“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare famously asked. Quite a lot apparently, and a city in France learnt this the difficult way. The residents of Bitche in northeastern France had been taken aback when the city’s Facebook web page was deleted. The cause attributed to the action was that the web page had violated the terms and situations of the social media platform. This stumped the city, as they had been pretty positive that they had carried out nothing at all to warrant this move. Soon, they realised they only had the city’s name to blame.
According to a report on Politico, the city’s official web page named “Ville de Bitche (City of Bitche)” was pulled down, out of the blue, on March 19. To figure out why this occurred and place forth an appeal to restore the web page, Valerie Degouy, the city’s communication manager, attempted to make contact with Facebook.
“I tried to reach out to Facebook in every possible way, through different forms, but there’s nothing (I could) do,” Degouy mentioned. Following this, she went on to generate a new web page titled “Mairie 57230,” based on Bitche’s postal code. Degouy explained that they had faced problems even though developing the web page in 2016.
This peculiar issue that Bitche was faced with quickly gained media traction. Speaking to CNN, Benoit Kieffer, mayor of Ville de Bitche, mentioned, “We received a Facebook message and we also noticed that it was missing. At first, you wonder, was there a technical problem? However, with the length of time, it can be considered real censorship.”
Speaking about the name, he added, “Bitchois and Bitchoises are proud to wear this name. The Americans already wore it proudly with a touch of humour of course.”
Following this, Facebook admitted that the web page was “removed in error” and reinstated it.
There are various towns in France with names that could make Facebook uncomfortable adequate to flag them. Another town in the exact same area of the nation, Rohrbach-les-Bitche, for that reason, took a preemptive measure to transform its name to circumvent Facebook’s profanity filter.
Once the web page was restored, Mayor Kieffer, released a statement on the reinstated Facebook web page and Bitche’s official site. In it, he stressed the value of possessing human moderators though filtering by way of content to enable differentiate among false positives and more severe offenders. He also urged the social media giant to make its policies more transparent and fair. Ending the situation on a positive note, the mayor welcomed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as nicely as Facebook’s French enterprise head to check out Bitche for themselves.