Live by the Facebook, die by the Facebook

There’s a lot of unhappy Macedonian publishers right now, as Craig Silverman reports for Buzzfeed:

“I’m in a very inappropriate situation, after spending a huge amount of money on Facebook for promoting articles and Page likes,” said a Macedonian publisher who lost a page with more than 1.3 million fans. “In end all have got is unpublished page.”

Why would Facebook do this? Well, just possibly because these were amongst the much-discussed Macedonian purveyors of fake news. As Silverman notes:

The removal of roughly three dozen pages owned by Macedonian publishers is a result of Facebook’s push to rid its platform of spammers, fake news publishers, and others who violate its terms of service. But it’s also a reminder that no one really “owns” a Facebook page, in spite of how much money they might spend growing it.

It’s always foolish to build a business that’s entirely dependent on a single outside source for traffic. We learnt that with Google, we’re learning it all over again with Facebook.