Facebook apologises to charity for wrongly blocking its posts: The social media platform says Money4YOU’s domain was incorrectly identified as spam after the charity changed its name“
Third Sector: thirdsector.co.uk/facebook-apologises-charity-wrongly-blocking-its-posts/communications/article/1710055. We discover our Money4YOU.org domain has been unblocked. We have still not received a reply from Facebook. We have contacted Facebook’s Press Office for comment and have not received a response. Money4YOU is a UK-based Charity (registered in England & Wales no. 1157549). Our mission is to tackle inequality by providing financial education, capacity building and entrepreneurship support to BAMER-led nonprofit organisations. We were founded in 2014 by AmickyCarol Akiwumi MBE. In April 2020 our name changed from Money4Youth to Money4YOU to reflect the widened scope of our activities, but our mission has remained the same. We have been funded by the Tudor Trust, the City Bridge Trust, Nisa’s Making a Difference Locally, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, UK Community Foundations, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, CommUNITY Barnet, the Youth Futures Foundation, and many other amazing grant makers and foundations.
In mid-2020, Facebook blocked our URL, theavocadofoundation.org, as well as the URL we formerly used, money4youth.com. Restrictions are placed on our Facebook and Instagram accounts even when this URL is not listed on those accounts: users are unable to share our posts and our ads have been consistently rejected.
Facebook’s reasoning for this is that our URL violates their Community Guidelines on Spam. The relevant section is at https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/spam. We have been in touch with a representative from Facebook Business support, who declined to specify which policy allegedly applies to us within the Spam section, nor what we can do to become compliant.
Facebooks’s failure to provide any guidance on how we can correct the source of the ban shows a worrying lack of regard for small organisations like ours which are relying on digital and social media to reach out both to our supporters and to those we support, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. That a small charity working to support marginalised communities should be banned without explanation during a global pandemic demonstrates the true extent of Facebook’s disregard for its small-scale users.
Impact up to now
Facebook’s ban of our URL has significantly impaired our activities online since it was put into place. We have been unable to promote or share our events, communicate our vision, encourage our community to use and share the free resources that we create and provide, encourage our supporters to donate to us or volunteer with us, or share our contact information to our more than 1,000 followers on Facebook, a significant number of whom live overseas, for the past six months. This issue has also taken up human resources that are extremely limited and valuable to us as a charity.
What you can do to help
We would welcome any response from Facebook about which specific policies we have allegedly violated. In the meantime, if you know anyone who works with Facebook or you do so yourself, please reach out to us at info@theavocadofoundation.org Thank you.