You may have heard of the little stoush between Australia and Facebook. Well, we’ve been caught in the crossfire and the WynnumCentral Facebook page has not been removed (so not really ‘banned’ as such), but it has had all of its posts removed, as have all ‘news sites’ in Australia.
What’s interesting is that there has been no communication to us from Facebook at all (nothing unusual there), but not only that, as administrators of the site we can still see all the posts on the site, so our initial assumption was that we had not been affected. It was only when it was pointed out by a colleague trying to access the site as a regular user that we found out it had been pulled too. Even when looking at the site using the ‘View as visitor’ button, it still seemed fine to us, but no, it’s definitely wiped.
It’s difficult to know how to feel about this – we’re obviously disappointed that we can’t communicate with our Facebook followers but we’re also pleasantly surprised to be lumped in with the bigger players as a ‘news’ site! Presumably this means that when Facebook and Australia make up, we might get another (albeit fairly small) income stream! Well we can live in hope.
So, to all our Facebook people we suggest doing some things the old-fashioned way ie…
- Subscribe to our ENEWS, then it’ll come straight in to your inbox
- Check the WynnumCentral website at wynnumcentral.com.au – all news stories are posted here first
- Sign up for ‘push notifications’ on the WynnumCentral website
- Check us out on Instagram – @wynnumcentral – there is a limit to the number of words you can include in a caption, but at the moment we’re putting up either full or slightly edited versions of our stories on Instagram
- Two other Wynnum-focused Facebook pages are less affected – Wynnum Business and Republic of Wynnum and these pages generally post stories that appear on WynnumCentral (although these now cannot link to news stories on the WynnumCentral site)
Ironically we were recently bemoaning on the Facebook page that we had 4179 followers (the Manly postcode in case you were wondering) and were pleading that someone unfollow us so we could get back to 4178. Someone heard our plea and we’re back down to 4178, but now it’s all a little irrelevant!
One ‘news site’ that has survived the Facebook shutdown is The New Farm News which has recently realised it is now Brisbane’s most popular news page. They’ve got an interesting (and – we think – very funny) take on it – https://www.facebook.com/The-New-Farm-News-101708951314287
There’s also a good analysis of what’s going on in this article on The New Daily – Australians urged to break up with Facebook over news blockade
So, in summary, if you haven’t already, sign up for our ENEWS (in the right hand column on this and every page), check out the other Facebook pages and/or head over to Instagram. Or just one of these would do it. We’d love to hear your comments, thoughts etc and whereas we’d normally head over to Facebook to read them, feel free to leave them in the comments section below.
QUICK UPDATE
Since writing this article the WynnumCentral Facebook page now has some content back up on it, but importantly, no posts which link to news stories on the WynnumCentral website. This also affects the Wynnum Business and Republic of Wynnum Facebook pages. We’re working on it!
