Australian award-winning journalist, Adam Turner, who covers technology for Fairfax Media, owner of The Sydney Morning Herald and other publications, has done the impossible by bringing a deleted Facebook fan page back from oblivion.
Once a page has been deleted, and not merely unpublished, few, if any, are ever seen again. They are simply gone. All the work, and the content that accompanied the work, all the fans, all the advertising dollars spent, are nothing but history to Facebook.
Jo Budd, the owner of this website and Fuck It, Let’s Have A Beer, (FILHAB), the accompanying fan page to this website, messaged Adam for help, hoping to find out why her page had been removed with no notification. He not only agreed to look into the matter for her but after contacting Facebook Australia on her behalf, was told they would restore the page. If not for Adam’s interest and inquiries, the page would have remained just a memory.
I am often an outspoken detractor of Facebook and its business ethics and normally throw in my two cents, but I’ll merely post the link to the online story Adam wrote relating the situation and his attempt to receive answers explaining their actions and not detract from his accomplishment with a rant.
You can find the story here, by clicking the following title; ‘Gut-wrenching’: Aussie Facebook page with 2.6m likes taken down, and also listen to a discussion of Facebook’s practices regarding this type of thing via Vertical Hold: Behind The Tech News, where Australia’s leading technology journalists join Adam and his co-host, fellow technology journalist, Alex Kidman, every Friday for a weekly podcast to get the stories behind the tech news of the week.
The link for that specific episode is Facebook Backflips On Ban.
You can find the show and subscribe to @VerticalHoldAU at the following sites:
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