The Facebook page for Splain You a Thing was taken down and I don’t know why

 

The saga seems to begin with a post written by Sunflower punk, after her child was harassed by men while walking home frm school. Her child is nine years old, and yet was deemed an appropriate target by adults. They scared her, and took away from her some of her freedom.

The post auto-posted on the page like all our posts, and there was no problem. We weren’t notified of any issue. People who shared the post, however, suddenly found themselves having the post removed from their walls.

Still, we were not notified on the page that there were any issues with the community standards. The only reason we even knew about the post having been removed elsewhere is because friends of ours let us know.

Then one morning, suddenly, the page was unpublished.

I went to the page, and saw a bar announcement over-top of the back-end of the page saying that the page had been unpublished for violating page terms and conditions. There was no explanation of what the specific violation was, nor did the actual terms page provided yield any insight. We had not even had a post removed from the wall, the page was just completely unpublished.

We suspected it was because of this previously mentioned post.

The pop-up offered the option of filing an appeal, so I clicked on it. I was offered no space in which to ask questions or offer any sort of rebuttal or anything. Only a button saying filed appeal. Click. Appeal filed. Still, no actual idea of what exactly we had done to violate the community standards.

Then one morning, both of us are logged out of Facebook and upon re-login there is a notice saying that this picture violated community standards.

A cartoon picture of Ania and Sunflower Punk holding spoons and a banner that says social justice garden. Sunflower punk is a Latinx person with sunflowers on their dress, and Ania is a white woman with an onion on her dress. The cartoon avatar is surrounded by words saying that this post violates their standards.

There was no specification of how it violated the standards, or what those standards were. The picture is one I made myself, I am the artist and so have complete license over the picture. The picture is directly related to the blog, it’s right there on the logo. The picture is not showing nudity, it’s not showing anything offensive, so what exactly was wrong with the picture.

This time, there is no option to appeal.

I go to try to find the page and it’s gone. I can’t even access the unpublished back end. There is no record of complaint, or appeal, nothing in any support inbox, no indication of what the bloody hell happened. Pictures we had on the page are gone. Comments, messages, reviews, and otherwise, gone. With no explanation as to why.

Since when is one post or picture enough to get a whole page unpublished? What about this picture violates standards? If I did violate standards because of some misunderstanding regarding the standards, or by accident, why am I not allowed to know how or what it was that did so, so that I can avoid triggering the same problem on future pages.

Why is my, and other writers for this blog’s, livelihood being threatened and why are we not allowed to know the reason? Why is there no record of any of this on our profiles? Why is there no notification or record of the decision on the appeal, or any record of the page even existing.

What exactly is going on?

The Facebook page for Splain You a Thing was taken down and I don’t know why
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UPDATE: Fake Goth Banned! Can’t Block Cathy Brennan?

I have written twice before about Cathy Brennan. You may know Cathy Brennan for being litigious, doxxing trans women, cis fuckery and for being a fake goth. And now it seems  she is also unblockable on Facebook. Today, several people tried to block her and they got the same error message you get when attempting to block Mark Zuckerberg. In the posts linked I talk about the double standards Facebook seems to use when deciding what violates community standards and what doesn’t. Posts depicting violent and graphic imagery do not get taken down. Posts containing racial and gender slurs stay up. Pages dead naming trans people? Yup, they stay up because they don’t “violate community standards”. Rape jokes? You guessed it.

But posts calling Brennan a fake goth? Those get you 1, 3, 7 or 30 day bans.

cathy

Cathy says this is because calling her so is “bullying behavior”. But how is it bullying when people are not tagging or messaging her with the meme? Again, my friends and I and several others had her blocked. If you have to make multiple accounts to report people who’ve blocked you, can you call that bullying? No.

Here I’ll provide several screen shots of the error messages. Note: some will be censored to hide names other than Cathy’s, since she’s so doxx happy.

Mine:

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Taken at 12:55AM EST

The following are screen shots provided by friends.

16864303_1452344921465668_979533106386754863_n
Error message on desktop site

 

16864381_10154924851958592_1558536053748752061_n
Mobile app message error

16938903_1452345014798992_1594658368340483449_n
16996505_10154924852193592_6179489785661647794_n

 

screenshot

Now, I don’t know if this is due to her using whatever influence she has at Facebook, or if it’s some sort of anti-harassment measure. I’ve seen it suggested that if a lot of people are trying to block the same person Facebook may interpret that as harassment. I’m skeptical of that claim because if anything, multiple people trying to block the same person should be indicative that the problem is the person being blocked. However, seeing how quickly they ban trans people, it wouldn’t be too surprising.

As of 4:14 AM EST, I’m still getting the error message. I will continue to update this post as more information comes in.
UPDATE: Below is a screenshot a friend sent, this was around 4:30am EST

Obsessed, says the woman who consistently searches her name. But she’s the one being bullied, right? Laughable.

Another error message when a friend tried blocking her.

I’m bring told that when attempting to block Brennan facebook redirects you to your block page but it doesn’t actually block her. I tested again at 10:00am EST and I got this

UPDATE February 24th, 2017

As of 1:00pm EST, I can’t see the profile in question. I don’t know if that means the block finally took or if she deactivated the account.
UPDATE 2, 2/24/17 2:22 pm EST

The reason that one profile isn’t currently available is because she was banned.

Cathy your “political opinion” is GARBAGE.

Now, as much as I am enjoying this, this doesn’t mean this is the end. She has multiple profiles and loyal followers. Don’t let this lull you into a fall sense of security.

Keep up the good fight, friends.

UPDATE: Fake Goth Banned! Can’t Block Cathy Brennan?