Facebook just suspended a page with 4.4 million followers

Facebook has, apparently without any warning or reason, suspended the account of The Shade Room, a celebrity gossip blog that had 4.4 million followers on the social network.

Between its website, Facebook, Instagram and other social media accounts, The Shade Room has an audience of over eight million 'roommates', consisting primarily of young, black women. Its revenues are reported to be heading in the direction of a million dollars.

Highlighted by Harvard University's Neiman Journalism Lab, the page's removal from Facebook raises significant questions for online publishers who are increasingly reliant on social media to drive traffic and advertising views.

Founded by 25-year-old Angie Nwandu, The Shade Room's huge success led to her being picked by Time as one of its 30 most influential people on the internet earlier this year, and its heavy Facebook footprint certainly played a significant role in that success. 

Facebook has recently been promoting its Instant Articles publishing tools for accredited media organisations, allowing them to share in Facebook's advertising profits on their pages and content. However, The Shade Room wasn't an approved Instant Articles publisher, although the page was verified, with a blue tick confirming that Facebook recognised it as the authentic page of a media company.
In a direct message to Neiman Lab's Laura Hazard Owen, Nwandu wrote that "we have been targeted on FB and have been receiving numerous reports over things that don’t violate the terms. The amount of reports have been excessive."
Facebook's reporting policies are known to be vulnerable to abuse by groups who wish to drive specific pages or individuals off the platform, an issue raised in complaints surrounding its real name policy that saw LGBT+ profiles targeted for coordinated reporting by homophobes.
However, Buzzfeed reports a Facebook spokesperson as saying The Shade Room's page was removed for violating unspecified community standards, while Jezebel suggests the account could have been suspended for posting photos without proper attribution.

If that is the case, the entire page's suspension seems disproportionate given the regularity with which other growing online publishers' pages post copyrighted images, as evidenced by complaints against viral media pages such as the UK's popular The Lad Bible.

The Shade Room has in the past run up against complaints from celebrities unhappy with content posted about them, but a previous incident which saw The Shade Room Instagram account taken down ended with an apology from the Facebook-owned image sharing service saying that "we wrongly removed an account in this case and worked to fix the error as soon as we learned of it. We apologise for the mistake."