Facebook page unpublished with no warning

PSA to others who come across this thread: Absolutely be collecting email addresses and general contact info (with their consent of course) of your fans or page participants so that when the platform disappears, you have an alternative method to reach out. Ideally, you have them sign up to your mailing list as a call to action on your Facebook page (or other social media).

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.

Collecting personal data like that in Europe is hard and expensive to do legally, which is one reason why page owners would rather use Facebook.

> Absolutely be collecting email addresses and general contact info (with their consent of course) of your fans or page participants

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.

Large-scale data processing is considered high risk and requires appointing a data processing officer, according to https://www.osano.com/articles/gdpr-compliance-regulations. How large is large scale? Depends on the country - according to this link, the Czech Republic says 10,000 is enough https://iapp.org/news/a/on-large-scale-data-processing-and-g...

That sounds like a job for the drummer.

Our last data protection officer spontaneously combusted...

Hitting the send button really really fast. The skills carry over.

Of course a company trying to sell you services to help compliance is going to say that this business is "high risk".

High-risk is a term used in the GDPR itself - see e.g. https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/article29/items/611236 from the European Commission

Your source has this:

" 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 "

Generic daily digest where you are aware of this data being collected due to it being used constantly, and giving you some value out of this, vs long-term storage of data that's not used and where the value is questionable.

This hypothetical situation doesn't require the appointment of a DPO.

If you collect the info for just this specific purpose (maybe something like "Facebook takes down pages all the time, please help me keep in touch with you by subscribing to this email newsletter! I promise to use it only in the case that Facebook takes this page down or it becomes otherwise unmanaged by me") then I don't see why it would be complicated, just as long as it's something they intentionally do and you're clear about how you'll use the data.

And the GDPR advocates claimed it wouldn't have devastating unintended consequences. Using coercive state power to forcefully regiment voluntary interactions is always wrong and causes severe adverse effects.

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.

> Collecting personal data like that in Europe is hard and expensive to do legally

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.

So what are those problematic GDPR requirements?

- 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.)

Depends on what "have a dedicated officer" entails?

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> .

It means designating a person that understands GDPR in the scope it applies to the particular data set and handles requests/security incidents. It can be secretary after a few hours of training.

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.

Secretary? I’m not really talking about an organization, I’m talking about an individual.

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.

Let's say you built your massive software business that relies on immutable records exchanged between services. Maybe your process involves cold storing some of the data. You have hundreds of microservices and thousands of lambdas, each one with a dedicated purpose. Your address microservice stores PII. Your session service knows about email. Your employee service has first and last names.

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.

If you rely on immutable data records for sensitive information such as PII, and you don't have the full view on where the data is stored and how to delete it, the law IS SUPPOSED TO make you realize that it was a bad mistake. It was a mistake when you started, now you just have to pay for it to get fixed.

Just host this portion of your operation in an area that doesn't give a shit about EU rules? Seems like kind of a non issue in the context of the OP.

To paraphrase, Facebook may own the platform, but you shouldn't let them own your relationship with your fans / customers / club members.

It’s true. And it’s as if FB is free and can get away with it, it is a mutual benefit relationship. Whoever implemented the functionality for removing accounts without any clarfication and whoever is in that team should really feel ashamed of their broken work.

> you have an alternative method to reach out.

You could simply put up a web page with a RSS feed.

Welcome to the show. Before I founded my startup I was a media buyer for about a decade and specifically I spent most of my time doing Facebook ads (Since 2012). I spent literally millions some year and couldn't get support most of the time. If I didn't have a chance most people are completely out of luck. Their support used to have the power to reverse these decisions but as of the last 2 years they stripped them of this power. Disabled ad accounts, unpublished pages, vague reasons and no ability to properly appeal are par for the course even for folks like me. It's a horrific broken and downright abusive system to people that are entirely dependent on them for their livelihood.

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).

Thank you for your info, some good ideas here. I have email and SMS from a lot of fans, but not the 13k followers. I realize a lot of the followers aren't real followers, but we did get a lot of response to our page, thus mostly sell out concerts and lots of private parties. I too have a couple people at Facebook trying to help, but it sounds like they can't get anywhere with the politics there. I'll check out the chat support for sure.

Sounds like they need to be sued. Big time.

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

I had something like this happen in 2012, and by posting it on HackerNews, I had a bunch of Facebook people replying - and fixing it. I was simply running a fan page, but when someone else (the official page I think) came into existence, it took all my audience and ported them over to the new one without warning.

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.

by posting it on HackerNews, I had a bunch of Facebook people replying

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.

I can't blame them, you see replies like "how do you feel working for such an amoral unethical company" and you start to understand why they don't like to reveal it anymore.

Did they go to some cool new site we can't get into?

I heard they hang out on Facebook now

You mean they are all old now ..... Sorry couldn't help it.

I would assume it is pretty standard. I work for a non-FAANG very well known company, and its requirements for a social media post that mentions the company name are so strict it is just easier for me not to name it. The formal justification for that is that the definition of advertising can widely differ between countries - that can include social media posts by employees; and given that advertising itself is in many cases strictly regulated, certain annoying precautions should be taken.

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.

Upvoted you here. Sadly in today's world, that is the most help anyone can offer. Until it is on the font page and someone from FB looks, and notices that it was an "accidental" "one-time" "hard to predict" issue that "we'll look into immediately"

Your page will return, and nothing else will change. Tomorrow this'll happen to someone else.

Today is yesterdays tomorrow. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30102240

And FB hasn’t done anything to fix yesterday’s have they?

Change the band's name to "Banned by Facebook" and write a catchy tune that gets played a lot on YouTube.

Perhaps multiple versions to appeal to people of different tastes, while still spreading the message.

and the song title could be, "when life hands you lemons... f*k facebook"

I hope you get some help here.

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.

I think people need to start to wake up to the reality that if you have some valuable social network on Facebook, it can be disabled (by hacker, overzealous moderator, dumb overfit AI, anything) anytime, you have absolutely no recourse over it, and Facebook genuinely couldn't care less. It's how it is supposed to work. I'm reading stories like this almost ever week now, and the common tune is always there's nothing to be done. Unless of course you happen to know people, which may ask somebody inside for a favor. But usually not.

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.

If there was a legal conflict here it would most likely be a matter of trademark rather than copyright, but trademarks are scoped to particular lines of business.

Seems this isn’t their first bout with rent-seekers https://cohornlaw.com/wonderbread-5-wins-trademark-dispute/

lawsuits from an ex-member.

I think this is a probably a good sign that if promoting your band is important to you, Facebook shouldn't own or host your online identity.

Shift to Telegram channels. You can live stream there. There's a "donation" bot to help you with any fund raising. I think you can accept payments in USD/Euro for the time being, and they are expanding options.

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.

Isn't that just as risky as relying on Facebook? What if Telegram one day decides to nuke your channel?

Differences between Telegram and Facebook:

- 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.

Bingo!

Nicegram is also on Android (yay!!) and I hope they are able to innovate more in that space.

what brought you here?

Here's another similar music/band FB page complaint thread from earlier in the week

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30122572

I think you linked to this thread haha. I was confused for a hot second there.

Damn whoops

Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30102240

What is the deal with so many websites and businesses hiding the email address contact? Not just big sites but even small websites. Are people suddenly afraid of email or something?

Part of the problem is bad design: businesses often don't empathize with how users might want to use their website. They focus on selling products rather than serving customers.

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.

Pretty much just one of the normal and expected outcomes of using any of these services in recent years. So many of these platforms lock, disable, or delete users' accounts seemingly at random and for no reason, then go radio silent when you open a support ticket. Not a lot you can do in most cases. Best of luck.

I think it is about time people / orgs would start having discussion groups on their websites. I do for my company. One of the first things people learn when discovering us on social media is to take their thoughts to our website.

I know it is not really helpful at the moment but maybe for future.

Could your account have been hacked and thus someone was spamming with your account?

Why do people put all their eggs into a centralized system, and be surprised when they lose control?

Surprise, you never had control in the first place dummy!

Federate, own your own stuff, screw big tech. They are not required.

Interesting how troll accounts of AKP in Turkey spread lies and hatred in Facebook (actually on Whatsapp groups too) and Facebook management does nothing but when it comes to a music band they do something irrelevant.

Are you still having trouble with this? Let me know, I might be able to help out.

> 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

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.

This is sadly the reality of these platforms. You're at their mercy and your business can disappear any day.

+100

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.

"Fact checkers" would be hilarious if they weren't so effective at fooling the gullible. I don't know why exactly they sprung up, I guess people eventually started to cotton on that news and internet corporations were not exactly on the up and up. So calling something news or journalism no longer cuts it. We now have another layer called "fact checking" and millions of people fell for it. Pretty soon it's going to be "really truthful Science™-based fact checking brought to you by Experts".

https://www.facebook.com/journalismproject/programs/third-pa...

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...

I didn't intend to imply they're Facebook employees or was even talking about facebook specifically at all. Just the idea of calling this stuff "fact checking".

> Still, they get it really quite wrong occasionally:

Don't worry that'll never happen with super-duper science-based expert fact checkers.

It sucks your page was removed and I hope you get it back. But hacker news is not your support channel. Call Facebook.

Which phone number?

> Call Facebook.

Have you tried obtaining phone support for a Facebook support issue of this nature?

> Call Facebook

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.

Imagine spending thousands on a service with no customer support.