Facebook UK Democracy site is censored without a clear usage policy. PR Fail?
As part of our daily briefing we go through as much industry news as we possibly can. Today we heard about the new Facebook group that had been opened up called Democracy UK. You can find it at
The one piece of information given about the group is listed on the wall page as:
“Facebook UK has created this page to show some of the ways people are using Facebook in political campaigns.”
Now we made a blog post the last week concerning the Digital Economy Bill and promoted it on our own Facebook page so we thought that this is definitely political and that we were definitely using Facebook and that it was definitely part of a campaign (many other people are writing to their MPs as a result of it), so there would be nothing wrong with posting this on the Facebook Page which we did, We were a bit shocked a few minutes later to see that the post had been removed from the wall of UK Democracy (hardly democracy in action) and so we assumed that either we or Facebook had made a mistake and posted it again as the following screen grab demonstrates.
A few minutes later we checked (because by now our suspicions were aroused). Low and behold it had been removed again. What’s the point of opening a Facebook group about Democracy using social media and then randomly removing posts when you don’t clearly have a usage policy about what you will and will not tolerate.
If you are going to censor it then for goodness sake put up a policy so that users know what they can and cannot do. At the very least notify people when they do so that they can take appropriate action themselves. Otherwise you simply lead to another PR fail.
Also as I write this I notice that I have strangely been removed from the group and I know I didn’t do it.
Presumably I have to put up or shut up about this and with no explanation, except that I don’t, because I can write it up here and hope that everyone notices that this has the potential to be a huge PR Fail.
Democracy in action eh lads?
Update 1 : I have now been mysteriously added back to the group but my post is still missing. Other users are starting to notice that their comments are being removed as well. The page is now only able to have posts added to the wall by the page admins but users can now make comments on the entries. All in all this looks like a case of people not thinking through what they would allow users to do before promoting the page. Not a great demonstration of either democracy or how to handle social media.
Update 2: A few minutes ago (15:50) I received an email from Richard Allen, Director of Policy Facebook. It reads:
Hey Aaron,
Thanks for posting to the Democracy UK page. I spotted your comment re censorship. Your post on the DEB should not have been deleted. There was some confusion with the team we have been developing to moderate this. If you can repost the DEB campaign item then it will be left up as it is a legitimate campaign story – sorry to cause extra work but I hope you will allow us a little leeway for teething troubles. I also have to get the moderation policy posted during today.
Richard.
It looks like my suspicions were correct, and the page’s promotion took off before a full list of actual policies were agreed with the result that those providing admin to the site made mistakes due to lack of direction. It seems that this has been escalated to the point where board members had to get involved, but that now they are, a firm policy has been decided upon and calm is restored. That is a good sign but it does prove that social media (especially social media involving topics that focus firmly held opinions) needs to be well thougt through with clear olicies before they are launcehd, not during and not after.
Thanks Richard for your letter it is greatly appreciated.
Tags: #facebook, censored, Facebook Page, industry news, politics, PR Fail, Social Media, UK Democracy, Usage Policy
I Love You. I really do. I would even buy you flowers and dinner for what you have shared with us! Thanks to you I now have a working blog. While following your steps, I found that instead of having “me” as a group it had the following: 166839 166839The proper files were still web web. I thought it was strange, and even after changing the group as your instructions said, there was no change in how this displayed in both putty and filezilla. However, I tested uploading to my blog and it worked like a charm! I am not sure what is going on with the group thing, but somehow it must have worked. I’m curious as to what the deal is with that. In any case, Thank you so much!