The independent comic industry news and review site Bounding Into Comics has been deplatformed:
Facebook has censored Bounding Into Comics and completely removed our 250k+ strong Facebook page.
Facebook did not provide any warnings and didn’t really explain why the page was removed.
The page was removed on Monday around 10:20 a.m. ET shortly after we published the new Spider-Man: Far From Home trailer. I was logged out of my personal Facebook account, which I use to manage the Bounding Into Comics Facebook page. Upon logging back in, I received a number of alerts from Facebook indicating they had removed ‘Content’ which ultimately meant they had removed not just content posts but all traces of the Bounding Into Comics Facebook page.
The first alert indicated Bounding Into Comics was being removed because it violated “the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.” The next alert read, “Our policies prohibit posting content that infringes or violates someone else’s rights or otherwise violates the law.”
The alerts continued, “If you continue to post content that infringes or violates other’s rights or otherwise violates the law, you could be temporarily blocked from posting content on Facebook, or even have your account permanently banned.”
The next alert then directed us to review Facebook’s Intellectual Property Policies. It read, “If you have questions regarding the removal of content please visit the Help Center. To help keep your account in good standing, remove any other content you’ve posted to Facebook that may infringe or otherwise violate another’s rights. To learn more about intellectual property, visit the Help Center.”
Two of the messages then repeated. The next alert read, “Our policies prohibit posting content that infringes or violates someone else’s rights or otherwise violates the law.”
The final message read, “If you continue to post content that infringes or violates others’ rights or otherwise violates the law, you could be temporarily blocked from posting content on Facebook, or even have your account permanently disabled.”
Facebook did not provide us with any actual concrete examples of the alleged violation. In fact, the reason why we are writing this article today, instead of yesterday, is because we attempted to reach out to Facebook believing the removal of the page was inadvertent. However, Facebook has not responded to any of our Help Center inquiries. They stopped responding in an email thread with a Publisher & Media Support team representative once the page was identified.
This is why it is absolutely vital to stop relying upon these enemy platforms. What is the point of building anything that relies upon them as a foundation when they can pull it out from under you like Lucy yanking the football away from Charlie Brown at any time?