Like most websites, we operate a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account to keep our users updated when away from the site. We've found that social media has become a very powerful tool to help keep people updated and connected. One of the ways we use social media, in particular Facebook, is to use it as a company photo album of sorts. Every time we go to events like E3 or CES, we upload all our photos into albums or we run basic giveaways, but mostly we use the account for updates.
On August 4th, 2015, I logged into my personal Facebook account and I'm informed that my email address is no good and needs to be changed. The email address was a basic @thetechgame.com email. Thinking that maybe Facebook has made a mistake, I attempt for it to send the code for reactivation of which it refused to do. So I attempted to rotate to another @thetechgame.com email of which was also refused (well this is annoying I said to myself) and moved on.
My Facebook account was the page admin for TheTechGame's Facebook page and as part of my normal daily routine I attempt to check the page to find our fanpage is no longer accessible. Instantly that sinking feeling hits my stomach, something was wrong.
Here's how the page looked on the 3rd via Google Cache:
facebook.com/thetechgame
And how it looks today:
facebook.com/thetechgame
I reached out to a fellow staff member (of our site) to confirm if the page was in fact missing and he confirmed it’s missing. So our main concern at this point was trying to pin point what had happened to ensure that the page had not been hijacked. We had no communication from Facebook (and still don't) about any issues, but one page mod could see that the page had been hidden and rolled back to 2011 with no data on the page. All anyone on the outside can see is "Sorry, this content isn't available at the moment."
So, we fired off a handful of tickets to attempt to get at least an understanding of what’s happened, but things were about to become even more interesting. Of course we never got a reply to any of the emails or tickets we sent, but when a TTG staff member attempted to send a TTG url to me they got this error, "You can't post this because it has a blocked link." We knew things were bad. No version of thetechgame.com domain could be posted with or without http. We asked friends in other countries to attempt to send the url in chat or post it as a status and they were unable to do so, meaning TheTechGame has been added to the global Facebook censor.
What you will see if you mention us or attempt to post a link in status or chat:
Things get dirty:
Although it will be hard to provide proof of this claim we have witnesses to backup it up. Facebook went ahead and modified 3 members of our staff's Facebook profiles and stripped out employment data that reflected TheTechGame. One of the most upsetting parts to this was as we reported here a member of our team passed away in early December 2013 at the age of 22. His Facebook account has remained exactly how it was apart from the normal farewell messages from his friends. To us his Facebook was a reflection of where he was in his life when he passed away. Facebook removed employment details that he worked for us and this is probably the worst part because it’s not like we can just login to his account to update his employment again, although we're sure he would laugh at his friends getting an employment update in 2015. He was that type of guy, but even attempting to put a happy spin on it does not help how crushing that is to us.
Nothing but charred earth:
So Facebook has destroyed our ability to interact with our users, messed with our accounts, what else could go wrong? Well, if you search TheTechGame on Facebook and hit enter you're now taken to a fake TheTechGame scamming page so that's just fantastic.
What are the possible reasons?
Well, we've posted highly critical stuff about Facebook on here before but I find it unlikely a loopy guy at the Facebook office only just saw it and wanted us gone. To be honest we have no idea what we've done since our use of Facebook is basic at best. Sometimes I login to Facebook to find war photos of dead children in my newsfeed. If you’re on Facebook enough you end up seeing this type of content, but if that’s acceptable then why isn't gaming? We'd like to think it’s a bug but it just seems so targeted. Someone had to have done everything we've outlined because even the Facebook debug tools return blocked errors.
Where can we stalk you now? :'(
We have a Twitter account that will now be our main 3rd party communication http://twitter.com/thetechgame and we may make serious use of our sub-reddit to replace Facebook.
/r/thetechgame
Will you create a new Facebook?
Simply no, we worked too hard on our account for it to be destroyed in a click. We will find a way to re-host our photo albums on site, so access to event photos is restored quickly.
Did we learn anything?
Absolutely! Luckily for us, Facebook is not a critical part of our site, so we won't die without it, but if you're say a ladbible or mrtechnicaldifficult this is a cause for concern. If you're investing in ads for your page keep in mind it can be taken away without warning or reason. The odds that I will be keeping a Facebook account for personal use are very slim now.
Can you help?
If you want to attempt to help us get restored you can submit a request to Facebook to unblock our domain and that could restore sharing our urls, but it probably won’t restore our fan page https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/571927962827151
If you want to share this story feel free, but just remember you can't share this page on Facebook. :P
So to recap the actions taken towards us.
1) TheTechGame emails are banned from use on Facebook.
2) Facebook.com/thetechgame has been hidden by Facebook and control taken from us.
3) TheTechGame.com urls are global banned from being posted anywhere on Facebook
4) Facebook made edits to personal Facebook profiles without permission.
All of the above was done without warning or notification nor can we get anyone from Facebook to speak to us directly, something that has never been a problem in the past.
If you're a 3rd party wishing to contact us please visit http://www.thetechgame.com/Contact.html
This story can sound borderline unbelievable I'm sure but here are a few stories that show that Facebook at times do very odd things.
Facebook employee pinches single-name Instagram handle
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-04/17/kathleen-instagram
How Instagram closed my account and gave it to a football celebrity.
https://medium.com/@ainiesta/how-instagram-closed-my-account-and-gave-it-to-a-football-celebrity-625a6a770eb3
Stockholm Pride slams Facebook 'censorship'
http://www.thelocal.se/20150803/stockholm-pride-slams-facebook-censorship
Any updates will be posted below this line thanks for taking the time to read this :)
Just a note: We've had some criticism over our lack of mobile support we get it! and we've been working on a total redesign for awhile don't worry.
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Update: 5 August 2015 - Facebook sent us a robotic response about reading their page management FAQ totally unrelated to our question. We still have not had any details as to what the problem is.
Update: 5 August 2015 - We're getting reports that we're now also censored on Instagram
Update : 6 August 2015 - We've confirmed that we're now also censored on Instagram.
Update 6 August 2015 Facebook has restored our page and the block seems to have been lifted
Update 6 August 2015 The page has gone down again and the block placed back on our .com .
Update 6 August 2015 Facebook has now blocked other domains we control that redirect to the site.
thetechgame.org
thetechgame.net
thetechgame.co
Interestingly they've blocked thetechgame.co.uk a domain name we do not own or control.
This seems to have been done in reaction to a user created petition found Here that listed other ways to link to the site.
Update 7 August 2015 - A TTG member makes contact with a Facebook employee who checked over the site and said there was no reason that he could see for the block and that the case was sent in for review again.
Update 7 August 2015 - Facebook lifts the url ban once again on thetechgame.com other urls .co, .org, .net under review.
Update 7 August 2015 - The URL block has been placed back on once again.
Update 8 August 2015 Facebook has unblocked thetechgame.co.uk a domain name we don't own but was blocked with all our domains. currently our page remains down and all our domains remain blocked.
Update 10 August 2015 - Facebook has restored our Fanpage for a 3rd time but this time we've opted to set it to unpublish and disable the page ourselves indefinitely until we can get someone from Facebook to contact us directly about the problems.
At this point all our domains remain blocked so running the page would be totally pointless while our domains below are blocked:
thetechgame.com
thetechgame.co
thetechgame.org
thetechgame.net
Update 10 August 2015 - Facebook has disabled the unpublished page so we're back without control of the page once again.
Clearly Facebook has some type of internal disagreement over us for whatever reason and the odds of a resolution when we're unable to reach anyone from Facebook to inform us of the problems(if any) means we're most probably going to end up in this loop forever.
The issue has become so ridiculous that when the page returned some kind of block had been placed towards posting the Facebook url to our page.
All we can do at this point is ask the community to file unblock reports once per day to help us.
https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/571927962827151
All Facebook want to know is why it should be unblocked(be nice!) and the domains that are the problem and in our case its the following:
thetechgame.com
thetechgame.co
thetechgame.org
thetechgame.net
Update 15 August 2015 - Facebook lifts the url ban once again on all TTG domains and restores our page.
Thanks for the support!
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