Facebook is a Criminal Enterprise

Everybody is aware of the size of Facebook. Maybe not of its excact size but of its impact in general. Sadly enough, much like google, Facebook customer service can not keep up with its popularity. And to put it that way is a huge understatement, because well… They are not even trying!

Facebook has clearly decided on a no response policy when it comes to issues that users experience. I, myself recently became a victim of this and it has been of the most frustrating experiences of my life. The goal of this article is to serve as a warning because I literally got robbed out of $2500 by facebook and there is NOTHING I can do. Obama is letting them steal all sorts of information while letting them rob US citizens trying to run a business in the process. Every individual person is completely overpowered and nobody stands a chance!

Facebook Like Pages

A few weeks ago me and a friend decided to invest heavily in a facebook like page as a marketing strategy. My friend already had a Facebook like page with about 25000 likes at the time. His page was called “Epic Wildlife” and all he did was post pictures of animals. No nasty stuff, just your average feel good facebook picture that you hope gets likes and shares from a lot of people with the goal of growing your page even further. In a short period of time, him and I invested about 2K in this Facebook page using only the offical Facebook advertisements. A lot of people get tricked into buying fake likes from third parties and, understandingbly,

Facebook does not allow that and will ban pages that try to take that shortcut. We were aware of this and thus we only used the more expensive offical advertisements offered by Facebook itself. We also started a new page and invested another $500 to grow that page. All was going well. The first page had 160K likes and the page we started later had 70K likes. Not a massive amount, but a nice marketing tool never the less that we were hoping would pay of in a few years. Then Zuckerbergs hammer came down…

How Facebook steals your money

Zuckerbergs hammer came down hard. Out of the blue, both our pages were deleted. When something like this happens my initial reaction is to start googling the heck out of it, so I did. I knew right away we were screwed. Pages of all different sizes are randomly being taken down for no apparent reason and nobody gets their page back or manages to squeeze a response out of Facebook. There is an appeal option but it’s not worth anything. My 50 different messages and emails got 1 response: 

We checked out your Page’s restriction and found that your Page received strong negative feedback from users. We use a variety of signals to assess user experience, such as user feedback on a Page’s communications and on the Page itself.

We will not be able to remove the restriction from your page. Please visit the Admin Panel of your Page for details about the restriction. To learn more about our policies, please visit:

https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

Violating your rights

This basically boils down to them saying: ”If people randomly report your page without having a good reason, we are still going to take your page down without looking further into the matter”

The $2500 ( $2500!!!! ) is gone and we won’t be getting it back. How users respond to your page is obviously completely out of your control and theoratically this means everybody can fraudulently take down their competition.

Not a single actual person looked into the case. This massive abuse of power should be adressed and who ever is responsible should go to jail for theft. Facebook is knowingly abusing it’s power position! Business owners that get tricked into using Facebook as a marketing tool, are the ones that are suffering and getting robbed. These practices need be put to a stop as soon as possible…