to corporate interests or even have ads at all.
The problem with Facebook, though, is that people use Facebook because everyone else uses Facebook.
These things tend to move in waves. Somebody comes up with a great new communications platform, and everyone abandons their custom solutions for it. Then the technology behind that platform becomes commoditized, the knowledge becomes widespread, and people start coming up with small scale custom solutions again. Then one of those custom solutions decides it wants to be big, generalizes it's platform, people flock to it, and the cycle starts over again.
Give it a couple years. I bet we'll see people creating their own social networks again, in some nearly unrecognizable form.
Certainly Facebook is within their rights to prohibit this kind of thing. You can even see why they'd want to do it: to make Facebook more friendly to the paying customers (advertisers).
But it's an interesting question, how far down this road Facebook or any other site can travel before the utility of the site is reduced to the point that there aren't enough active users to attract paying customers.