I posted a little post on my Facebook page yesterday morning, A Girl Called Jack, a quick hello and a catch up, asking people what they were having for dinner, and apologising for not being around so much lately, what with the children being on summer break, getting any work at all done lately has been a bit of a pipe dream!
Unusually, nobody liked it, nobody looked at it, and nobody commented. I left it a day, and this morning logged into Facebook to see if I had accidentally ‘hidden’ my page or made the post private, or some other dumb thing.
I didn’t expect to find an error message saying that Facebook had unpublished my page for violating a ‘strict policy against sharing pornographic content’.
I have clicked the little button to appeal Facebook’s ‘decision’ – as to the very best of my knowledge there was and never has been any ‘pornographic content’ posted on my page – and am awaiting the results of the appeal. (Was it the rather large marrow, I wonder? Or the sticky sweet pot of marmalade?)
I know of several cases where friends and high profile people have had their social media pages maliciously attacked in an attempt to have them removed. One friend had a photo of her daughter reported on Instagram, sitting on a stool in pants and a tshirt, and her Instagram account was closed down. Facebook is notorious for knee-jerk closures of accounts and pages without carrying out any investigations at all, claiming it does not have the staff levels required to investigate every complaint.
My Facebook page was the biggest source of traffic to my blog. I’m not sure why someone is so upset by a bit of recipe sharing, some cheap meal ideas, and news about food banks and politics – as to try to close it down with lies and malicious behaviour – but I built this blog from nothing, with next to nothing, and I will simply set up another Facebook page if I need to, and start again.
I would like to apologise to the 33,002 people who follow and Like my page, who are unable to view it or comment on it at the moment. If I need to set another one up, I will keep you all posted.
In the meantime, while I am unable to post pictures of Garlic Jam or ask what you’re all having for dinner, the vulgar, racist, crude, far-right and genuinely pornographic Facebook pages and groups continue, thrive, unreported and uninhibited by a bizarre set of rules and algorithms.
I’ll be back with recipes and posts on my blog shortly – I’m just having a short break with the children before they start Big School in September. In the meantime, enjoy the rest of the summer, and I hope to have The Facebook Problem resolved shortly. And here’s all the photos ever published on my Facebook page – can you spot the one that violates their strict standards on pornography and nudity?
Jack. x