Five days ago, ARCA's art crime and cultural heritage protection blog began experiencing problems on the Facebook Platform posting to a few key heritage groups where our blog posts were sometimes being censored as spam. While it took us a while to realize that this was not a technical glitch on the platform itself, by Thursday our blog's URL was totally banned, even from our own Facebook page despite us not having violated the site's Terms of Service.
This total ban eliminated years of previous post links and information related to the issues surrounding art crimes that we have covered and published on the platform in an effort to increase awareness and build capacity on combatting art and heritage crime.
Finding it difficult to find a way to engage directly with any sort of "help" department within the social media powerhouse's platform, we sent inquiries through about twenty different channels, each of which gave bot replies thanking us for our concerns but in no way indicating that our messages would be read by a human. We also reached out to our readership asking our followers to help us get the lights turned back on by echoing our concerns with retweets and by contacting Facebook directly on our behalf. Hoping that perhaps with external voices of support they would realize we were ok.
This morning at 09:45 Italy time our access was restored.
In the end, we have no idea what changed Facebook's mind. We have never received any communication from the social media platform as to why we were censored in the first place, nor did anyone contact us to tell us that our access had been restored but for now it seems we have been white-listed.
We would like to thank everyone who helped our voice be heard and who banged the drums loud enough that we regained our posting capabilities on the platform. ARCA has been writing articles on art crime and cultural heritage protection for more than 10 years and while we still do not fully understand why we were suddenly censured on Facebook, it seems that everyone's notifications helped get the situation reversed relatively quickly.
Without your group voice, ARCA's art crime blog would likely still be banned.
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