The frequently foul-mouthed comic, a parody of titles such
as The Beano and Dandy, took to Twitter on Monday to air its grievance at being blocked
to its 150,000 followers.
Ian Westwood, group managing director at parent Dennis
Publishing, told the Guardian that Viz staff had no clue what content had
triggered the page being blocked but that Facebook’s rules meant that the
publication ran a risk of being “permanently deleted” from the social
networking platform.
A spokeswoman for Facebook UK implied that Viz’s frequently
risque language and humour had triggered the content block, but that should not
have been grounds for removing the Facebook page.
“We want Facebook to be a place where people can express
their opinions and challenge ideas, including through satire and comedy,” she
said. “Upon further review we found that the Viz page had been removed in
error. We have now restored it and would like to apologise for any
inconvenience caused.”
Following Facebook’s move to reinstate Viz’s brand page on
Monday night, the comic tweeted followers to say “we’re not going to tone
anything down”.
However, in this case Facebook moved to block the page for
an unexplained breach of those rules.
Enforcement is handled by a “community operations team” that
includes both a manual and automated review of content.
Facebook has to monitor a large volume of content posted on
a daily basis and on occasion legitimate pages like Viz are mistakenly blocked.
Taking advantage of the widespread publicity the publication
received following the Facebook block, the magazine moved to offer 15% off all
Viz T-shirts when its brand page was reinstated.
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