After a two-month hiatus, Zoutpansberger’s Facebook page has returned, following its disappearance when they reported copyright theft. The lengthy restoration process, involving an internal Meta team, highlights the difficulties publishers face with intellectual property theft and platform support.
Just in case you haven’t noticed – we’re back on Facebook.
Yes, after a hiatus of more than two months, the Zoutpansberger’s Facebook page has magically reappeared. It seems the mighty Meta can actually find misplaced stuff, even though it is a mission to get them to search for it.
It all started on 16 January this year when we reported cases of copyright theft to Facebook. Earlier that day, there was a shooting incident not far from the office, and we had exclusive footage of the event. It didn’t take long before ‘vulture’ sites, such as ‘Zout Online TV’ and ‘Breaking News-South Africa’, copied the article and photos.
The theft of intellectual property is a common problem on social media platforms such as Facebook. Very little is done to combat such crimes, and it is left to publishers to try to track down the culprits. These unscrupulous players often have no journalists and merely scour the internet to see what they can copy and paste onto their pages.
There is no respect for someone else’s work, and even artificial intelligence gets roped in to automate the stealing process.
Thugs get rewarded
For their efforts, the thugs get rewarded by the social media giants. Facebook has a content monetisation programme in place, where “content creators” get remunerated for the interaction they elicit. It basically boils down to getting as many likes, shares and comments as possible, because that’s what brings in the money. It encourages content creators to chase clickbait.
But the problem is that these fake publishers need to constantly “feed the beast” and, seeing that they don’t produce their own original copy, they need to steal as much as they can from others.
So, when we noticed our content was being stolen, we duly reported three of the pages to Facebook, using the appropriate channels. Somewhere, however, Facebook lost the plot, and the next morning our own page was gone.
There was not even a warning, a cautionary letter, or any indication that Facebook was about to pounce. No trace of the page, its content or its followers could be found.
A lengthy restoration process
That, of course, started a lengthy process to try to restore the page. It is near impossible to contact Facebook directly and speak to a human being. The channels said to be available all lead to dead ends. The AI assistance cannot help.
After a week or two of trying unsuccessfully, we opted to “go to the top”, or at least what is considered to be near the top in South Africa. With the assistance of the Association of Independent Publishers (AIP), we were put in touch with a local representative, Ms Wydeman Coetzee. She referred the query to Meta’s ‘Pro Team’.
Perhaps the Pro Team is just so busy that they couldn’t get to our small problem – a missing page – but it took several more weeks for something to (not) happen. Initially, there was an insinuation that it was all our fault, that we were hacked or had inadvertently deleted the page. But all such actions would have left traces, of which there were none.
On 16 March, a member of the Pro Team, Maarten, wrote back and said that he had done all in his power, but to no avail. He simply could not lift the restrictions (whatever this meant).
Lift restrictions
The ball was then thrown back into the court of Ms Wydeman, and lo and behold, she did manage to find someone stronger who could lift whatever was restricting our page. On Monday morning, out of the blue, it came alive again.
Now that we have it back, we’re not sure what we will do with it. Facebook doesn’t really like it if we post links that take people to our website and allow them to read our wonderful and unique articles. If you do this, the algorithm kicks in to punish you and shows the post to as few people as possible.
So, for now, we will just use it when we are slightly bored. If you really want to talk to us, visit our website, send us an email, stop us in the street, or just shout at us when you drive past. We love hearing from you.
Anton van Zyl has been with the Zoutpansberger and Limpopo Mirror since 1990. He graduated from the Rand Afrikaans University (now University of Johannesburg) and obtained a BA Communications degree. He is a founder member of the Association of Independent Publishers.
