After reporting content theft, the Zoutpansberger’s Facebook page mysteriously vanished, leaving them in a frustrating, faceless battle with Facebook’s support. Despite their legitimate complaint, the thieves remain active while the newspaper struggles to restore its online presence.
Many of our loyal readers would have noticed that the Zoutpansberger’s Facebook page has disappeared. Since last Friday night (16 January), no trace of the local publisher can be found. It is as if the page never existed.
To respond to some of the conspiracy theories: no, we did not say something bad about the American president. We did not tell him to leave the Greenlanders alone. We did not publish outrageous claims about the world order, and we did not use Grok’s abilities to undress celebrities. In fact, we did nothing apart from complaining.
Stealing our photos and stories
Well, we did complain, but we believe it was a legitimate complaint. We reported thieves who were stealing our photos and stories and profiting from them.
On Friday afternoon, we published an article on the Zoutpansberger’s website about a shooting incident in the park next to the Makhado Municipality’s offices. A man allegedly tried to attack and stab a policeman and was shot dead. We carried a short article about the incident, along with a photo. We also published a short teaser, with a link to the article, on the Zoutpansberger’s Facebook page.
Within a few hours, we noticed that at least three ‘clickbait’ Facebook pages had copied the article and photo and published them on their own pages.
The three, with names such as Breaking-News SA, Zout Online TV and FlyingNews Live Update, did not bother to change the copy. No credit was given to the source of the information or the picture.
As far as could be established, all three of these pages are monetised, which means the owners get paid by Facebook. Facebook’s monetisation programme is quite complex, but in essence it encourages content producers to make posts that elicit a lot of response. The more likes, shares and comments a post gets, the more money for the owner of the page.
Copyright infringements
Facebook does have mechanisms through which such copyright infringements can be reported. Once we became aware of the infringements, we duly reported the three pages to Facebook. This process entails providing links to where the original copy appears and explaining who the real owners of the intellectual property are.
Early on Saturday morning, Facebook notified us that the unlawful posts had been removed and that the owners of the pages had been notified. This seemed to be a positive and welcome development, except that it was suddenly realised that the Zoutpansberger’s own Facebook page had been removed in its entirety. There was not even a trace of it left in the admin section or in Meta’s Business Suite.
This marked the start of a long process to try to contact Facebook to sort out the mess. Facebook, for all practical purposes, is faceless. You cannot contact anyone at Facebook directly. There is no customer service number or even an email address to which queries can be sent.
Consulting AI ‘friends’
After a lengthy search, consulting with all our Artificial Intelligence (AI) ‘friends’ and clicking on just about every button on Facebook, we eventually ended up with an AI helper in the Business Suite. The AI was quick to establish that there did not appear to be any logical reason for the page’s disappearance.
There were no ‘strikes’ against us, no transgressions of Community Standards or anything similar. In the end, it gave up and passed the matter on to a consultant, who appeared to be human.
The consultant also could not find any logical reason why the page had disappeared. However, he was unable to progress further until we proved that we are human and the real owners of the webpage (which no longer exists). This required uploading verification documents, which would need to be vetted by an independent company.
Waiting for Facebook
And this is where we still are. It is not possible to contact Facebook to enquire about the progress of the investigation. The only option is to ask the AI helper in the Business Suite again. Even with a reference number (quickly copied from the previous conversation), you get no further. You simply have to wait for Facebook to complete whatever process it is busy with.
As for the Facebook pages that stole the content and were caught out, all three are still active. The posts containing Zoutpansberger content were removed, but the owners simply continue stealing content from other media houses. It is not as if they will be punished. None of them have publicly available contact details.
Facebook pays for criminality
The sad part is that advertising on Facebook pays for such criminality. It will get worse.
Until Facebook can determine what happened to our page, we cannot share any content from our websites. We can only ask our readers to share whatever they find worth sharing.
Sharing links on social media or platforms such as WhatsApp is not the same as illegally copying material. It is as easy as copying the “address” of the story, also referred to as the URL. Websites such as the Zoutpansberger’s also have convenient share icons, just below the summary at the top, which copy the URL.
For now, please “pop in” frequently to the website to see what we publish.
This story was first published by Zoutpansberger and is republished with permission.
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.
