So some of you may have noticed by now that the MCUExchange page can no longer be found on Facebook.
What happened?
It’s not entirely clear to us either. This unpublishing of our page is the worst in a series of Facebook misfortunes that have distressed our team for months now.
It started back in July around the time Spider-Man: Far From Home came out. Out of nowhere during the first week of the month, our articles started getting little to no traction on the page. Mind you, we had around 35,000+ likes on our page during this time. All organic likes. Each post of ours would net AT LEAST 50 likes on any given day. For a major piece of news, we’d have 200 likes minimum and more than 50 shares.
Suddenly, we were netting 4 likes on a good day. Unless there was a major algorithm change, the math for our follower count and reach/engagement simply didn’t line up. Some of you may recall us messaging you guys privately with the hopes of getting us out of this rut.
Lo and behold, upon researching we found that Facebook had done some sneaky algorithm changes for business pages. From what we understood (and we may be still wrong on this), Facebook began recognizing us as a legit business page (hooray I guess?) and not as a fan page anymore. So the site put us on the algorithm of a business page. Now that Facebook bots recognized us as a business page, they wanted us to follow their preferred business practice of boosting posts and creating ads.
Which we did. We played ball because we thought, ‘Fuck it. Whatever it takes to continue the site.”
So in the coming weeks following that sudden change in our reach, we began boosting posts for key bits of news. I was personally using my own money to boost these posts. SDCC came along shortly after that and was then followed by D23. It was a slew of exciting information and we boosted posts for most of them. Everything seemed fine.
Until I went abroad to visit some family less than a month ago.
While I was abroad I got a message from the Facebook Support team. They said my current location didn’t match the location listed on the cards I used to pay for our ads. The kicker was I didn’t even use any of my cards or Paypal abroad. So I told the support team what was up; that I was on vacation for a few days and would be back to the location listed on my card real soon. A day after I got home from my trip, I get notified that Facebook was revoking MCUExchange’s right to boost posts and create ads.
So not only did we get screwed with our reach/engagement but we were now losing our only means of reaching the hard-earned 35,000+ followers we amassed.
Not too long after that, we get the message that the page was unpublished entirely due to us not abiding by their page policies. No specific reason was given. Just that we broke their rules.
It’s now been 9 days since I sent my appeal to the team. I sent them a message practically similar to this explaining in detail what we’ve been experiencing. So far, I’ve gotten no response. The case is still listed as open as of this writing so there’s that. Better than it being closed but still, the long response time is distressing for us.
If any of you have experienced this before and know what to do or who to reach out to, we’d love to hear it out. If you know any other proper channels to contact Facebook with, we’d love to hear it.
In the meantime, we do have a Facebook group which you guys can join while we sort this issue out.
Moving forward, it’ll still be business as usual for the team. Even though it sucks not being able to reach you guys on Facebook, we’ll still be doing best we can to bring you the goods. That said, hopefully we resolve this sooner than later.
Thank you all for your continued support!
