Update:

Good news! Upon examination (and after 18 hours and dozens of emails) Facebook just admitted they’d flubbed and restored all access for elephant and our admins. (We’re waiting for most of our admins to be granted access once again to their own profiles, pages, friends.) We’re exhausted and just spent a day paying to work on well, nothing productive.

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Losing our access to our Facebook pages? No big deal–just sets me and elephant back three years, block the accounts of 20 volunteer admins who didn’t do anything wrong, result in losing 60% of our readers and revenues, forcing layoffs and probably foreclosure, again–unless I get assurance this won’t happen again (unless we actually violate their guidelines), which we would never want to do, well, Facebook effectively holds the keys to our business and our mission. ~ ed.

Facebook just took down elephant’s Page because we posted this. (Help?)

Check out the blog in queestion, here. I assume we’ve been warned “your page will go down and stay down forever suckah if you mess up again” because of the image in said blog—which is clearly art, 100-year-old pre-Art Deco for-the-love-of-god art. And art is protected, supposedly, in FB’s posting guidelines.

Oh—and please share this blog and this appeal on Facebook—we can’t.

Help! Anyone know anyone at Facebook? Our Page down bc of poem illustrated by art. If so email me? [email protected] or [email protected].

We can’t access our own profiles or walls. While that may not seem like a big deal to you, Facebook is the basis of 60% of our business, dedicated to sharing the mindful life beyond the choir. Our business is media. And social media is the modern bookstore—ie, where we distribute copies of our online “magazines.”

If you have a good contact at Facebook, please (respectfully) ask them to help me out, on an urgent basis. They can, svp, email us at [email protected].

I’ve reached out to our one contact and though he was kind enough to respond last time

(when we were banned for sharing a feminist article featuring an image of art, not nudity, but re-shares of the article grabbed other, totally inappropriate images from within the blog—that grab, of course, was not under our control, but rather due to Facebook’s own auto-choosing of images)

he didn’t change anything. So though our intention is (of course) never to violate their rules, and lose our page, and hurt our own business and disappear to our readers. We’ve been active, posting every day on FB for years, without problem prior to the above. So I have to ask: since, in this situation, Facebook holds all the cards, including whether they reply and help out at all, or not—is the only way to build new media in this day and age to leave FB and other platforms outside of our own control behind, and focus on newsletters?

We’re an independent company, without Huff Post-ish friends in high places, but we’ve been voted #1 in the US, twice, for #green on twitter, we’ve won many green, wellness and health accolades, and until this hour, we were at 1.6 million readers/month. That will drop quickly if this isn’t rectified to about 900,000 readers/month, putting us back two years of 7 days a week work.

And worst of all, even if and when we get through this, they’ve threatened to take our Page down the next time a random reader decides to flag a issue-based blog they happen to vehemently disagree with. Apparently I’m in the business of building sand castles.