Another tale of Facebook account suspension
Kelli Fox is a dear friend and Astrologer extraordinare. She and her husband - David Fox - founded Astrology.com and sold it to iVillage back in the day. Now they have a state-of-the-art Astrology site - with APIs and a web service for developers who wish to offer astrological matchings to their customers.
Their site KT, the Astrologer is where their own customer facing offering is housed.
But Kelli also had an active Facebook account - which was recently suspended cause - guess why? She wasn’t an individual, she was an entity and company.
So that’s what Facebook Pages are for - correct?
So Kelli goes to Facebook and says “OK - I’d like a Facebook page and can you move all those friends I had asemebled over to my new page?”
Well dear readers - you can imagine the answer they got back from Facebook.
Uh uh - nope. No way. Here’s what they said:
“Unfortunately we do not currently have the ability to move the individuals that are friends with your organization’s profile over to be fans of your new Facebook Page.”
Kelli does have a Facebook ‘Group’ now - but that’s it. She’s having to start from scratch.
So here I am dear readers, hoping that some Facebook guy can step in and do the right thing.
Please.
Kelli and David are good folks and they deserve the best that Fawbook can offer. I’m sure they’d pay for the cost in moving their old account info into their new Facebook Page. Think of it as a new revenue channel!
And afterall - isn’t this what Facebook pages area ll about? To represent entities - not individuals?
February 4th, 2008 at 1:25 am
At the very least Facebook should provide Kelli with the means to notify the Facebook friends she has assembled, so that they have the opportunity to follow Kelli from the profile to the group. Facebook only claimed that they cannot move the individuals over to the new page.
Thanks Marc for bringing this up.
February 4th, 2008 at 11:43 am
I loved Kelli’s astrology posts and emails in the 90s. I wondered what happened to her, so give her my best wishes in her fight against Facebook
February 5th, 2008 at 12:50 am
Saw this post from Robert Scoble’s shared items and figured I’d play the devil’s advocate. (No offense to yourself or Kelli intended, though.) I find it slightly difficult to sympathize with people who violate the terms of service.
Yes, I know that apparently nobody reads the TOS, but when the account sign-up page clearly states
it’s sort of hard to justify continuing on behalf of a company. It’s a social utility that’s widely known to be for exclusive personal use, and there’s been a precedent set for this type of account suspension recently.
It might seem unfair, but at the very least Facebook didn’t go as far as to revoke her site access permanently - which they certainly could do, and can do to anyone for any (or no) reason as in the TOS. Personally? If I see spambots or organizations posing as people, I’ll certainly report them as it diminishes the value of truthful social connections.