The celebrity gossip and news startup The Shade Room is back on Facebook, the startup announced today, albeit under a new moniker.
Its previous page, which had racked up more than 4 million followers, was “facebook.com/theshaderoom;” the new profile is “facebook.com/shaderoominc.”
The startup said earlier its page had been removed from the Facebook ecosystem without any notice, highlighting a challenge for new media publishers that take a multi-platform approach or a Facebook-centric one.
Companies that publish content to Facebook to grow their audience or connect with customers are subject to the social network’s policies — and policy changes. If they don’t play by Facebook’s rules, they can find their profiles suspended or removed.
Jamie Bolding is the CEO of a London startup called Viral Thread that experienced a similar fate. He told us that Viral Thread had grown its follower-count on its main Facebook page into the millions before it was removed.
The company is now running several Facebook pages, full of curated videos it hopes will be meme-worthy. Its main page there, “Facebook.com/vtvideoscom,” has a humble 132,416 followers today.
Bolding said he has seen a rash of take-downs of startup brands’ Facebook pages over the past month, especially for those that have cultivated a large audience but never attained the coveted blue check indicating their accounts are verified, he said.
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The Viral Thread CEO said, “Facebook never informed us of [certain] policy changes. When you have a copyright takedown you get automatic emails, but never an actual serious warning of ‘your page is going to get deleted.’ I think their communication here was pretty appalling considering many businesses live off their Facebook page. We spent 2 years building ours up, helping Facebook grow, then they just cut us off with a flick of a switch, leaving me to deal with 15 employees.”
We have reached out to The Shade Room and Facebook for more information.
Earlier today, Re/Code’s Peter Kafka reported that Facebook representatives said they took down The Shade Room’s page for multiple copyright violations. But, The Shade Room founder Angie Nwandu told Re/Code that Facebook sent her a notification that only cited violations of their terms of use, and not specifically copyright issues.
