Oт потребител на Black Hat
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The same has been happening to all of our pages for about a month as well, and it is killing our reach and business.
We also run a successful viral website that has been up for more than three years, but I can tell you that things don't look good, unless you have a blue verification badge (I'll explain why below).
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In May, Facebook announced many changes to its platform, including reducing reach to low quality sites, reducing reach to clickbait sites, and hiring 3000 people to review content.
Maybe what they meant by hiring 3000 people is that they are building and testing an artifical intelligence filter, but being a secretive and deceptive company as always, they chose to say it that way (oh the irony).
These changes seem to be geared mostly towards spammy web sites, but since Facebook seems to be operating mostly on autopilot, this could have an impact on any site that posts good content as well.
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That being said, what we noticed so far is that Facebook has been testing a new filter to automatically filter out things that might go against their community standards. These kind of things include pornography, harm to animals and racism, among other things.
Though I'm sure most of you don't post that kind of content, their filter seems to be based on artificial intelligence, and these systems usually start off "stupid" and are supposed to become "smarter" with time by learning to differenciate content properly.
This means that at first:
- The AI will poorly differenciate, for example, a male body from a female body, so it could remove content that has male nipples (happened to us).
- It could also poorly differenciate a sleeping cat from a dead cat, so it could remove that as well (happened to us too).
- And just to make it more obvious, it could also think a picture of a swimsuit with spots that look like nipples is the naked body of a woman, and remove it (yes, it happened to us).
What I believe is happening is that Facebook is currently training and testing their AI filter on various pages. Why they aren't letting us know the reasons for removing the content is beyond my comprehension, and this just makes things more confusing.
I also believe they are doing it on "regular" pages that don't have a blue verification badge.
Why ? Because we tested out that theory, and it checked out.
For testing purposes, we started out by doing this:
- We found a few pages that posted similar content to ours that had a blue verification badge.
- Using the Facebook Sharing Debugger, we downloaded their thumbnails used on post URLs that they had successfully posted on their pages.
- We wrote articles about the same subjects and used their identical thumbnails to include with our posts.
- We posted the URLs on our pages and lo and behold, the posts got deleted, sometimes after a few seconds, sometimes after a few minutes.
As mentioned before, this has been causing us a lot of headaches lately as our team struggles to post content that won't be removed.
Also, since posting content twice usually has a big impact on reach, whenever a post is removed and we post it again, it always seems to perform worse than the first time.
When a post gets deleted, we also try changing the URL of that post so Facebook thinks it's a new post, but since some of our fans already saw the post, it rarely performs as good as the first post.
My advice to you for now is the following:
- Try to prevent using thumbnails that might depict something that could go against Facebook's Community Standards. These things include mostly pictures showing a lot of bare skin, asses and nipples (male or female), but it could be anything else really, you be the judge.
- If you're unsure about your thumbnail and have smaller pages like we do, try testing your content on your smaller pages first, so if it gets removed there, it will have much less impact than if it's removed on your main page.
- If something gets deleted and you feel it really wasn't supposed to, then make sure to report it to Facebook using the report a problem link found in the help menu on your page. This *might* help speed up the filter's learning process, although I'm starting to doubt Facebook really checks any of their support requests.
- Get a blue verification badge. You can do so by reading an article written by Facebook and following their guidelines. Though, we already tried doing so and they refused our request, stating we needed to continue growing our public presence.
I really hope this information will help us start a nice discussion about the subject and enlighten the people that might feel frustrated by Facebook's new policies.
Please keep in mind that everything I wrote is based on pure experience only and that I've never talked to anyone at Facebook about the subject. You could say this is a big hypothesis with some positively tested results.
Never forget that Facebook is one of the most secretive companies out there, and whatever worked yesterday could completely change tomorrow without notice. We're currently looking at alternative content distribution platforms because we feel the good Facebook days might soon be over.
If other people want to add information to this post, feel free to do so as I think we all need to help eachother throughout these cloudy days.
Also feel free to ask me questions, but I might not have an answer for you.
Sincerely,
Another pissed off Facebook marketer.
