#BannedByFacebook #Censorship
See Banned By Facebook for the ongoing list.
As some of you may know, Facebook has developed a merchandising system for accounts that have registered with them as business accounts. Business account status allows Facebook to figure out who they can target to buy advertising on their platform, which is a huge money maker for them. Also, in the last year or so, they revamped the service so that business accounts can have the “convenience” of doing product checkout directly on the Facebook platform without going to the original business’s website. And of course, Facebook takes a small “convenience fee” from each sale.
We have had a business account with Facebook since probably 2018. And we have built a Facebook catalog. In fact, we have built two catalogs on there. The first was wiped out when FB restructured their catalog system a few years ago. We spent a solid week rebuilding our FB catalog at the time.
We have had problems with individual listings on an intermittent basis almost from inception of our FB catalog. For instance, when we loaded up Kraal of the Walking Dead by Dan Cushman we were told that we could not put anything sexually explicit into our FB catalog. After laughing in wonder at the ridiculous assertion that there was anything sexually explicit in Kraal, we fought that “ruling” and had the book reinstated into our catalog.
We’re pretty sure we know why Queen of the Black Coast by Robert E. Howard and The Bride of Osiris by Otis Adelbert Kline were banned; someone might take prurient interest in the covers of those books. The best, though, was when some furious little minion of the FB empire told us we absolutely could not post the book My Brother’s Widow by John D. MacDonald. We were told in no uncertain terms that we could not post nudity. The minion was pretty surly when we pointed out that the image of the woman on the cover showed her back, not her front.
And so it went, on and off, for a couple of years. FB would remove a book from our FB catalog, we would fight it and usually win the right to have it reinstated into the catalog. However, recently we noticed that a number of books have been removed (“made unavailable”) from our FB catalog.
We have no clue as to why many of our books were censored.
- The Amazing Misadventures of Oona and Jick by Margaret St. Clair
- The Moon Terror by A.G. Birch
- The Sea Witch – Three Stories by Nictzin Dyalhis
- Murgunstrumm by Hugh B. Cave
- South to Chihuahua by William L. Hopson
among others… If you know, would you mind telling us?
We have made the decision to not bother trying to fight with the Facebook censors anymore. Instead we’re just going to post at our page Banned By Facebook any book that has been censored. And lest you think we’re going to be buying any Facebook advertising any time soon, think again.
